Ninth House

by Leigh Bardugo

  Detective Abel Turner understood her in a way Darlington never had.

  Good. Better. Best. That was the trajectory that got you to this place. What Darlington and probably all the rest of these eager, effortful children couldn’t understand was that Alex would have happily settled for less than Yale. Darlington was all about the pursuit of perfection, something spectacular. He didn’t know how precious a normal life could be, how easy it was to drift away from average. You started sleeping until noon, skipped one class, one day of school, lost one job, then another, forgot the way that normal people did things. You lost the language of ordinary life. And then, without meaning to, you crossed into a country from which you couldn’t return. You lived in a state where the ground always seemed to be slipping from beneath your feet, with no way back to someplace solid.

  It didn’t matter that Alex had witnessed the delegates of Skull and Bones predict commodities futures using Michael Reyes’s guts or that she’d once seen the captain of the lacrosse team turn himself into a vole. (He’d squealed and then—she could have sworn it—pumped his tiny pink fist.) Lethe was Alex’s way back to normal. She didn’t need to be exceptional. She didn’t even need to be good, just good enough. Turner had given her permission. Go home. Go to sleep. Take a shower. Get back to the real work of trying to pass your classes and make it through the year. Her grades from first semester had been bad enough to land her in academic probation.

  She’s town.

  Except the societies liked to shop town girls and boys for their experiments. It was the whole reason Lethe existed. Or a big part of it. And Alex had spent most of her life as town.

  She eyed the coroner’s van, parked half on and half off the sidewalk. Turner’s back was still to her.

  The mistake people made when they didn’t want to get noticed was to try to look casual, so instead she strode toward the van with purpose, a girl who needed to get to the dorms. It was late, after all. When she rounded the back of the vehicle, she shot one quick glance in Turner’s direction, then slipped into the wide V of the open van doors as a uniformed coroner turned to her.

  “Hey,” she said. He remained in a half crouch, face wary, body blocking the view behind him. Alex held up one of the two gold coins she kept tucked in the lining of her coat. “You dropped this.”

  He saw the glint and without thinking reached out to take it, his response part courtesy, part trained behavior. Someone offered you a boon, you accepted. But it was also a magpie impulse, the lure of something shiny. She felt a little like a troll in a fairy tale.

  “I don’t think…” he began. But as soon as his fingers closed over the coin, his face went slack, the compulsion taking hold.

  “Show me the body,” Alex said, half-expecting him to refuse. She’d seen Darlington flash one at a security guard before, but she’d never used a coin of compulsion herself.

  The coroner didn’t even blink, only backed farther into the van and offered her his hand. She clambered up behind him with a quick glance over her shoulder and shut the doors. They wouldn’t have much time. All she needed was for the driver or, worse, Turner to come knocking on the door and find her there, having a chat over a corpse. She also wasn’t sure how long the compulsion would last. This particular bit of magic had come from Manuscript. They specialized in mirror magic, glamours, persuasion. Any object could be enchanted, the most famous being a condom that had convinced a philandering Swedish diplomat to hand over a cache of sensitive documents.

  The coins took tremendous magic to generate, so they were kept in tight supply at Lethe, and Alex had been stingy with her allotted two. Why was she squandering one now?

  As Alex joined the coroner in the enclosed space, she saw his nostrils flare at her smell, but his fingers were already on the zipper of the body bag, the coin clutched in his other hand. He was moving too quickly, as if in fast forward, and Alex had the urge to tell him to just stop for a second, but then the moment passed and he was pulling the body bag open, the black vinyl splitting like the skin of a fruit.

  “Jesus,” breathed Alex.

  The girl’s face was fragile, blue veined. She wore a white cotton camisole, torn and puckered where the knife had entered and retreated—again and again. The wounds were all centered on her heart, and she’d been struck with enough force that it looked as if her sternum had started to give way, the bones fracturing in a shallow, bloody crater. Alex was suddenly sorry she hadn’t taken Turner’s strongly worded advice and gone home. This didn’t look like a ritual gone wrong. It looked personal.

