With each beat of their wings, the moths grew darker and the tattoos started to fade.
Alex’s chest rose and fell in jagged, rapid bursts. Her eyes were wide with fear, but as
the moths darkened and the ink vanished from her skin, her expression changed, opened.
Her lips parted.
She’s seen the dead, he thought. She’s witnessed horrors. But she’s never seen magic.
This was why he had done it, not because of guilt or pride but because this was the moment he’d been waiting for: the chance to show someone else wonder, to watch them
realize that they had not been lied to, that the world they’d been promised as children was not something that had to be abandoned, that there really was something lurking in the wood, beneath the stairs, between the stars, that everything was full of mystery.
The moths beat their wings again, again, until they were black, then blacker. One by one they tipped from her arms and dropped to the floor in a faint patter. Alex’s arms were
bare, stripped of all sign of the tattoos, though in places where the needle had gone deep,
he could still discern faint ridges. Alex held her arms out, breath coming in gasps.
Darlington gathered the moths’ fragile bodies, placing them gently in the box.
“Are they dead?” she whispered.
“Ink drunk.” He shut the lid and placed the box back in the cupboard. This time the lock’s click seemed more resigned. He and the house were going to have to have a discussion. “Address moths were originally used for transporting classified material. Once
they drank a document, they could be sent anywhere in a coat pocket or a box of antiques.
Then they’d be placed on a fresh sheet of paper and would recreate the document to the
word. As long as the recipient knew the right incantation.”
“So we could put my tattoos on you?”
“They might not fit quite right, but we could. Just be careful …” He waved a hand. “In
the throes. Human saliva reverses the magic.”
“Only human?”
“Yes. Feel free to let a dog lick your elbows.”
Then she turned her gaze on him. In the shadows of the room, her eyes looked black,
wild. “Is there more?”
He didn’t have to ask what she meant. Would the world keep unraveling? Keep spilling
its secrets?
“Yes. There’s plenty more.”
She hesitated. “Will you show me?”
“If you let me.”
Alex smiled then, a small thing, a glimpse of the girl lurking inside her, a happy, less
haunted girl. That was what magic did. It revealed the heart of who you’d been before life
took away your belief in the possible. It gave back the world all lonely children longed for.
That was what Lethe had done for him. Maybe it could do that for Alex as well.
Months later, he would remember the weight of the moths’ bodies in his palm. He would think of that moment and how foolish he had been to think he knew her at all.
5
Winter
The sky was already fading into gray when Alex finally made it back to Old Campus.
She’d stopped at the Hutch to shower with verbena soap beneath a hanging censer filled
with cedar and palo santo—the only things that would counter the stink of the Veil.
She had spent so little time in Lethe places by herself. She had always been with Darlington, and she still expected to see him tucked into the window seat with a book, expected to hear him grumble that she’d used all of the hot water. He’d suggested leaving
clothes there and at Il Bastone, but Alex already had so little to wear that she couldn’t afford to stash an extra pair of jeans and one of her two bras somewhere other than her ugly school-issue dresser. So when she stepped out of the bathroom into the narrow dressing room, she had to opt for Lethe House sweats—the Lethe spirit hound
embroidered at the left breast and right hip, a symbol meaningless to anyone but society
members. Darlington’s own clothes still hung there—a Barbour jacket, a striped
Davenport College scarf, fresh jeans neatly folded and creased, perfectly broken-in engineer boots, and a pair of Sperry Top-Siders just waiting for Darlington to slip into them. She’d never seen him wear them, but maybe you had to have a pair in case your preppy card got pulled.