Ninth House

by Leigh Bardugo

  Had her mother meant it? Alex didn’t know. When she’d gotten old enough to realize how much the questions hurt her mother and to realize the answers were never going to change, she stopped asking. She decided not to care. If her father couldn’t be bothered with her, she wasn’t going to bother with him.

  But now she found herself saying, “Was there anything unusual about him?”

  Mira laughed. “How about everything?”

  “I mean…” Alex struggled for a way to describe what she wanted to know without sounding crazy. “Did he like the same stuff you did? Tarot and crystals and all that? Did you ever get the sense he could see things that weren’t there?”

  Mira looked down Chapel Street. Her gaze turned distant. “Have you ever heard of the arsenic eaters?”

  Alex blinked, confused. “No?”

  “They would ingest a little bit of arsenic every day. It made their skin clear and their eyes bright and they felt wonderful. And all the while they were just drinking poison.” When Mira turned her eyes back to Alex, they were sharper and steadier than Alex ever remembered them being, free of the usual determined cheer. “That’s what being with your father was like.” Then she smiled and the old Mira was back. “Text me after you see the doctor.”

  “I will, Mom.”

  Alex closed the door and watched the car drive away. The Bridegroom had stood a respectful distance away, watching the whole exchange, but now he drew closer. Was he ever going to let up? She really didn’t want to go to Il Bastone, but she was going to need the Lethe library to figure out how to break their connection. “No one is immortal,” she snapped at him, and saw him reluctantly shrink back, vanishing through the bricks.

  “Your mom okay?” Mercy asked as Alex entered the common room. She’d put on her hyacinth robe and curled up on the couch.

  “I think so. She’s just worried about me getting through the rest of the year.”

  “And you’re not?”

  “Sure,” Alex said. “Of course.”

  Mercy snorted. “No, you’re not. I can tell. So continues the mystery of Alex Stern. It’s okay. Mystery is good. I played softball for two years in high school.”

  “You did?”

  “See? I have secrets too. Did you hear about Blake?”

  She hadn’t. She hadn’t heard about anything during the weeks she’d hid at the Hutch. That had been the point. But according to Mercy, Blake Keely had attacked a woman in her home and her husband had fought him off with a golf club. Forensics had matched the knife he’d been carrying with the weapon in the Tara Hutchins murder investigation. There was no mention of Dawes, or the mansion on Orange, or Hiram Bingham III’s fatal marble noggin. No discussion of Merity. Not a single word about the societies. Case closed.

  “I could have ended up dead,” said Mercy. “I guess I should be grateful.”

  Grateful. The word hung in the air, its wrongness like the sour clang of a bell.

  Mercy tilted her head back, letting it flop on the arm of the couch, staring up at the ceiling. “My great-grandmother lived to be one hundred and three years old. She was doing her own taxes and swimming at the Y every morning until she keeled over dead in the middle of a yoga class.”

  “She sounds great.”

  “She was a total asshole. My brother and I hated going to her house. She served the nastiest-smelling tea and she never stopped complaining. But you always felt a little tougher at the end of a visit. Like you’d endured her.”

  Alex figured she’d be lucky if she made it to the end of the semester. But it was a nice sentiment. “I wish my grandmother had made it to a hundred and three.”

  “What was she like?”

  Alex sat down in Lauren’s ugly recliner. “Superstitious. Religious. I’m not sure which one. But she had a steel spine. My mom told me when she brought my father home, he took one look at my grandmother, turned right around, and never came back.” Alex had asked her grandmother about it once, after her first heart attack. Too pretty, she’d said, waving her hand dismissively. Mal tormento que soplo. He was a bad wind that blew through.

  “I think you have to be like that,” Mercy said. “If you’re going to survive to get old.”

  Alex looked out the window. The Bridegroom had returned. His face was taut, determined. As if he could wait forever. And he probably could.