  She swallowed the bile that rose in her throat and forced herself to inhale deeply. If this girl had somehow been targeted by a society or was messing with the uncanny, the smell of the Veil should still be on her. But with Alex’s own stink filling the ambulance, it was impossible to tell.

  “It’s the boyfriend.”

  Alex glanced at the coroner. Compulsions were supposed to make anyone under their power eager to please.

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  “Turner said so. They’ve already picked him up for questioning. He has priors.”

  “For what?”

  “Dealing and possession. So does she.”

  Of course she did. The boyfriend was moving product, and this girl was too. But there was a good long leap from small-time dealing to murder. Sometimes, she reminded herself. Sometimes it’s not far at all.

  Alex looked again at the girl’s face. She was blond, a little like Hellie.

  The resemblance was superficial, at least on the outside. But underneath? In the cut-open places, they were all the same. Girls like Hellie, girls like Alex, girls like this one, had to keep running or eventually trouble caught up. This girl just hadn’t run fast enough.

  There were paper bags over her hands—to preserve the evidence, Alex realized. Maybe she’d scratched her attacker.

  “What’s her name?” It didn’t matter, but Alex needed it for her report.

  “Tara Hutchins.”

  Alex typed it into her phone so she wouldn’t forget it. “Cover her up.”

  She was glad when she couldn’t see that brutalized body anymore. This was nasty, ugly, but it didn’t mean Tara was connected to the societies. People didn’t need magic to be terrible to each other.

  “Time of death?” she asked. That seemed like the kind of thing she should know.

  “Sometime around eleven. Hard to pinpoint because of the cold.”

  She paused with her hand on the lever of the van doors. Sometime around eleven. Right around the time two docile Grays who had never given anyone any trouble had opened their jaws like they were trying to swallow the world and something had tried to slam its way into a chalk circle. What if that something had found its way to Tara instead?

  Or what if her boyfriend got fucked up enough to think he could stab straight through to her heart? There were plenty of human monsters out there. Alex had met a few. For now she’d “done her part.” More than done it.

  Alex cracked the door to the van, scanned the street, then hopped down. “Forget you met me,” she told the coroner.

  A vague, confused expression crossed his face. Alex left him standing, dazed, beside Tara’s body and strolled away, crossing the street and keeping to the dark sidewalk, away from the police lights. In a short while, the compulsion would wear off and he’d wonder how he’d ended up with a gold coin in his hand. He would put it in his pocket and forget about it or toss it in the trash without ever realizing the metal was real.

  She glanced back at the Grays gathered around Payne Whitney. Was it her imagination or was there something in the bent of their shoulders, the way they huddled together by the gymnasium doors? Alex knew better than to look too closely, but in that fleeting moment she could have sworn they looked frightened. What did the dead have to fear?

  She could hear Darlington’s voice in her head: When was the first time you saw them? Low and halting, as if he wasn’t sure whether the question was taboo. But the real qu
estion, the right question, was: When was the first time you knew to be afraid?

  Alex was glad he’d never had the sense to ask.

  Where do we begin to tell the story of Lethe? Does it begin in 1824 with Bathsheba Smith? Perhaps it should. But it would take another seventy years and many more disasters before Lethe would come to be. So instead we point to 1898, when Charlie Baxter, a man with no home and of no consequence, turned up dead with burns to his hands, feet, and scrotum, and a black scarab where his tongue should be. Accusations flew and the societies found themselves under threat from the university. To heal the rift and—let us speak frankly—to save themselves, Edward Harkness, a member of Wolf’s Head, joined with William Payne Whitney of Skull and Bones, and Hiram Bingham III of the now-defunct Acacia Fraternity, to form the League of Lethe as an oversight body for the societies’ occult activities.

  From these earliest meetings rose our mission statement: We are charged with monitoring the rites and practices of any senior societies trafficking in magic, divination, or otherworldly discourse, with the express intent of keeping citizens and students safe from mental, physical, and spiritual harm and of fostering amicable relations between the societies and school administration.

