up through the cluttered living room, wrapping an arm around her middle, trying to think. She was bleeding and it hurt to breathe. He’d broken her ribs. She wasn’t sure how many. She could feel something warm and wet trickling down the back of her neck from where she’d hit her head. Could she make it to the kitchen? Grab a knife?
“Who are you?” the mechanic growled. His voice was low and raspy, maybe from Alex’s chop to his windpipe. “Who hurt Tara?”
“Her shitbag boyfriend,” Alex spat.
He roared and rushed at her.
Alex lurched left toward the mantel, dodging him narrowly, but he was still between her and the door, bouncing on his heels, as if this were some kind of boxing match.
He smiled. “Nowhere to run, bitch.”
Before she could slip past him, he had his hands around her throat again. Black spots filled her vision. North was shouting, gesturing wildly, powerless to help. No, not powerless. That wasn’t right. Let me in, Alex.
No one knew who she was. Not North. Not this monster in front of her. Not Dawes or Mercy or Sandow or any of them.
Only Darlington had guessed.
18
Last Fall
Darlington knew Alex resented the call. He could hardly blame her. It wasn’t a Thursday, when rituals took place, or a Sunday, when she was expected to prepare for the next week’s work, and he knew she was struggling to keep up with her classes and the demands of Lethe. He’d been concerned about how the incident at Manuscript might impact their work, but she’d shrugged it off more easily than he had, handling the report so that he wouldn’t have to relive the embarrassment and going right back to complaining about Lethe’s demands. The ease with which she let go of that night, the casual forgiveness she’d offered, unnerved him and made him wonder again at the grim march of the life she’d lived before. She’d even made it smoothly through her second rite with Aurelian—a patent application at the Peabody’s ugly, fluorescent-lit satellite campus—and her first prognostication for Skull and Bones. There’d been a rocky moment when she turned distinctly green and looked like she might vomit all over the Haruspex. But she’d managed, and he could hardly fault her for wavering. He’d been through twelve prognostications and they still left him feeling shaken.
“It will be quick, Stern,” he promised her as they set out from Il Bastone on Tuesday night. “Rosenfeld is causing trouble with the grid.”
“Who’s Rosenfeld?”
“It’s a what. Rosenfeld Hall. You should know the rest.”
She adjusted the strap on her satchel. “I don’t remember.”
“St. Elmo,” he prompted her.
“Right. The electrocuted guy.”
He’d give her the point. St. Erasmus had supposedly survived electrocution and drowning. He was the namesake for St. Elmo’s fire and for the society that had once been housed in Rosenfeld Hall’s Elizabethan towers. The red-brick building was used for offices and annex space now and was locked at night, but Darlington had a key.
“Put these on,” he said, handing her rubber gloves and rubber overboots not unlike the kind once made in his family’s factory.
Alex obliged and followed him into the foyer. “Why couldn’t this wait until tomorrow?”
“Because the last time Lethe let trouble at Rosenfeld go, we had a campus-wide blackout.” As if chiming in, the lights in the upper stories flickered. The building hummed softly. “This is all in The Life of Lethe.”
“Remember how you said we don’t concern ourselves with the non-landed societies?” Alex asked.
“I do,” said Darlington, though he knew what was coming.
“I took your teachings to heart.”
Darlington sighed and used his key to open another door, this one to a huge storage room packed with battered dorm furniture and discarded mattresses. “This is the old dining hall of St. Elmo.” He shone his flashlight over the soaring Gothic arches and cunning stone details. “When the society was cash poor in the sixties, the university purchased the building from them and promised to keep leasing the crypt rooms to St. Elmo to use for their rituals. But instead of a proper contract built by Aurelian to secure the terms, the parties opted for a gentleman’s agreement.”
“Did the gentlemen change their minds?”
“They died, and less gentle men took over. Yale refused to renew the society’s lease and St. Elmo’s ended up in that grubby little house on Lynwood.”
“Home is where the heart is, you snob.”
“Precisely, Stern. And the heart of St. Elmo was here, in their original tomb. They’ve been broke and all but magicless since they lost this place.