  What do you want? Belbalm had asked her. Safety, comfort, to feel unafraid. I want to live to grow old, Alex thought as she pulled the curtains closed. I want to sit on my porch and drink foul-smelling tea and yell at passersby. I want to survive this world that keeps trying to destroy me.

  29

  Early Spring

  The next morning when Alex set out for class, determined to at least try to make a good show of it, North was still there. He seemed agitated, cutting in and out of her path, hovering in her field of vision so that she couldn’t see the board in Spanish.

  I know you’re not around, Alex texted Dawes when she got out of section. But did you ever find anything about severing connections to Grays? I’ve got a Bridegroom situation.

  Temper fraying, she cut into the bathroom in the entryway to Commons and waved North inside.

  “Just tell me one thing,” she said to him. “Did you find Tara behind the Veil?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then I’m going to need you to fuck off for a good long while. The deal is off. The case is solved and I don’t want to hang with your girl-murdering ass.” Alex didn’t really believe North had been responsible; she just wanted him to leave her alone.

  The Bridegroom jabbed a finger at the sink.

  “If you think I’m going to run a bath in there so we can have a chat, you’re wrong. Take a break.”

  She thought about ditching lecture and just going back to the quiet of her warded dorm room. But she’d gone to the trouble of putting on clothes. She might as well make the most of it. At least it was Shakespeare and not Modern British Novels.

  She crossed Elm to High Street and Linsly-Chittenden Hall, and took a seat on the aisle, tucking herself into a desk. Whenever the Bridegroom swooped into her view, she shifted her focus. She hadn’t done the reading, but everyone knew The Taming of the Shrew, and she liked this bit they were covering about the sisters and music.

  Alex was looking at a slide of Sonnet 130 when she felt her head split open with a sudden bolt of pain. A deep wash of cold gusted through her. She saw flashes of a street lit by gas lamps, a smokestack belching dark clouds into the gray sky. She tasted tobacco in her mouth. North. North was inside her and she hadn’t invited him in. She had time to feel a flash of rage and then the world went black.

  In the next second she was looking down at her paper. The professor was still talking but Alex couldn’t quite understand what she was saying. She could see the trail of the pen where her notes had left off. Three dates had been scrawled across the page in wobbly handwriting.

  1854 1869 1883

  There was blood spattered across the page.

  Alex reached up and nearly smacked herself in the face. It was as if she’d forgotten how long her arm was. Hastily, she wiped her sleeve across her face. Her nose was bleeding.

  The girl to her right was staring at her. “You okay?”

  “I’m great,” Alex said. She pinched her nostrils with her fingers, trying to get the bleeding to stop, as she hastily shut her notebook. North hovered just in front of her, his face stubborn. “You son of a bitch.”

  The girl beside her cringed, but Alex couldn’t be bothered with putting on a good front. North had possessed her. He’d been inside her. He might as well have shoved his hand up her ass and used her as a puppet.

  “You fucking bastard,” she snarled beneath her breath.

  She shoved her notebook into her satchel, seized her coat, and hurried down the aisle, out of the lecture hall, and through the back door of L-C. She headed straight for Il Bastone, texting Dawes furiously: SOS.

  Alex was limping by the time she reached th
e green, the pain in her side making it hard to breathe. She wished she’d brought some Percocet with her. North was still following a few feet behind. “Now you’re keeping a respectful distance, you disembodied fuck?” she barked over her shoulder.

  He looked grim, but he sure as hell didn’t look sorry.

  “I don’t know what bad shit you can do to a ghost,” she promised him. “But I’m going to figure it out.”

  All of her bluster was cover for the fear rattling around in her heart. If he’d gotten in once, could he get in again? What could he make her do? Hurt herself? Hurt someone else? She’d used North in pretty much the same way when Lance had attacked her, but her life had been in danger. She hadn’t been bullying him into going on a fact-finding mission.

  What if other Grays found out and came barging through? It had to be the result of the bond she’d formed with him. She’d invited him in twice. She knew his name. She’d called him by it. Maybe once that door was open, it couldn’t be locked again.