  Lethe was funded by an infusion of capital from Harkness and a mandatory contribution from the trusts of each of the Ancient Eight. When Harkness tapped James Gamble Rogers (Scroll and Key, 1889) to create a plan for Yale and design many of its structures, he ensured that safe houses and tunnels for Lethe would be built throughout the campus.

  Harkness, Whitney, and Bingham drew on knowledge from each of the societies to create a storehouse of arcane magic for use by the deputies of Lethe. This was added to significantly in 1911, when Bingham traveled to Peru.

  —from The Life of Lethe: Procedures and Protocols of the Ninth House

  4

  Last Fall

  “Come on,” Darlington said, helping her to her feet. “The illusion will break any minute and you’ll be lying in the front yard like a noon drinker.” He half-dragged her up the stairs to the porch. She’d handled the jackals well enough, but her color wasn’t good and she was breathing hard. “You’re in terrible shape.”

  “And you’re an asshole.”

  “Then we both have hardships to overcome. You asked me to tell you what you were getting into. Now you know.”

  She yanked her arm away. “Tell me. Not try to kill me.”

  He looked at her steadily. It was important she understand. “You were never in any danger. But I can’t promise that will always be the case. If you don’t take this seriously, you could get yourself or someone else hurt.”

  “Someone like you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Most of the time nothing too bad happens at the Houses. You’ll see things you’d like to forget. Miracles too. But no one completely understands what lies beyond the Veil or what might happen if it crosses over. Death waits on black wings and we stand hoplite, hussar, dragoon.”

  She placed her hands on her thighs and peered up at him. “You make that up?”

  “Cabot Collins. They called him the Poet of Lethe.” Darlington reached for the door. “He lost both his hands when an interdimensional portal closed on them. He was reciting his latest work at the time.”

  Alex shuddered. “Okay, I get it. Bad poetry, serious business. Are those dogs real?”

  “Real enough. They’re spirit hounds, bound to serve the sons and daughters of Lethe. Why the long sleeves, Stern?”

  “Track marks.”

  “Really?” He’d suspected that might be the issue, but he didn’t quite believe her.

  She straightened and cracked her back. “Sure. Are we going in or not?”

  He bobbed his chin toward her wrist. “Show me.”

  Alex lifted her arm, but she didn’t shove her sleeve back. She just held it out to him, like he was going to tap a vein for a blood drive.

  A challenge. One that he suddenly didn’t want to accept. It was none of his business. He should say that. Let it go.

  Instead, he took hold of her wrist. The bones were narrow, sharp in his hand. With his other hand he pushed the fabric of her shirt up the slope of her forearm. It felt like a prelude.

  No needle punctures. Her skin was covered in tattoos: the curling tail of a rattlesnake, the sunburst bloom of a peony, and …

  “The Wheel.” He resisted the urge to touch his thumb to the image below the crook of her elbow. Dawes would be interested in that bit of tarot. Maybe it would give them something to talk about. “Why hide tattoos? No one cares about that here.” Half the student body had them. Not many had full sleeves, but they weren’t unheard of.

  Alex yanked her cuff back down. “Any other hoops to jump through?”

  “Plenty.” He pulled open the door and led her inside.

  The entry was dark and cool, the stained glass throwing bright patterns onto the carpeted floor. Before them, the great staircase wound along the wall to the second story, dark wood carved in a thick sunflower motif. Michelle had told him the staircase alone was worth more than the rest of the house and the land it was built on.

  Alex released a small sigh.

  “Glad to be out of the sun?”

  She made a soft humming noise. “It’s quiet here.”

  It took him a moment to understand what she meant. “Il Bastone is warded. As are the rooms at the Hutch.… It’s that bad?”

  Alex shrugged.

  “Well … they can’t get to you here.”

  Alex looked around, her face impassive. Was she unimpressed by the soaring entry, the warm wood and stained glass, the scent of pine and cassis that always made stepping into the house feel a bit like Christmas? Or was she just trying to seem that way?

  “Nice clubhouse,” she said. “Not very tomblike.”

