Ninth House

by Leigh Bardugo

  “But what did you do? How did you do it?”

  Stay with me.

  “I don’t really know.” She didn’t understand any of it. Where the ability had come from. Why she could see things no one else could. Was it buried somewhere in her bloodline? In the genes of the father she’d never met? Was it in her grandmother’s bones? The Grays had never dared approach in Estrea Stern’s house, the candles lit at the windows. If she’d lived longer, would she have found a way to protect Alex?

  “I gave you my strength,” said North.

  No, thought Alex. I took it. But she doubted North would appreciate the distinction.

  “I know what you did to those men,” said North. “I saw when you let me inside.”

  Alex shivered. All the warmth and well-being that had poured into her as she’d soaked in the milk bath was no match for the thought of a Gray rattling around in her head. What else had the Bridegroom seen? It doesn’t matter. Unlike Darlington, North couldn’t share her secrets with the world. No matter how many layers of the Veil he pierced, he was still trapped in death.

  “You have enemies on this side of the Veil, Galaxy Stern,” he continued. “Leonard Beacon. Mitchell Betts. Ariel Harel. A whole host of men you sent to the darker shore.”

  Daniel Arlington.

  Except he’d said Darlington wasn’t on the other side. A murmur rose from the shapes behind the Bridegroom, the same sound she’d heard when she waded into the Nile. Jean Du Monde. Jonathan Mont. It might not even be a name. The syllables sounded strange and wrong, as if spoken by mouths not made to form human language.

  And what about Hellie? Was she happy where she was? Was she safe from Len? Or would they find each other behind the Veil and make their own misery there?

  “Yeah, well, I have enemies on this side too. Instead of looking up my old buddies, how about you find Tara?”

  “Why don’t you seek out Darlington’s notebooks?”

  “I’ve been busy. And it’s not like you’re going anywhere.”

  “How glib you are. How sure of yourself. There was a time when I had the same confidence. Time took it. Time takes everything, Miss Stern. But I didn’t have to go looking for your friends. After what you did to me at Tara Hutchins’s residence, they came looking for me. They could smell your power on me like stale smoke. You’ve deepened the bond between us.”

  Perfect. Exactly what she needed. “Just find Tara.”

  “I have hope that repellent object will draw her to me. But her death was brutal. She may be recovering somewhere. The other side can be a dismaying place for the new dead.”

  Alex hadn’t thought of that. She had just assumed people crossed over into some kind of understanding. Painlessness. Tranquility. She looked again at the surface of the water, that wobbling reflection of the Bridegroom, at those monstrous shapes somewhere behind him, and shivered.

  How had Hellie passed into the next world? Her death had been … well, in some ways, compared to Tara, compared to Len and Betcha and Ariel, she had passed in relative peace.

  It was still death. It was still death too soon.

  “Find her,” said Alex. “Find Tara so I can figure out who hurt her and Turner can put him away before he hurts me.”

  North frowned. “I don’t know that the detective is a good partner in this endeavor.”

  Alex leaned back against the curve of the crucible. She wanted to get out of the water but she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to. “Not used to seeing a black man with a badge?”

  “I haven’t been holed up in my tomb for the last hundred years, Miss Stern. I know the world has changed.”

  His tomb. “Where are you buried?”

  “My bones are in Evergreen.” His lip curled. “It’s quite the tourist attraction.”

  “And Daisy?”

  “Her family had her interred in their mausoleum on Grove Street.”

  “That’s why you’re always lurking around there.”

  “I’m not lurking. I go to pay my respects.”

  “You go because you’re hoping she’ll see you doing your penance and forgive you.”

  When North was mad, his face changed. It looked less human. “I did not hurt Daisy.”

  “Temper temper,” crooned Alex. But she didn’t want to provoke him further. She needed him and she could make a gesture toward peace. “I’m sorry about what I did at the apartment.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  So much for peace. “No, I’m not.”

  North turned his head away. His profile looked like it had been cut for a coin. “It wasn’t an entirely unenjoyable experience.”