  “Alex?”

  Alex whirled, then caught her side, the pain from her wound splintering through her. Tripp Helmuth stood on the sidewalk in a navy sailing-team windbreaker and a backward cap.

  “What do you want, Tripp?”

  He held up his hands defensively. “Nothing! I just … Are you okay?”

  “No, I’m really not. But I will be.”

  “I just wanted to thank you for, y’know, keeping that stuff with Tara quiet.”

  Alex had done no such thing, but if Tripp wanted to think she had, that was fine. “You bet, buddy.”

  “That’s crazy about Blake Keely, though.”

  “Is it?” said Alex.

  Tripp lifted his cap, ran a hand through his hair, settled it back on his head. “Maybe not. I never liked him. Some guys are just made mean, y’know?”

  Alex looked at Tripp in surprise. Maybe he wasn’t quite as useless as he seemed. “I do know.”

  She cast a warning glance at North, who was pacing back and forth, passing through Tripp again and again.

  Tripp shivered. “Shit, I think I’m coming down with a flu.”

  “Get some rest,” said Alex. “There’s something bad going around.”

  Something that looks like a dead Victorian.

  Alex hurried down Elm to Orange, eager to be behind the wards. She pulled herself up the three porch steps to Il Bastone, a sense of ease flowing through her as soon as she opened the door and crossed the threshold. North was hovering in the middle of the street. She slammed the door and, through the window, saw a gust of air knock him backward—as if the whole house had given a great harumph. Alex rested her forehead against the closed door. “Thanks,” she murmured.

  But what would stop him the next time he tried to push his way into her? Would she have to return to the borderlands to sever the connection? She’d do it. She’d throw herself on Salome Nils’s mercy to be let back into Wolf’s Head. She’d let Dawes drown her a thousand times.

  Alex turned, keeping her back against the door. It felt like safe harbor. Afternoon light filtered through the remaining stained-glass window in the foyer. The other had been boarded up, the pebbles and shards of shattered glass lying dull in the deep shadow. There was blood on the old wallpaper where Dawes had hit her head. No one had made an attempt to clean it.

  Alex peered through the archway to the parlor, half-expecting to see Dawes there. But there was no sign of her or her binders or her index cards either. The house felt empty, battered and wounded. It put a hollow ache in Alex’s heart. She’d never had to return to Ground Zero. And she’d never loved Ground Zero. She’d been happy to turn her back on it and never look into the face of the horrors she’d done there.

  But maybe she did love Il Bastone, this old house with its warm wood and its quiet and its welcome.

  She pushed away from the door and got a dustpan and broom from the pantry. It took her a long while to sweep up the broken glass. She poured it all into a plastic bag, sealed it with a strip of tape. She just wasn’t sure if she should throw it out. Maybe they could put the broken pieces in the crucible with some goat’s milk, make it whole.

  It was only when she went to wash her hands in the little powder room that she realized there was dried blood all over her face. No wonder Tripp had asked if she was okay. She rinsed it off, watching the water swirl in the basin before it vanished.

  There was bread and cheese that hadn’t spoiled yet in the refrigerator. She made herself eat lunch, though she wasn’t hungry. Then she went upstairs to the library.

  Dawes hadn’t replied to her text. She probably wasn’t even looking at her phone. She’d gone to ground too. Alex couldn’t blame her, but that meant she would have to find a way to block her connection to the Bridegroom on her own.

  Alex yanked the Albemarle Book from the shelf but hesitated. She’d recognized the first date North had forced her to scrawl in her notebook instantly: 1854, the year of his murder. The others had been meaningless to her. She owed North nothing. But Darlington had thought the Bridegroom murder was worth investigating. He would want to know what those dates meant. Maybe Alex wanted to know too. It felt like giving in, but North didn’t have to find out he’d snagged her curiosity.

  Alex unslung her satchel and took out her Shakespeare notebook, opening it to the blood-spattered page: 1854 1869 1883. If she did some kind of search for all those years, the library would go mad. She had to find a way to narrow the parameters.

