but in the eerie lamplit quiet, the words sounded menacing. “I think he saved my life. He attacked that thing.”
“The gluma?”
“Yeah.” Alex shuddered. It had been so strong and seemingly immune to everything she’d thrown at it—which admittedly hadn’t been much. “I need to know how to stop one of those things.”
“I’ll pull whatever we have on them,” said Dawes. “But you shouldn’t form ties with Grays, especially a violent one.”
“We don’t have a tie.”
“Then why did he help you?”
“Maybe he wasn’t helping me. Maybe he was trying to hurt the gluma. I didn’t exactly have time to ask.”
“I’m just saying—”
“I know what you’re saying,” said Alex, then flinched when a low gong sounded. Someone had entered the stairwell.
“It’s okay,” Dawes said. “It’s only Dean Sandow.”
“You called Sandow?”
“Of course,” Dawes said, straightening. “You were nearly killed.”
“I’m fine.”
“Because a Gray interceded on your behalf.”
“Don’t tell him that,” Alex snarled before she could tame her response.
Dawes drew back. “He needs to know what happened!”
“Don’t tell him anything.” Alex wasn’t sure why she was so afraid of Sandow knowing what had gone down. Maybe it was just old habit. You didn’t talk. You didn’t tell. That was how CPS got called. That was how you got locked up “for observation.”
Dawes planted her hands on her hips. “What would I tell him? I don’t know what happened to you any more than I know what happened to Darlington. I’m just here to clean up your messes.”
“Isn’t that what they pay you for?” Empty the fridge. A little light dusting. Save my worthless life. Damn it. “Dawes—”
But Sandow was already pushing open the door. He startled when he saw Alex by the window. “You’re up. Dawes said you were unconscious.”
Alex wondered what else Dawes had said. “She took good care of me.”
“Excellent,” Sandow said, draping his overcoat on a bronze post shaped like a jackal’s head and striding across the room to where the old-fashioned samovar sat in a corner. Sandow had been a Lethe delegate in the late seventies and a very good one, according to Darlington. Brilliant on theory, but just as good on fieldwork. He fashioned some original rites that are still on the books today. Sandow had returned to campus as an associate professor ten years later, and since then he had served as Lethe’s liaison with the university president. Excluding a few alums who had been taps themselves, the rest of the administration and faculty knew nothing about Lethe or the societies’ true activities.
Alex could imagine Sandow happily working away in the Lethe library or fastidiously marking a chalk circle. He was a small, tidy man with the trim build of a jogger and silvery brows that steepled at the center of his forehead, giving him a permanent look of concern. She’d seen little of him since she’d begun her education at Lethe. He’d sent her his contact information and an “open invitation to office hours” that she’d never taken him up on. Sometime in late September, he’d come to a long, awkward lunch at Il Bastone, during which he and Darlington discussed a new book on women and manufacturing in New Haven and Alex hid her white asparagus beneath a bread roll.
And, of course, he was the one Alex texted the night Darlington disappeared.
Sandow had come to Il Bastone that night with his old yellow Labrador, Honey. He made a fire in the parlor grate and asked Dawes for tea and brandy as Alex tried to explain—not what had happened. She didn’t know what had happened. She only knew what she’d seen. She was shaking by the time she finished, remembering the cold of the basement, the crackling smell of electricity on the air.
Sandow had patted her knee gently and set a steaming mug before her.
“Drink,” he’d said. “It will help. That must have been very frightening.” The words took Alex by surprise. Her life had been a series of terrifying things she’d been expected to take in stride. “It sounds like portal magic. Someone playing with something they shouldn’t.”
“But he said it wasn’t a portal. He said—”
“He was scared, Alex,” Sandow had said gently. “Probably panicked. For Darlington to disappear that way, a portal must have been involved. It may have been a kind of anomaly created by the nexus beneath Rosenfeld Hall.” Dawes had drifted into the room, hovering behind the couch with her arms crossed tight, barely holding herself together while Sandow murmured about retrieval spells and the likelihood that Darlington simply had to be pulled