of Hellie holding her hair back. They’d gotten drunk on Jäger and then sat on the bathroom floor at Ground Zero, laughing and puking and brushing their teeth, then doing it all over again.
“Move your legs, Alex,” Hellie said. She was pushing Alex’s knees aside, slumping down next to her in the big basket chair. She smelled like coconut and her body was warm, always warm, like the sun loved her, like it wanted to cling to her golden skin as long as possible.
“Move your stupid legs, Alex!” Not Hellie. Dawes, shouting in her ear.
“I am.”
“You’re not. Come on, give me three more steps.”
Alex wanted to warn Dawes that the thing was coming. The death words hadn’t affected it; maybe the wards wouldn’t stop it either. She opened her mouth and vomited again.
Dawes heaved in response. Then they were on the landing, through the door, toppling forward. Alex found herself falling. She was on the floor of the Hutch, face pressed to the threadbare carpet.
“What happened?” Dawes asked, but Alex was too tired to reply. She felt herself rolled onto her back, a sharp slap across her face. “Tell me what happened, Alex, or I can’t fix it.”
Alex made herself look at Dawes. She didn’t want to. She wanted to go back to the basket chair, Hellie like a glowing slice of sun beside her.
“A Gray, I don’t know. Like glass. I could see through him.”
“Shit, that’s a gluma.”
Alex needed her flash cards. The word was there, though, somewhere in her memory. A gluma was a husk, a spirit raised from the recently dead to pass through the world, go-betweens who could travel across the Veil. They were messengers. For Book and Snake.
“There was red smoke. I breathed it in.” She heaved again.
“Corpse beetles. They’ll eat you from the inside out.”
Of course. Of course they would. Because magic was never good or kind.
She heard bustling and then felt a cup pressed to her lips. “Drink,” said Dawes. “It’s going to hurt like hell and blister the skin right off your throat, but I can heal that.”
Dawes was tipping Alex’s chin up, forcing her mouth open. Alex’s throat caught fire. She had a vision of prairies lit by blue flame. The pain seared through her and she grabbed Dawes by the hand.
“Jesus, Alex, why are you smiling?”
The gluma. The husk. Someone had sent something after her and there could only be one reason why: Alex was onto something. They knew she had gone to see Tara’s body. But who? Book and Snake? Skull and Bones? Whoever it was had no reason to think she would stop with a visit to the morgue. They didn’t know the choice she’d made, that the report had already been filed. Alex had been right. There was something wrong with Tara’s death, some connection to the societies, the Houses of the Veil. But that wasn’t why she was smiling.
“They tried to kill me, Hellie,” she rasped as she slid into the dark. That means I get to try to kill them.
Manuscript, the young upstart among the Houses of the Veil but arguably the society that has weathered modernity best. It is easy to point to its Oscar winners and television personalities, but their alumni also include advisers to presidents, the curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and, perhaps most tellingly, some of the greatest minds in neuroscience. When we speak of Manuscript, we talk of mirror magic, illusions, great glamours of the type that can make a star, but we would do well to remember that all of their workings derive from the manipulation of our own perception.
—from The Life of Lethe: Procedures and Protocols of the Ninth House
Don’t go to a Manuscript party. Just don’t.
—Lethe Days Diary of Daniel Arlington (Davenport College)
10
Last Fall
The night of the Manuscript party, Darlington spent the early-evening hours with the windows of Black Elm lit, handing out candy, jack-o’-lanterns lining the driveway. He loved this part of Halloween, the ritual of it, the tide of happy strangers arriving on his shores, hands outstretched. Most times Black Elm felt like a dark island, one that had somehow ceased to appear on any chart. Not on Halloween night.
The house lay in the gentle swell of a hill not far from the lands that had once belonged to Donald Grant Mitchell, and its library was stocked with multiple copies of Mitchell’s books: Reveries of a Bachelor, Dream Life, and the only title his grandfather had deemed worth reading, My Farm of Edgewood.