And she had to wonder if she’d ever feel safe again. We are the shepherds. But who would protect them from the wolves? Blake Keely was dead and gone, his pretty skull smashed to bits. But what was going to happen to Kate Masters and Manuscript, who had unleashed Merity for the sake of saving a few dollars? What about Colin—eager, brilliant, scrubbed-face Colin—and the rest of Scroll and Key, who had sold their secrets to criminals and possibly sent a monster to devour Darlington? And what about the gluma? She’d nearly been murdered by a golem in glasses, and no one seemed to care. Dawes had been attacked. Dean Sandow had nearly bled out on the hall rug. Were they all really that expendable?
Nothing was going to be dismantled. Nothing would change. There were too many powerful people who needed the magic that lived in New Haven and that was tended by the Houses of the Veil. Now the investigation belonged to Sandow and to faceless groups of wealthy alumni who would dole out punishment or forgiveness as they saw fit.
Alex snagged a doctor’s lab coat off the back of a chair and headed for the elevators in her hospital socks. She thought someone might stop her, but she strolled by the nurses’ station without incident. The pain was bad enough that she wanted to bend double and cling to the wall, but she wasn’t going to risk drawing attention.
The elevator doors opened on a woman with auburn hair in a cream-colored sweater and snug jeans. She looked like Dawes but Dawes winnowed down and polished to a high shine. Alex let her pass and stepped inside the elevator. As soon as the doors closed, she slumped against the wall, trying to catch her breath. She didn’t really have a plan. She just couldn’t be here. She couldn’t make small talk with Dawes’s sister. She couldn’t act like what had happened was somehow fair or right or okay.
She shuffled out into the cold, limped a half block away from the hospital, and requested a ride on her phone. It was late and the streets were empty—except for the Bridegroom. North hovered in the glow of the hospital lights. He looked worried as he moved toward her, but Alex couldn’t bring herself to care. He hadn’t found Tara. He hadn’t done a damn thing to help her.
It’s over, she thought. Even if you don’t want it to be, buddy.
“Unwept, unhonored, and unsung,” she growled. North recoiled and vanished, his expression wounded.
“How are you tonight?” the driver asked as she slid into the back seat.
Half dead and disillusioned. How ’bout you? She wanted to be behind the wards, but she couldn’t bear the idea of returning to Il Bastone. “Can you take me to York and Elm?” she said. “There’s an alley. I’ll show you.”
The streets were quiet in the dark, the city faceless.
I’m done, Alex thought, as she dragged herself out of the car and up the staircase to the Hutch, the smell of clove and comfort surrounding her.
Dawes could run off to Westport. Sandow could go home to his housekeeper and his incontinent Labrador. Turner … well, she didn’t know who Turner went home to. His mother. A girlfriend. The job. Alex was going to do what any wounded animal would. She was going where the monsters couldn’t reach her. She was going to ground.
Others may falter and take the false step. What penalty but pride? Ours is the calling of the final trumpet on the horseman’s last ride.
Ours is the answer given without pause and none too soon. Death waits on black wings and we stand hoplite, hussar, dragoon.
—“To the Men of Lethe,” Cabot Collins
(Jonathan Edwards College, ’55)
Cabsy wasn’t actually any good as far as poets go. Seems to have missed the last forty years of verse and just wants to write Longfellow. It’s ungenerous to carp, what with him losing his hands and all, but I’m not sure even that justifies two hours cooped up at Il Bastone, listening to him read from his latest masterpiece while poor Lon Richardson is stuck turning the pages.
—Lethe Days Diary of Carl Roehmer
(Branford College ’54)
28
Early Spring
Alex woke to the sound of glass breaking. It took her a moment to remember where she was, to take in the hexagon pattern of the Hutch’s bathroom floor, the dripping faucet. She grabbed the lip of the sink and pulled herself up, pausing to wait out the head rush before she padded through the