Ninth House

by Leigh Bardugo

“Come on,” he snapped. “Open the door, Alex. Let us out.”

  Let me in.

  Hellie’s ghost hung halfway through the window and the sky. She was fading to gray. Would she trail them all the way down to that grimy alley? “Don’t go,” Alex begged her.

  But Len thought she was talking to him. “Open the door, you useless bitch.”

  Alex reached for the knob. Let me in. The metal was cold in her hand. She started to open the door, then shut it. She flipped the lock and turned to face Len and Betcha and Ariel.

  “What now?” Len said impatiently.

  Alex held her hand out to Hellie. Stay with me. She didn’t know what she was asking. She didn’t know what she was offering. But Hellie understood.

  She felt Hellie rush toward her, felt herself splitting, being torn open to make room for another heart, another pair of lungs, for Hellie’s will, for Hellie’s strength.

  “What now, Len?” Alex asked. She picked up the bat.

  * * *

  Alex didn’t remember much of what happened next. The sense of Hellie inside her like a deep, held breath. How light and natural the bat felt in her hand.

  There was no hesitation. She swung from her left, just as Hellie had when she’d played for the Midway Mustangs. Alex was so strong it made her clumsy. She hit Len first, a hard crack to the skull. He stepped sideways and she stumbled, knocked off-balance by the force of her own swing. She hit him again and his head gave way with a thick crunch, like a piñata breaking open, chips of skull and brain flying, blood spattering everywhere. Betcha still had Hellie’s ankles in his hands when Alex turned the bat on him—she was that fast. She struck him behind the knees first and he screamed as he collapsed, then she brought the bat down like a sledgehammer on his neck and shoulders.

  Ariel rose and at first she thought he might reach for a gun, but he was backing away, eyes terrified, and as she passed the sliding glass door, she understood why. She was glowing. She chased him to the door—no, not chased. She flew at him, as if her feet were barely touching the ground. Hellie’s rage was like a drug inside her body, setting her blood on fire. She knocked Ariel to the floor and hit him again and again, until the bat broke against his spine. Then she took the two jagged pieces in her hands and went to find the rest of the vampires, a coven of boys, asleep in their beds, wasted and drooling.

  When it was done, when there were no more people left to kill and she felt her own exhaustion creeping into Hellie’s limitless energy, Hellie was the one who guided her, made her put the pink plastic shoes on her own feet and walk the two miles down to where Roscoe crossed the Los Angeles River. She saw no one along the way; Hellie steered her down each empty street, telling her where to turn, when to wait, when it was safe, until they reached the bridge and climbed down in the dawning gray of early morning. They waded in together, the water cold and foul. The city had broken the river when it had flooded one too many times, had sealed it up in concrete to make sure it could never do damage again. Alex let it wash her clean, the shattered remnants of the bat flowing from her hands like seeds. She followed the river’s course most of the way back to Ground Zero.

  She and Hellie placed Hellie’s body back where it had been, and then they lay down together in the cold of that room. She didn’t care what happened now, if the police came, if she froze to death on this floor.

  “Stay,” she told Hellie, hearing the thunder of their hearts beating together, feeling the weight of Hellie curled into her muscles and bones. “Stay with me.”

  But when she woke, a paramedic was shining a light into her eyes and Hellie was gone.

  20

  Winter

  What had Alex been thinking the night that Darlington vanished? That she just had to get him back to the Hutch. They would talk. She would explain … What exactly? That they’d deserved it? That killing Len and the others had given not only Hellie but her some kind of peace? That the world punished girls like them, like Tara, for all their bad choices, every mistake. That she had liked doling out the punishment herself. That whatever conscience she’d always assumed she possessed just hadn’t shown up for work that day. And she certainly wasn’t sorry.

  But she could say she was. She could pretend she didn’t remember the feel of the bat in her hand, that she wouldn’t do it again. Because that’s what Darlington feared—not that she was bad, but that she was dangerous. He feared chaos. So Alex could tell him that Hellie had possessed her. She would turn it into a mystery that they could solve together. He would like that. She would be something for him to fix, a project like his broken town, his crumbling house. She could still be one of the good guys.

