“Dante replies,” Alex said, feeling like a jackass. She was Dante. Darlington was Virgil. That was the way Lethe was supposed to work until Alex made it to her senior year and took on the title of Virgil to mentor an incoming freshman. She’d nodded and matched Darlington’s small smile when he’d told her their code names—he’d referred to them as “offices”—pretending she got the joke. Later, she’d looked them up and discovered that Virgil had been Dante’s guide as he descended into hell. More Lethe House humor wasted on her.
“There’s a body at Payne Whitney,” said Dawes. “Centurion is on site.”
“A body,” Alex repeated, wondering if fatigue had damaged her ability to understand basic human speech.
“Yes.”
“Like a dead body?”
“Ye-es.” Dawes was clearly trying to sound calm, but her breath caught, turning the single syllable into a musical hiccup.
Alex pressed her back against the column, the cold of the stone seeping through her coat, and felt a stab of angry adrenaline spike through her.
Are you messing with me? That was what she wanted to ask. That was what this felt like. Being fucked with. Being the weird kid who talked to herself, who was so desperate for friends she agreed when Sarah McKinney pleaded, “Can you meet me at Tres Muchachos after school? I want to see if you can talk to my grandma. We used to go there a lot and I miss her so much.” The kid who stood outside the shittiest Mexican restaurant in the shittiest food court in the Valley by herself until she had to call her mom to ask her to pick her up because no one was coming. Of course no one was coming.
This is real, she reminded herself. And Pamela Dawes was a lot of things but she wasn’t a Sarah McKinney-style asshole.
Which meant someone was dead.
And she was supposed to do something about it?
“Uh, was it an accident?”
“Possible homicide.” Dawes sounded like she’d been waiting for just this question.
“Okay,” Alex said, because she had no idea what else to say.
“Okay,” Dawes replied awkwardly. She’d delivered her big line and now she was ready to get offstage.
Alex hung up and stood in the bleak, windswept silence of the empty plaza. She’d forgotten at least half of what Darlington had tried to teach her before he’d vanished, but he definitely hadn’t covered murder.
She didn’t know why. If you were going to hell together, murder seemed like a good place to start.
2
Last Fall
Daniel Arlington prided himself on being prepared for anything, but if he’d had to choose a way to describe Alex Stern, it would have been “an unwelcome surprise.” He could think of a lot of other terms for her, but none of them were polite, and Darlington always endeavored to be polite. If he’d been brought up by his parents—his dilettante father, his glib but brilliant mother—he might have had different priorities, but he’d been raised by his grandfather, Daniel Tabor Arlington III, who believed that most problems could be solved with cask-strength scotch, plenty of ice, and impeccable manners.
His grandfather had never met Galaxy Stern.
Darlington sought out Alex’s first-floor Vanderbilt dorm room on a sweating, miserable day in the first week of September. He could have waited for her to report to the house on Orange, but when he was a freshman, his own mentor, the inimitable Michelle Alameddine, who had served as his Virgil, had welcomed him to Yale and the mysteries of Lethe House by coming to meet him at the Old Campus freshman dorms. Darlington was determined to do things right, even if everything about the Stern situation had started out wrong.
He hadn’t chosen Galaxy Stern as his Dante. In fact, she had, by sheer virtue of her existence, robbed him of something he’d been looking forward to for the entirety of his three-year tenure with Lethe: the moment when he would gift someone new with the job he loved, when he’d crack the ordinary world open for some worthy but barely suspecting soul. Only a few months before, he’d unloaded the boxes full of incoming freshman applications and stacked them in the great room at Black Elm, giddy with excitement, determined to read or at least skim through all eighteen hundred-plus files before he made his recommendations to the Lethe House alumni. He would be fair, open-minded, and thorough, and in the end he would choose twenty candidates for the role of Dante. Then Lethe would vet their backgrounds, check