  Now, that surprised her. “No?”

  “It was … I had forgotten what it felt like to be in a body.”

  Alex considered. She shouldn’t deepen the bond. But if he could look inside her head when he entered her, maybe his thoughts would be open to her too. She’d gotten little sense of him in the panic of the fight. “You can come back in if you like.”

  He hesitated. Why? Because there was intimacy in the act? Or because he had something to hide?

  Dawes bustled through the door, a tray heaped with dishes in her hands. She set it down on the map cabinet. “I kept it simple. Mashed potatoes. Macaroni and cheese. Tomato soup. Green salad.”

  As soon as the smell hit, Alex’s stomach began to rumble and saliva filled her mouth. “Bless you, Dawes. Can I get out of this thing?”

  Dawes glanced at the tub. “It looks clear.”

  “If you’re going to eat, I’ll stay,” said North. His voice was steady, but he looked eager in the mirror of the water.

  Dawes handed Alex a towel and helped her climb awkwardly from the tub.

  “Can I be alone for a minute?”

  Dawes’s eyes narrowed. “What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing. Just eat. But if you … If you hear anything, don’t worry about knocking. Just come on in.”

  “I’ll be downstairs,” Dawes said warily. She closed the door behind her.

  Alex leaned over the crucible. North was waiting in the reflection.

  “Want in?” she asked.

  “Submerge your hand,” he muttered, as if asking her to disrobe. But, of course, she’d already disrobed.

  She dunked her hand beneath the surface.

  “I’m not a murderer,” said North, reaching for her.

  She smiled and let her fingers clasp his. “Of course not,” she said. “Neither am I.”

  * * *

  She was looking through a window. She felt excited, a sense of pride and comfort she’d never known. The world was hers. This factory, more modern than Brewster’s or Hooker’s. The city before her. The woman beside her.

  Daisy. She was exquisite, her face precise and lovely, her hair in curls that brushed the collar of her high-necked dress, her soft white hands buried in a fox-fur muff. She was the most beautiful woman in New Haven, maybe Connecticut, and she was his. Hers. Mine.

  Daisy turned to him, her dark eyes mischievous. Her intelligence sometimes unnerved him. It was not quite feminine, and yet he knew it was what elevated her over all of the belles of the Elm City. Perhaps she was not really the most beautiful. Her nose was too sharp, her lips too thin—but oh the words that spilled from them, laughing and quick and occasionally naughty. And there was absolutely nothing to fault in her figure or her clever smile. She was simply more alive than anyone he’d ever met.

  These calculations were made in a moment. He could not stop making them, because always they tallied to a sense of triumph and contentment.

  “What is it you’re thinking, Bertie?” she asked in her playful voice, sidling closer. Only she used that name with him. Her maid had come with them, as was proper, but Gladys had hung back in the hallway and now he saw her through the window drifting toward the green, the strings of her bonnet trailing from her hand as she plucked a sprig of dogwood from the trees. He hadn’t had much cause to speak to Gladys, but he would make more of an effort. Servants hea
rd everything, and it would pay to have the ear of the woman closest to the woman who would be his wife.

  He turned away from the window to Daisy glowing like a piece of milky glass against the polished wood of his new office. His desk, along with the new safe, had been built especially for the space. He’d already spent several late nights here working in comfort. “I was thinking of you, of course.”

  She tapped him on the arm, drawing closer still. Her body had a sway to it that might have been unseemly in another woman, but not in Daisy.

  “You needn’t flirt with me anymore.” She held up her hand, fluttered her fingers, the emerald glinting on them. “I’ve already said yes.”

  He snatched her hand from the air and pulled her near. Something in her eyes kindled, but with what? Desire? Fear? She was sometimes impossible to read. In the mirror above the mantel, he saw the two of them, and the image thrilled him.

  “Let’s go to Boston after the wedding. We can drive up to Maine for our honeymoon. I don’t want a long sea voyage.”

  She only lifted a brow and smiled. “Bertie, Paris was part of the bargain.”

  “But why? We have time to see the whole world.”