  But Alex never had to tell those lies. The thing in the basement made sure of that. Darlington was not abroad. He was not in Spain. And she didn’t really believe he’d vanished into some pocket realm to be retrieved like a child who’d wandered away from the group. Dawes and Dean Sandow hadn’t been there that night. They hadn’t felt the finality of that darkness.

  “It’s not a portal,” he’d said in the basement of Rosenfeld Hall. “It’s a muh—”

  One minute he was there and the next he was enveloped in blackness.

  She’d seen the terror in his eyes, the plea. Do something. Help me.

  She meant to. At least, she thought she meant to. She’d replayed that moment a thousand times, wondering why she’d frozen—if it had been fear or lack of training or distraction. Or if it had been a choice. If the thing in the corner had given her a solution to the problem Darlington presented.

  This isn’t something I can keep from Sandow. Darlington’s words like fingers reaching into her mouth, pinching her tongue, keeping her from crying out.

  At night, she thought of Darlington’s perfect face, of the feel of his body bracketing hers in the sleep-warmed sheets of his narrow bed.

  I let you die. To save myself, I let you die.

  That is the danger in keeping company with survivors.

  * * *

  The mechanic leaned over her, smiling. “Nowhere to run, bitch.”

  His grip felt so heavy on her neck, like his thumbs might push right through her skin and sink into her windpipe.

  Alex hadn’t wanted to think of that night at Ground Zero. She hadn’t wanted to look back. She hadn’t even been sure what had happened, if it had been Hellie or her that had made it possible.

  Let me in.

  Stay with me.

  Maybe she’d been afraid that if she opened the door again something terrible might step inside. But that was exactly what she needed now. Something terrible.

  Alex’s right hand closed over the discarded golf club—a putter. She extended her left hand toward North, remembered the sense of herself splitting, willed herself to do it again. Open the door, Alex. She had time to register the look of surprise on his face, and then the dark cold of him rushed toward her.

  Hellie had come to her willingly, but North fought. She sensed his confusion, his desperate terror to remain free, and then a tide of her own need swallowed his concerns.

  North felt different than Hellie. She had been the powerful curve of a wave. North’s strength was dark and limber, springy as a fencer’s foil. It filled her limbs, made her feel like molten metal ran through her veins.

  She twirled the putter once in her hand, tested its weight. Who said I’m running? She swung.

  The mechanic managed to get his hand up, protecting his head, but Alex heard the bones of his hand give way with a satisfying crunch. He yowled and stumbled backward into the couch.

  Alex went for his knee next. The big ones were easier to handle on the ground. He collapsed with a thud.

  “Who are you?” she demanded. “Who sent you?”

  “Fuck off,” he snarled.

  Alex brought the putter down and struck the hard slats of the floor. He was gone—as if he’d melted straight through the floorboards. She stared at the empty place where he had been, the recoil of the strike reverberating through her arms.

 
Something smacked her from behind. Alex fell forward as pain exploded through her skull.

  She hit the floor and rolled, scrabbling backward. The mechanic was half in and half out of the wall, his body split by the mantel.

  Alex sprang to her feet, but in the next second he was beside her. His fist shot out, cracking across her jaw. Only North’s strength kept her from crumpling. She swung the putter, but the mechanic was already gone. A fist cracked into her from the other side.

  This time she went down.

  The mechanic kicked her hard in the side, his boot connecting with her broken ribs. She screamed. He kicked again.

  “Get your hands on your head!”

  Detective Turner. He was standing at the door, his weapon drawn.

  The mechanic looked at Turner. He threw his middle fingers up and vanished, melting into the mantel.

  Alex slumped against the wall and felt North flood out of her, saw him leave her in a blurry tide, reassuming his form, his face frightened and resentful. Was she supposed to feel sorry for him?

  “I get it,” Alex muttered. “But I didn’t have a choice.” He touched his hand to the wound at his chest as if she’d been the one to shoot him.