  “We’re not a society and we don’t run like one. This isn’t a clubhouse; it’s our headquarters, the heart of Lethe, and the storehouse of hundreds of years of knowledge on the occult.” He knew he sounded like a horrible prig but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. “The societies tap a new delegation of seniors every year, sixteen members—eight women, eight men. We tap a single new Dante—one freshman every three years.”

  “Guess that makes me pretty special.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  Alex frowned at that, then nodded at the marble bust propped on a table beneath the coat rack. “Who’s that?”

  “The patron saint of Lethe, Hiram Bingham the Third.” Unfortunately, Bingham’s boyish features and downturned mouth didn’t lend themselves to immortalization in stone. He looked like a perturbed department store mannequin.

  Dawes shuffled out of the parlor, her hands curled into the sleeves of her voluminous sweatshirt, her headphones snug around her neck, a vision in beige. Darlington could feel the discomfort radiating off her. Pammie hated new people. It had taken him the better part of his freshman year to win her over, and he still always had the sense that she might be one loud noise away from bolting into the library, never to be seen again.

  “Pamela Dawes, meet our new Dante, Alex Stern.”

  With all the enthusiasm of someone greeting a cholera outbreak, Dawes offered her hand and said, “Welcome to Lethe.”

  “Dawes keeps everything running and ensures I don’t make too big a fool of myself.”

  “So it’s a full-time job?” asked Alex.

  Dawes blinked. “Evenings and afternoons, but I can make myself available to you with enough notice.” She glanced back at the parlor worriedly, as if her long-unfinished dissertation was a baby crying. Dawes had served as Oculus for nearly four years and she’d been hammering away on her dissertation—an examination of Mycenaean cult practices in early tarot iconography—all the while.

  Darlington decided to put her out of her misery. “I’m giving Alex the tour and then I’ll take her across campus to the Hutch.”

  “The Hutch?” asked Alex.

  “Rooms we keep at the corner of York an
d Elm. It’s not much, but it’s convenient when you don’t want to trek too far from your dorm. And it’s warded too.”

  “It’s stocked,” Dawes said faintly, already scooting back into the parlor and safety.

  Darlington gestured for Alex to follow him upstairs.

  “Who was Bathsheba Smith?” Alex asked on his heels.

  Then she had been reading her Life of Lethe. He was pleased she remembered the name, but, if memory served, Bathsheba appeared on the first page of the first chapter, so he wasn’t going to get too excited. “The seventeen-year-old daughter of a local farmer. Her body was found in the basement of the Yale Medical School in 1824. She’d been dug up for study by the students.”

  “Jesus.”

  “It wasn’t uncommon. Doctors needed to study anatomy and they needed cadavers to do that. But we think Bathsheba was an early attempt to communicate with the dead. A medical assistant took the fall, and Yale’s students learned to keep their activities more quiet. After the discovery of the girl’s body, the locals nearly burned Yale to the ground.”

  “Maybe they should have,” murmured Alex.

  Maybe. They’d called it the Resurrection Riot, but it hadn’t turned truly nasty. Boom or bust, New Haven was a town forever on the brink of things.

  Darlington toured Alex around the rest of Il Bastone: the grand parlor, with the old map of New Haven above the fireplace; the kitchen and pantry; the downstairs training rooms; and the second-floor armory, with its wall of apothecary drawers, all of them stocked with herbs and sacred objects.

  It was left to Dawes to make sure they were kept well supplied, that any perishable items were freshened or disposed of before they turned foul, and to maintain any artifacts that required it. Cuthbert’s Pearls of Protection had to be worn for a few hours every month or they lost both their luster and their power to protect the wearer from lightning strikes. A Lethe alum named Lee De Forest, who had once been suspended as an undergrad for causing a campus-wide blackout, had left Lethe with countless inventions, including the Revolution Clock, which showed an accurate-to-the-minute countdown to armed revolt in countries around the globe. It had twenty-two faces and seventy-six hands and had to be wound regularly or it would simply begin screaming.