Helplessly, North watched them gust up from the carpet.
“Sorry,” Alex muttered. “But you have shit taste in women.”
She looked at the dean’s body and tried to make her mind work, but she felt wrung out,
empty. She couldn’t quite keep hold of her thoughts. In the garden, daffodils were just pushing up through the soil of the flower beds.
Turner, she thought. Where was he? Had he gotten her message?
She took out her phone. There was a message from the detective. Working a case. Stay
put. Will call when I’m done. DON’T DO ANYTHING STUPID.
“It’s like he doesn’t even know me.”
A burst of laughter floated through the door. She needed to think. If the records from
the other deaths ascribed to Daisy were correct, then Sandow’s death would most likely look like a heart attack or stroke. But Alex wasn’t taking any chances. She could sneak out
through the garden, but people had seen her going into the office with him. She hadn’t exactly been discreet.
She would have to slip back into the party, try to mingle. If anyone asked, she’d claim
she last saw the dean talking to Professor Belbalm.
“North,” she said. He glanced up from where he’d been kneeling. “I need your help.”
It was possible he wouldn’t be willing, that he would blame her for Daisy’s final death.
Alex wondered if the Grays would leave any part of her to pass beyond the Veil. North’s
presence here, his grief, didn’t make it seem likely.
Slowly, North rose. His eyes were dark and mournful as ever, but there was a new caution in them as he looked at Alex. Is he afraid of me? She didn’t mind the idea. Maybe he’d think twice about jumping into her skull again. Still, she felt for North. She knew
loss, and he’d lost Daisy twice—first the girl he loved, and then the dream of who she’d been.
“I need you to make sure there’s nobody in the hall,” Alex said. “No one can see me
leave this room.”
North drifted through the door, and for a long moment Alex wondered if he’d just leave
her here with a dead body and a carpet covered in powdered evil.
Then he passed back through the wall and nodded the all-clear.
Alex made herself walk. She felt strange, wide open and exposed, a house with all its
doors thrown open.
She smoothed her hair, tugged down the hem of her dress. She would have to act normal, pretend nothing had happened. But Alex knew that wouldn’t be a problem. She’d
been doing it her whole life.
We say “the Veil,” but we know there are many Veils, each a barrier between our world and the beyond. Some Grays remain sequestered behind all of
them, never to return to the living; others may be glimpsed in our world by
those willing to risk Hiram’s Bullet, and others may pierce still further into
our world to be seen and heard by ordinary folk. We know too that there are
many borderlands where the dead may commune with the living, and we
have long suspected that there are many afterlives. A natural conclusion is
that there are also many hells. But if there are such places, they remain
opaque to us, unknown and undiscovered. For there is no explorer so
intrepid or daring that he would dare to walk the road to hell—no matter
how it may be paved.
—from The Life of Lethe: Procedures and Protocols of the Ninth House
Cuando ganeden esta acerrado, guehinam esta siempre abierto. While the Garden of Eden may be closed, Hell is always open.
—Ladino saying
32
Spring
Alex met Dawes at the Hutch and they walked up Elm to Payne Whitney, to the
intersection that Sandow had chosen for his murder rite, the place where Tara Hutchins had died. Auspicious. Spring flowers had begun to emerge on the edges of the empty plot of land, pale purple crocus, tiny white bells of lily of the valley on their hesitant bent necks.
It was hard for Alex to be away from the wards. All her life she’d seen Grays—the Quiet Ones, she’d called them. They weren’t keeping quiet anymore. She could hear them now. The dead woman clad in a nightgown singing softly to herself outside the music school. Two young men in coats and breeches, perched on the Old Campus fence,