who beat people to death with bats didn’t seem like the spare-the-women-and-children type. Maybe the attacker had believed they were dead already from the drugs. Or maybe Alex had tipped someone off. But she knew something more about what had happened than she’d told the police. He felt it in his bones.
“Hellie and I got high,” she said quietly, still brushing her finger against the windowsill. “I woke up in the hospital. She didn’t wake up at all.”
She looked very small suddenly and Darlington felt a stab of shame. She was twenty, older than most freshmen, but she was still just a kid in a lot of ways, in over her head. And she’d lost friends that night, her boyfriend, everything familiar.
“Come with me,” he said. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe because he felt guilty for prying. Maybe because she didn’t deserve to be punished for saying yes to a bargain no right-minded person would refuse.
He led her back to the gloom of the armory. It had no windows, and its walls were lined in shelves and drawers nearly two stories high. It took him a moment to find the cupboard he wanted. When he rested his hand on the door, the house paused, then let the lock give with a disapproving click.
Carefully, he removed the box—heavy, gleaming black wood, inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
“You’ll probably need to remove your shirt,” he said. “I’ll give Dawes the box and she can—”
“Dawes doesn’t like me.”
“Dawes doesn’t like anyone.”
“Here,” she said. She pulled the shirt over her head, revealing a black bra and ribs shadowed like the furrows of a tilled field. “Don’t get Dawes.”
Why was she so willing to put herself in his hands? Was she unafraid or just reckless? Neither trait boded well for her future at Lethe. But he had the sense that it was neither of those things. It felt like she was testing him now, like she’d laid down another challenge.
“Some propriety wouldn’t kill you,” he said.
“Why take the chance?”
“Usually when a woman takes her clothes off in front of me I have some warning.”
Alex shrugged, and the shadows moved over her skin. “Next time, I’ll light the signal fires.”
“That would be best.”
Tattoos covered her from wrist to shoulder and spread beneath her clavicles. They looked like armor.
He opened the box’s lid.
Alex drew in a sudden breath and skittered backward.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. She’d retreated nearly halfway across the room.
“I don’t like butterflies.”
“They’re moths.” They perched in even rows in the box, soft white wings fluttering.
“Whatever.”
“I’ll need you to stay still,” he said. “Can you?”
“Why?”
“Just trust me. It will be worth it.” He considered. “If it’s not, I’ll drive you and your roommates to Ikea.”
Alex balled her shirt in her fists. “And take us for pizza after.”
“Fine.”
“And dear Aunt Eileen is going to buy me some new fall clothes.”
“Fine. Now come here, you coward.”
She crossed back to him in a kind of sideways shuffle, averting her eyes from the contents of the box.
One by one, he took out the moths and laid them gently on her skin. One at her right wrist, her right forearm, the crook of her elbow, her slender biceps, the knob of her shoulder. He repeated the process with her left arm, then placed two moths at the points of her collarbones where the heads of two black snakes curled, their tongues nearly meeting at the hollow of her throat.
“Chabash,” he murmured. The moths beat their wings in unison. “Uverat.” They flapped their wings again and began to turn gray. “Memash.”
With each beat of their wings, the moths grew darker and the tattoos started to fade.
Alex’s chest rose and fell in jagged, rapid bursts. Her eyes were wide with fear, but as the moths darkened and the ink vanished from her skin, her expression changed, opened. Her lips parted.
She’s seen the dead, he thought. She’s witnessed horrors. But she’s never seen magic.
This was why he had done it, not because of guilt or pride but because this was the moment he’d been waiting for: the chance to show someone else wonder, to watch them realize that they had not been lied to, that the world they’d been promised as children was not something that had to be abandoned, that there really was something lurking in the wood, beneath the stairs, between the stars, that everything was full of mystery.
The moths beat their wings again, again, until they were black, then blacker. One by one they tipped from her arms and dropped to the floor in