  “You have time. I will be a mother to your children and a hostess to your business partners. But for a moment…” She stood on tiptoe, her lips a bare breath from his, the heat of her body palpable as her fingers pressed against his arm. “I might simply be a girl seeing Paris for the first time, and we might simply be lovers.”

  The word hit him like a hammer swing.

  “Paris it is,” he said on a laugh, and kissed her. It was not their first kiss, but like every kiss with Daisy it felt new.

  A creak sounded on the stairs, then a rolling sound, like someone stumbling.

  Daisy pulled away. “Gladys has the very worst timing.”

  But over Daisy’s shoulder, Bertie could see Gladys still drifting dreamily along the green, her white cap bright against the dogwoods.

  He turned and saw—nothing, no one, an empty doorway. Daisy sucked in a startled breath.

  The edge of his vision blurred, a dark blot spreading like flame catching at the corner of a page, eating along its edge. He cried out as he felt something like pain, something like fire, pierce his skull. A voice said, They cut me open. They wanted to see my soul.

  “Daisy?” he gasped. The word came out garbled. He was lying on his back in an operating theater. Men stood above him—boys, really.

  Something’s wrong, one said.

  Just finish! shouted another.

  He looked down. His stomach had been cut open. He could see, oh God, he could see himself, his gut, the meat of his organs, displayed like winding snakes of offal in a butcher’s case. One of the boys was pawing at him. They cut me open.

  He screamed, doubled over. He clutched his stomach. He was whole.

  He was in a room he didn’t recognize, some kind of office, polished wood everywhere. It smelled new. The sunlight was so bright it hurt his eyes. But he wasn’t safe from those boys. They’d followed him here. They wanted to kill him. They’d taken him from his good spot at the train yard. They’d offered him money. He knew they wanted to have their fun, but he hadn’t known, he didn’t know. They’d cut him open. They were trying to take his soul.

  He couldn’t let them drag him back to that cold room. There was protection here. If he could only find it. He reached for the desk, pulling open drawers. They seemed too far away, as if his arms were shorter than he remembered.

  “Bertie?”

  That wasn’t his name. They were trying to confuse him. He looked down and saw a black shape in his hand. It looked like a shadow, but it felt heavy in his palm. He knew the name for it, tried to form the word for it in his mind.

  There was a gun in his hand and a woman was screaming. She was pleading. But she wasn’t a woman; she was something terrible. He could see night gathered around her. The boys had sent her to bring him back so they could cut him open again.

  Lightning flashed but the sky was still blue. Daisy. He was supposed to protect her. She was crawling across the floor. She was weeping. She was trying to get away.

  There, a monster, staring back at him from above the mantel, his white face filled with horror and rage. They’d come for him and he had to stop them. There was only one way to do it. He had to ruin their fun. He turned the shadow in his hand, pressed it to his gut.

  Another flash of lightning. When had the storm come on?

  He looked down and saw that his chest had come apart. He’d done the work. Now they couldn’t cut him open. They couldn’t take his soul. He was on the floor. He saw sunlight crisscrossing the slats, a beetle crawling over the dusty floorboards. Daisy—he knew her—lay still beside him, the roses fading from her cheeks, her wicked, lively eyes gone cold.

  22

  Winter

  Alex staggered backward, nearly knocking the tray from the table where Dawes had placed it. She clutched her chest, expecting to find an open wound there. Her mouth was full of food and she realized that she’d been standing in front of the tray, shoveling macaroni into her mouth, as she relived North’s death. She could still sense him inside her, oblivious, lost to the sensations of eating for the first time in more than a hundred years. With all of her will, she shoved him from her, resealing the breach that had allowed him inside.

  She spat out the macaroni, gasped for air, lurched to the edge of the crucible. The only face looking back at her from the surface of the water was her own. She slapped her hand against it, watching the ripples spread.

  “You killed her,” she whispered. “I saw you kill her. I felt it.”

  But even as she said it, she knew she hadn’t been North in that moment. There had been someone else inside him.

