the hall to the Dante bedroom and pulled on a pair of Lethe House sweats. It felt like days had passed but it had only been hours. There was a lingering soreness where her ribs had been broken, the only sign of the beating she’d endured. And yet she was so tired. Each day had started to feel like a year, and she wasn’t sure if it was the physical trauma or the heavy exposure to the uncanny that was wearing her down.
Afternoon light streamed through the stained-glass windows, leaving bright patterns of blue and yellow on the polished slats of the floor. Maybe she would sleep here tonight, even if it did mean she had to go to class in sweats. She was literally running out of clothes. These attempts on her life were playing havoc with her wardrobe.
The bathroom off the big bedroom had two standing pedestal sinks and a deep claw-footed tub that she’d never used. Had Darlington? She had trouble imagining him sinking into a bubble bath to relax.
She cupped her hand beneath the sink to drink, then spat into the basin. Alex flinched back—the water was pink and speckled with something. She stoppered the drain before it could vanish.
She was looking at North’s blood. She felt sure of it. Blood he had himself swallowed nearly a hundred years ago when he died.
And parsley.
Little bits of it.
She remembered Michael Reyes lying unconscious on an operating table, the Bonesmen gathered around him. Dove’s heart for clarity, geranium root, a dish of bitter herbs. The diet of the victima before a prognostication.
There had been someone inside North that day at the factory—someone who had been used by Bones for a prognostication, long before there was a Lethe House around to keep watch. They cut me open. They wanted to see my soul. They’d let him die. She felt sure of it. Some nameless vagrant who would never be missed. NMDH. No more dead hobos. She’d seen the inscription in Lethe: A Legacy. A little joke among the old boys of the Ninth House. Alex hadn’t quite believed it somehow, even after she’d seen Michael Reyes cut open on a table. She should check on him, make sure he was okay.
Alex let the sink drain. She rinsed her mouth again, wrapped her wet hair in a fresh towel, and sat down at the little antique desk by the window.
Bones had been founded in 1832. They hadn’t built their tomb until twenty-five years later, but that didn’t mean they weren’t trying their hand at rituals before that. No one had been keeping an eye on the societies back then, and she remembered what Darlington had said about stray magic breaking loose from the rituals. What if something had gone wrong with that early prognostication? What if a Gray had disrupted the rite, sent the victima’s spirit flying wild? What if it had found its way into North? He hadn’t even seemed to recognize that he was holding a gun—a shadow in my hand.
The terrified victima inside North, North inside Alex. They were like a nesting doll of the uncanny. Had the spirit somehow chosen North’s body to escape to, or had he and Daisy simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, two innocent people mowed down by power they couldn’t begin to understand? Was that what Darlington had been investigating? That stray magic had caused the North-Whitlock murder?
Alex climbed the stairs to the third floor. She’d spent little time here, but she found the Virgil bedroom on her second try. It was directly above the Dante room but far more grand. Alex supposed that if she survived three years of Lethe and Yale, it would one day be hers.
She went to the desk and opened the drawers. She found a note with a few lines of poetry inside, some stationery stamped with the Lethe hound, and not much else.
There was a statistics textbook on the desk. Had Darlington left it there the night they’d gone to the basement of Rosenfeld Hall?
Alex padded back down the stairs to the bookshelf that guarded the library. She pulled down the Albemarle Book. The smell of horses rose from its pages, the sound of hooves on cobblestones, a snatch of Hebrew—the memory of the research she’d done on golems. Darlington had used the library regularly and the book’s rows were full of his requests, but most seemed focused on feeding his obsession with New Haven—manufacturing history, land deeds, city planning. There