The Haruspex might head directly back to New York in the creamy leather seat of a black town car, or he might stay for the festivities and take his pick of willing undergrad
girls or boys or both. She’d been told “attending to” the Haruspex was considered an honor, and Alex supposed if you were high enough and drunk enough, it might feel like
that was the case, but it sure sounded like being pimped out to the man who paid the bills.
The redhead—Miranda, it turned out, “like in The Tempest”—had helped Alex clean up
the vomit. She’d been genuinely nice about it and Alex had almost felt bad for not remembering her name.
Reyes had been transported out of the building on a gurney, cloaked in obfuscation veils that made him look like a bunch of AV equipment piled beneath protective plastic sheeting. It was the most risky part of the whole night’s endeavor as far as the safety of the society went. Skull and Bones didn’t really excel at anything other than prognostication,
and of course the members of Manuscript weren’t interested in sharing their glamours with another society. The magic binding Reyes’s veils wobbled with every bump, the gurney coming into and out of focus, the blips and bleeps from the medical equipment and
the ventilator still audible. If anyone stopped to take a close look at what was being wheeled down the hallway, the Bonesmen would have some real trouble—though Alex
doubted it would be anything they couldn’t buy their way out of.
She would check in on Reyes once he was back on the ward and then again in a week
to make sure he was healing without complications. There had been casualties following
prognostications before, though only one since Lethe had been founded in 1898 to monitor the societies. A group of Bonesmen had accidentally killed a vagrant during a hastily planned emergency reading after the stock-market crash of 1929. Prognostications had been banned for the next four years, and Bones had been threatened with the loss of its massive red stone tomb on High Street. “That’s why we exist,” Darlington had said as Alex turned the pages listing the names of each victima and prognostication date in the Lethe records. “We are the shepherds, Stern.”
But he’d cringed when Alex pointed to an inscription in one of the margins of Lethe: A
Legacy. “NMDH ?”
“No more dead hobos,” he’d said on a sigh.
So much for the noble mission of Lethe House. Still Alex couldn’t feel too superior tonight, not when she’d been seconds from abandoning Michael Reyes to save her own ass.
Alex endured a long string of jokes about her spewed dinner of grilled chicken and Twizzlers, and stayed at the theater to make sure the remaining Bonesmen followed what
she hoped was proper procedure for sanitizing the space.
She promised herself she’d return later to sprinkle the theater with bone dust.
Reminders of death were the best way to keep Grays at bay. It was why cemeteries were
some of the least haunted places in the world. She thought of the ghosts’ open mouths, that
horrible drone of insects. Something had been trying to slam its way into the chalk circle.
At least that was how it had seemed. Grays—ghosts—were harmless. Mostly. It took a lot
for them to take any kind of form in the mortal world. And to pass through the final Veil?
To become physical, capable of touch? Capable of damage? They could. Alex knew they
could. But it was close to impossible.
Even so, there had been hundreds of prognostications in this theater and she’d never heard of any Grays crossing over into physical form or interfering. Why had their behavior
changed tonight?
If it had.
The greatest gift Lethe had given Alex was not the full ride to Yale, the new start that
had scrubbed her past clean like a chemical burn. It was the knowledge, the certainty, that
the things she saw were real and always had been. But she’d lived too long wondering if
she was crazy to stop now. Darlington would have believed her. He always had. Except Darlington was gone.
Not for good, she told herself. In a week the new moon would rise and they would bring him home.