  Alex stumbled down the hall to the Dante bedroom and pulled on a pair of Lethe House sweats. It felt like days had passed but it had only been hours. There was a lingering soreness where her ribs had been broken, the only sign of the beating she’d endured. And yet she was so tired. Each day had started to feel like a year, and she wasn’t sure if it was the physical trauma or the heavy exposure to the uncanny that was wearing her down.

  Afternoon light streamed through the stained-glass windows, leaving bright patterns of blue and yellow on the polished slats of the floor. Maybe she would sleep here tonight, even if it did mean she had to go to class in sweats. She was literally running out of clothes. These attempts on her life were playing havoc with her wardrobe.

  The bathroom off the big bedroom had two standing pedestal sinks and a deep claw-footed tub that she’d never used. Had Darlington? She had trouble imagining him sinking into a bubble bath to relax.

  She cupped her hand beneath the sink to drink, then spat into the basin. Alex flinched back—the water was pink and speckled with something. She stoppered the drain before it could vanish.

  She was looking at North’s blood. She felt sure of it. Blood he had himself swallowed nearly a hundred years ago when he died.

  And parsley.

  Little bits of it.

  She remembered Michael Reyes lying unconscious on an operating table, the Bonesmen gathered around him. Dove’s heart for clarity, geranium root, a dish of bitter herbs. The diet of the victima before a prognostication.

  There had been someone inside North that day at the factory—someone who had been used by Bones for a prognostication, long before there was a Lethe House around to keep watch. They cut me open. They wanted to see my soul. They’d let him die. She felt sure of it. Some nameless vagrant who would never be missed. NMDH. No more dead hobos. She’d seen the inscription in Lethe: A Legacy. A little joke among the old boys of the Ninth House. Alex hadn’t quite believed it somehow, even after she’d seen Michael Reyes cut open on a table. She should check on him, make sure he was okay.

  Alex let the sink drain. She rinsed her mouth again, wrapped her wet hair in a fresh towel, and sat down at the little antique desk by the window.

  Bones had been founde
d in 1832. They hadn’t built their tomb until twenty-five years later, but that didn’t mean they weren’t trying their hand at rituals before that. No one had been keeping an eye on the societies back then, and she remembered what Darlington had said about stray magic breaking loose from the rituals. What if something had gone wrong with that early prognostication? What if a Gray had disrupted the rite, sent the victima’s spirit flying wild? What if it had found its way into North? He hadn’t even seemed to recognize that he was holding a gun—a shadow in my hand.

  The terrified victima inside North, North inside Alex. They were like a nesting doll of the uncanny. Had the spirit somehow chosen North’s body to escape to, or had he and Daisy simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, two innocent people mowed down by power they couldn’t begin to understand? Was that what Darlington had been investigating? That stray magic had caused the North-Whitlock murder?

  Alex climbed the stairs to the third floor. She’d spent little time here, but she found the Virgil bedroom on her second try. It was directly above the Dante room but far more grand. Alex supposed that if she survived three years of Lethe and Yale, it would one day be hers.

  She went to the desk and opened the drawers. She found a note with a few lines of poetry inside, some stationery stamped with the Lethe hound, and not much else.

  There was a statistics textbook on the desk. Had Darlington left it there the night they’d gone to the basement of Rosenfeld Hall?

  Alex padded back down the stairs to the bookshelf that guarded the library. She pulled down the Albemarle Book. The smell of horses rose from its pages, the sound of hooves on cobblestones, a snatch of Hebrew—the memory of the research she’d done on golems. Darlington had used the library regularly and the book’s rows were full of his requests, but most seemed focused on feeding his obsession with New Haven—manufacturing history, land deeds, city planning. There were entries from Dawes too, all about tarot and ancient mystery cults, and even a few from Dean Sandow. But then there it was, early in the fall semester, two names in Darlington’s jagged scrawl: Bertram Boyce North and Daisy Whitlock. The Bridegroom was right. Darlington had been looking into his case. But where were his notes? Had they been in his satchel that night at Rosenfeld and been swallowed up with the rest of him?