  “Just find Tara,” she snapped. “You have the retainer.”

  “The what?” said Turner. He was patting the mantel and the bricked-up hearth beneath it as if expecting to find a secret passage.

  “Portal magic,” Alex grunted out.

  North looked back once over his shoulder and vanished through the wall of the apartment. Pain came at her in a sudden swell, a time-lapse photograph of a blooming flower, as if North’s presence had kept the worst of it at bay and now that she was empty the damage could rush in. Alex tried to push herself up. Turner had holstered his weapon.

  Turner slammed his fist on the counter. “That isn’t possible.”

  “It is,” said Alex.

  “You don’t understand,” said Turner. He looked at her the way North had, as if Alex had done him a wrong. “That was Lance Gressang. That was my murder suspect. I left him less than an hour ago. Sitting in a jail cell.”

  Is there something unnatural in the very fabric of New Haven? In the stone used to raise its buildings? In the rivers from which its great elms drink? During the War of 1812, the British blockaded New Haven Harbor, and poor Trinity Church—not yet the Gothic palace now gracing the green—had no way of accessing the necessary lumber for its construction. But Commander Hardy of the Royal British Navy heard of the purpose for which the great roof beams were intended. He permitted them to pass and they were floated down the Connecticut River. “If there is any place on earth that needs religion,” he said, “it is this New Haven. Let the rafts go through!”

  —from Lethe: A Legacy

  Why do you think they built so many churches here? Somehow the men and women of this city knew: Their streets were home to other gods.

  —Lethe Days Diary of Elliot Sandow (Branford College ’69)

  21

  Winter

  Turner had his phone out and Alex knew what came next. Part of her wanted to let it happen. She wanted the steady beep of hospital machines, the smell of antiseptic, an IV full of the strongest dope they had to knock her into sleep and away from this pain. Was she dying? She didn’t think so. Now that she’d done it once, she figured she’d know. But it felt like she was dying.

  “Don’t.” She forced the word out in a rasp. Her throat still hurt like it was being squeezed by Lance Gressang’s enormous hands. “No hospital.”

  “Did you see that in a movie?”

  “How are you going to explain this to a doctor?”

  “I’ll say I found you this way,” said Turner.

  “Okay, how am I going to explain this? And the messed-up crime scene. And how I got in here.”

  “How did you get in here?”

  “I don’t need a hospital. Take me to Dawes.”

  “Dawes?”

  Alex was annoyed that Turner had somehow forgotten Dawes’s name. “Oculus.”

  “Fuck this,” said Turner. “All of you with your code names and your secrets and your bullshit.” She could see the way he was leaping from rage to fear and back again. His mind was trying to erase everything he’d seen. It was one thing to be told magic existed, quite another to have it literally give you the finger.

  Alex wondered how much Lethe had shared with Centurion. Did they hand him the same Life of Lethe booklet? A long file full of horror stories? A commemorative mug that said Monsters Are Real? Alex had spent her life surrounded by the uncanny and it had still been hard to let in the reality of Lethe. What would it be like for someone who had grown up in what he believed was an ordinary city—his city—who had been an instrument of order on its streets, to suddenly know that the most basic rules did not apply?

  “She need a doctor?” A woman stood in the hall, her cell phone in her hand. “I heard a commotion.”

  Turner flashed his badge. “Help is on the way, ma’am. Thank you.”

  That badge was a kind of magic too. But the woman turned to Alex. “You okay, honey?”

  “I’m good,” Alex managed, feeling a pang of warmth for this stranger in a bathrobe, even as she cradled her phone to her chest and shuffled away.

  Alex tried to raise her head, the pain spiking through her like a whip crack. “You need to take me somewhere warded. Someplace they can’t get to me, understand?”

  “They.”

  “Yes, they. Ghosts and ghouls and inmates who can walk through walls. It’s all real, Turner, not just a bunch of college kids dressing up in robes. And I need your help.”

