mouth, her nose, drifting beneath her eyelids.
Something hard struck Alex’s head again, then again. She forced her eyes open. She was on her back on the floor of the temple room, choking up mud and staring at Dawes’s
frightened face framed by the painted sky—mercifully static and free of clouds. Her body
was shaking so hard she could hear the thump of her own skull on the stone floor.
Dawes seized her, wrapped her up tight, and, slowly, Alex’s muscles stopped spasming.
Her breathing returned to normal, though she could still taste silt and the bitter remnants
of carob in her mouth. “You’re all right,” said Dawes. “You’re all right.”
And Alex had to laugh, because the last thing she would ever be was all right.
“Let’s get out of here,” she managed.
Dawes slung Alex’s arm around her shoulders with surprising strength and pulled her
to her feet. Alex’s clothes were bone dry, but her legs and arms felt wobbly, as if she’d tried to swim a mile. She could still smell the river, and her throat had the raw, fish-slick feel of water going up her nose.
“Where do I leave the key?” asked Dawes.
“By the door,” said Alex. “I’ll text Salome.”
“That seems so civil.”
“Never mind. Let’s break a window and pee on the pool table.”
Dawes released a breathy giggle.
“It’s okay, Dawes. I didn’t die. Much. I went to the borderlands. I made a deal.”
“Oh, Alex. What did you do?”
“What I set out to do.” But she wasn’t sure how she felt about it. “The Bridegroom is
going to find Tara for us. That’s the easiest way to figure out who hurt her.”
“And what does he want?”
“He wants me to clear his name.” She hesitated. “He claims Darlington was looking into the murder-suicide.”
Dawes’s brows shot up. “That doesn’t sound right. Darlington hated popular cases like
that. He thought they were … ghoulish.”
“Tawdry,” said Alex.
A faint smile touched Dawes’s lips. “Exactly. Wait … then the Bridegroom didn’t kill his fiancée?”
“He says he didn’t. That’s not quite the same thing.”
Maybe he was innocent, maybe he wanted to make peace with Daisy, maybe he just
wanted to find his way back to the girl he had murdered. It didn’t matter. Alex would hold
up her end of the bargain. Whether you made a deal with the living or the dead, best not to
come up short.
We may wish to pass more quickly over Book and Snake, and who could blame us? There is an element of the unsavory to the art of necromancy, and
this natural revulsion can be nothing but increased by the way the
Lettermen have chosen to present themselves. When entering their giant
mausoleum, one can hardly forget one is entering a house of the dead. But it
is perhaps best to put aside fear and superstition and instead contemplate a
certain beauty in their motto: Everything changes; nothing perishes. In truth, the dead are rarely raised beneath their showy pediments. No, the bread and
butter of the Lettermen is intelligence, gathered from a network of dead
informants, who traffic in all manner of gossip and who needn’t listen at
keyholes when they can simply walk unseen through walls.
—from The Life of Lethe: Procedures and Protocols of the Ninth House
Tonight Bobbie Woodward coaxed the location of an abandoned speakeasy
from what looked like little more than the remnants of a spine, a broken
jawbone, and a hunk of hair. There is no amount of Jazz Age bourbon that
can make me forget that sight.
—Lethe Days Diary of Butler Romano (Saybrook College ’65)
13
Last Fall
Darlington had woken from the Manuscript party with the worst shame hangover of his
life. Alex showed him a copy of the report she’d sent. She’d kept the details murky, and
though he wanted to be the kind of person who demanded a strict adherence to the truth,
he really wasn’t sure he could look Dean Sandow in the eye if the specifics of his humiliation were known.
He’d showered, made Alex breakfast, then called a car to take them both back to the Hutch so he could pick up the Mercedes. He returned to Black Elm in the old car, the images of the previous night a blur in his head. He collected the pumpkins along the drive