But Sandow was already pushing open the door. He startled when he saw Alex by the
window. “You’re up. Dawes said you were unconscious.”
Alex wondered what else Dawes had said. “She took good care of me.”
“Excellent,” Sandow said, draping his overcoat on a bronze post shaped like a jackal’s
head and striding across the room to where the old-fashioned samovar sat in a corner.
Sandow had been a Lethe delegate in the late seventies and a very good one, according to
Darlington. Brilliant on theory, but just as good on fieldwork. He fashioned some original rites that are still on the books today. Sandow had returned to campus as an associate professor ten years later, and since then he had served as Lethe’s liaison with the university president. Excluding a few alums who had been taps themselves, the rest of the
administration and faculty knew nothing about Lethe or the societies’ true activities.
Alex could imagine Sandow happily working away in the Lethe library or fastidiously marking a chalk circle. He was a small, tidy man with the trim build of a jogger and silvery brows that steepled at the center of his forehead, giving him a permanent look of
concern. She’d seen little of him since she’d begun her education at Lethe. He’d sent her
his contact information and an “open invitation to office hours” that she’d never taken him
up on. Sometime in late September, he’d come to a long, awkward lunch at Il Bastone, during which he and Darlington discussed a new book on women and manufacturing in New Haven and Alex hid her white asparagus beneath a bread roll.
And, of course, he was the one Alex texted the night Darlington disappeared.
Sandow had come to Il Bastone that night with his old yellow Labrador, Honey. He made a fire in the parlor grate and asked Dawes for tea and brandy as Alex tried to explain
—not what had happened. She didn’t know what had happened. She only knew what she’d
seen. She was shaking by the time she finished, remembering the cold of the basement, the
crackling smell of electricity on the air.
Sandow had patted her knee gently and set a steaming mug before her.
“Drink,” he’d said. “It will help. That must have been very frightening.” The words took Alex by surprise. Her life had been a series of terrifying things she’d been expected
to take in stride. “It sounds like portal magic. Someone playing with something they shouldn’t.”
“But he said it wasn’t a portal. He said—”
“He was scared, Alex,” Sandow had said gently. “Probably panicked. For Darlington to
disappear that way, a portal must have been involved. It may have been a kind of anomaly
created by the nexus beneath Rosenfeld Hall.” Dawes had drifted into the room, hovering
behind the couch with her arms crossed tight, barely holding herself together while Sandow murmured about retrieval spells and the likelihood that Darlington simply had to
be pulled back from wherever he’d gone. “We’ll need a new-moon night,” Sandow had said. “And then we’ll just call our boy home.”
Dawes burst out crying.
“Is he … where is he?” Alex had asked. Is he suffering? Is he scared?
“I don’t know,” said the dean. “That will be part of the challenge for us.” He’d sounded
almost eager, as if presented with a delicious problem. “A portal of the size and shape you
described, stable enough to be maintained without practitioners present, can’t have gone anywhere interesting. Darlington was probably transported to a pocket realm. It’s like dropping a coin between the cushions of a couch.”
“But he’s trapped there—”
“He probably isn’t even aware he’s gone. Darlington will come back to us thinking he
was just in Rosenfeld and furious that he’ll have to repeat the semester.”
There had been emails and text chains since then—Sandow’s updates on who and what
would be needed for the rite, the creation of the Spain cover story, a flurry of apologetic
and frustrated messages when the January new moon had to be scrapped due to Michelle Alameddine’s schedule, followed by profound silence from Dawes. But that night, the night when Darlington had gone from the world, was the last time they’d all been in a room together. Sandow was the fire alarm they weren’t supposed to pull without good cause. Alex was tempted to think of him as the nuclear option, but really, he was just a parent. A proper adult.