  Or maybe she just needed to find Darlington’s notes.

  Alex remembered the words he’d written in the carriage catalog: the first? If he’d actually done any research on North’s case, she hadn’t found it in the Virgil bedroom or at Black Elm. But what if his notes were here, in the library? Alex opened the Albemarle Book and looked at Darlington’s last entry—the schematic for Rosenfeld. But right above it was a request for something called the Daily New Havener. She copied the request exactly and returned the book to the shelf.

  When the bookcase stopped shaking, she pried it open and entered the library. The shelves were filled with stack after stack of what looked less like newspapers than flyers packed with tiny type. There were thousands of them.

  Alex stepped outside and opened the Albemarle Book again. Darlington had been working in the library the night he’d disappeared. She wrote out a request for the Rosenfeld schematics.

  This time when she pulled the door open, the shelves were empty except for a single book lying flat on its side. It was large and slender, bound in oxblood leather, and completely free of dust. Alex set it on the table at the center of the room and let it fall open. There, between elevations of the third and fourth subterranean levels of Rosenfeld Hall, was a sheet of yellow legal paper, folded neatly and covered in Darlington’s tiny, jagged scrawl—the last thing he’d written before someone sent him to hell.

  She was afraid to unfold the page. It might be nothing. Notes on a term paper. A list of repairs needed at Black Elm. But she didn’t believe that. That night in December, Darlington had been working on something he cared about, something he’d been picking at for months. He’d been distracted as he worked, maybe thinking of the night ahead, maybe worried about his apprentice, who never did the damn reading. He hadn’t wanted to bring his notes with him, so he’d stashed them someplace safe. Right here, in this book of blueprints. He’d thought he would be back soon enough.

  “I should have been a better Dante,” she whispered.

  But maybe she could do better now.

  Gently, she unfolded the page. The first line read: 1958-Colina Tillman-Wrexham. Heart attack? Stroke?

  A series of dates followed—coupled with what seemed to be women’s names. The last three dates on the list matched those North had forced her to write in her notebook.

  1902-Sophie Mishkan-Rhinelander-Brain fever?

  1898-Effie White-Stone-Dropsy (Edema?)

  1883-Zuzanna Mazurski-Phelps-Apoplexy

  1869-Paoletta DeLauro-Kingsley-Stabbing />
  1854-Daisy Fanning Whitlock-Russell-Gunshot

  The first? Darlington had believed that Daisy was the first, but the first what? Daisy had been shot, Paoletta had been stabbed, but the others had died of natural causes.

  Or someone had gotten smarter about killing girls.

  I’m seeing things, thought Alex. I’m making connections that aren’t there. According to every single TV show she’d ever watched, serial killers always had a modus operandi, a way they liked to kill. Besides, even if a murderer had been operating in New Haven, if these dates were right, this particular psychopath had been preying on girls from 1854 to 1958—over one hundred years.

  But she couldn’t say it was impossible, not when she’d seen what magic could do.

  And there was something about the way the dates clustered that felt familiar. The pattern matched the way the societies had been founded. There’d been a flurry of activity in the 1800s—and then a new tomb hadn’t been built for a very long time, not until Manuscript in the sixties. An unpleasant shiver crawled over Alex’s skin. She knew Skull and Bones had been founded in 1832 and that date didn’t line up with any of the deaths, but it was the only year she could remember.

  Alex took the notes and padded down the hall to the Dante room. She grabbed a copy of The Life of Lethe from the desk drawer. Scroll and Key had been founded in 1842, Book and Snake in 1865, St. Elmo in 1889, Manuscript in 1952. Only the founding date of Wolf’s Head matched up with 1883, but that could be coincidence.

  She ran her finger down the list of names.

  1854-Daisy Fanning Whitlock-Russell-Gunshot

  She hadn’t seen Daisy’s name hyphenated anywhere else. She’d always just been Daisy Fanning Whitlock.