by her perfectionism. There were always excuses for why girls died.
And yet Alex was weirdly comforted by how different her story would be now from what it might have been a year ago. Dying of hypothermia after getting wasted and breaking into a public pool. Overdosing when she tried something new or went too far. Or just vanishing. Losing Len’s protection and disappearing into the long sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, the rows of little houses like stucco mausoleums in their tiny plots.
But if she could avoid dying right now, that would be nice. It’s the principle of the thing, as Darlington would say. After arguing with the library for a few hours, she found two passages on how to combat glumae, one in English, one in Hebrew, which required a translation stone and turned out to be less about glumae than golems. But since both sources mentioned the use of a wrist or pocket watch, the advice seemed sound.
Wind your timepiece tight. The steady tick of a watch confuses any creature made, not born. They perceive a heartbeat in simple clockwork and will look to find a body where there is none.
It wasn’t exactly protection, but distraction would have to do.
Darlington had worn a wristwatch with a wide black leather band and mother-of-pearl face. She’d assumed it was an heirloom or affectation. But maybe it had a purpose too.
Alex entered the armory, where they kept Hiram’s Crucible; the Golden Bowl looked almost bereft for lack of use. She found a pocket watch tangled up in a drawer with a collection of pendulums used for hypnotism, wound it, and tucked it into her pocket. But she had to open a lot of drawers before she found the mirrored compact she wanted, wrapped in cotton batting. A card in the drawer explained the mirror’s provenance: the glass originally fashioned in China, then set into the compact by members of Manuscript for a still-classified Cold War op run by the CIA. How it had made its way from Langley to the Lethe mansion on Orange, the card didn’t say. The glass was smudged, and Alex wiped it clean with a puff of breath and her sweatshirt.
Despite the events of the weekend, she made it through Spanish without her usual sense of blurriness or panic, spent two hours in Sterling powering through the last of her reading for her Shakespeare section, and then ate her usual double-serving lunch. She felt awake, focused the way she was on basso belladonna but without the heart-twitching jitters. And to think, all it had taken was an attempt on her life and a visit to the borderlands of hell. If only she’d known sooner.
That morning, North had been hovering in the Vanderbilt courtyard, and she’d muttered that she wouldn’t be free until after lunch. Sure enough, he was waiting when she emerged from the dining hall, and they set out together up College to Prospect. They were nearly to Ingalls Rink when she realized she hadn’t seen a single Gray—no, that wasn’t quite true. She saw them behind columns, darting into alleys. They’re afraid of him, she realized. She remembered him standing in the river, smiling. There are worse things than death, Miss Stern.
Alex had to keep consulting her phone as she cut down to Mansfield. She still couldn’t quite hold the map of New Haven in her head. She knew the main arteries of the Yale campus, the routes she walked each week to class, but the rest of the body was vague and shapeless to her. She was headed toward a neighborhood she’d driven with Darlington once in his old battered Mercedes. He’d shown her the old Winchester Repeating Arms factory, which had been partially turned into fancy lofts, the line running straight down the building where the paint gave way to raw brick—the exact moment when the developer had run out of money. He’d gestured to the sad grid of Science Park—Yale’s bid for medical-tech investment in the nineties.
“I guess it didn’t work,” Alex had said, noting the boarded-up windows and empty parking lot.
“In the words of my grandfather, this town has been fucked from the start.” Darlington had leaned on the gas, as if Alex had witnessed some embarrassing family spat at the Thanksgiving table. They’d passed the cheap row houses and apartment buildings where workmen had lived during the Winchester days, then, farther up the slope of Science Hill, the homes that had belonged to the company’s foremen, their houses built