  Those were the words that woke him. “There’s a uniform out front, and I can’t carry you past him without answering a whole heap of questions—and you sure can’t walk out on your own.”

  “I can.” But, God, she didn’t want to. “Reach into my right pocket. There’s a little bottle in there with a dropper.”

  He shook his head but dug into Alex’s pocket. “What is this?”

  “Basso belladonna. Just put two drops in my eyes.”

  “Drugs?” asked Turner.

  “Medication.”

  Of course that placated him. Turner the Eagle Scout.

  As soon as the first drop hit her eyes, she knew she’d made a bad miscalculation. She felt instantly energized, ready to move, act, but the basso belladonna did nothing to ease the pain, only made her more aware of it. She could feel the places where her broken bones were pressing that they shouldn’t, where the blood vessels had burst, the capillaries ruptured and swelling.

  The drug was telling her brain that everything was okay, that anything was possible, that if she willed it, she could heal herself right now. But the pain was shrieking panic, banging on her awareness, a fist against glass. She could feel a splinter starting, her sanity like a windshield that wasn’t meant to break. She’d been called crazy countless times, had sometimes believed it, but this was the first time she’d felt insane.

  Her heart was thundering. I’m going to die here.

  You’re fine. Through how many late nights and long afternoons had she said that to someone who’d smoked too much, swallowed too much, snorted too much? Breathe through it. You’re fine. You’re fine.

  “Meet me on Tilton,” she told Turner, pushing to her feet. He was beautiful. The basso belladonna had lit his brown skin like a late-summer sunset. Light bounced off the short stubble of his shaved head. Medication, my ass. The pain screamed as her broken ribs shifted.

  “This is a terrible idea,” he said.

  “The only kind I have. Go on.”

  Turner blew out an exasperated breath and went.

  Alex’s hyped-up mind had already plotted a route down the back hall and out onto the rickety landing. The air was cool and moist against her fevered skin. She could see every grain of the weathered gray wood, feel sweat blooming on her cheeks and turning cold in the winter air. It was going to snow again.

  Down the little row of
steps. Just hop them, said the drug lighting up her system.

  “Please shut up,” gasped Alex.

  Everything seemed to be coated in a smooth, silvery sheen, painted in high gloss. She forced herself to walk instead of run, her bones scraping against each other like a violin bow. The blacktop of the alley behind Tara’s apartment glittered, the stink of garbage and piss like a thick, visible haze that she had to push through as if she were underwater. She passed between two row houses and onto Tilton. A moment later, a blue Dodge Charger rounded the corner and slowed. Turner hopped out and opened the back door, letting Alex slide into the back seat.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “Il Bastone. The house on Orange.”

  It was almost worse to lie down and stop moving. All she could think about as she sank into the new-car smell of Turner’s leather seats was the pain rolling through her. She stared at the bits of sky and rooftop passing by the window, trying to follow their path to Il Bastone in her head. How much longer? Dawes would be there. Dawes was always there, but could she help? It’s my job.

  “Oculus isn’t answering her phone,” said Turner. Was Dawes in section? Somewhere in the stacks? “What was I seeing back there?” he asked.

  “Told you. Portal magic.” She said it with confidence, though she couldn’t really be sure. She’d thought portal magic was used for traveling big distances or entering secure buildings. Not getting the jump on someone in a beatdown. “Portals are Scroll and Key magic. I thought Tara and Lance might be dealing to them because of Colin Khatri. And Tara’s tattoo.”

  “Which one?”

  “Rather die than doubt. From Idylls of the King.” She had the strange sense that she’d taken Darlington’s place. Did that mean he’d taken hers? God, she hated being this high. “Lance said something when he was kicking the crap out of me. He wanted to know who hurt Tara. He didn’t do it.”

  “Do I need to remind you that he’s a criminal?”

  Alex tried to shake her head, then winced. “He wasn’t bullshitting me.” In the panic and fear of the attack, she’d thought she was being hunted again, like with the gluma. But now she wasn’t so sure. “He was interrogating me. He thought I’d broken in.”