wearing striped ties and going home to a yellow Lab, two kids involved with Habitat for Humanity, and a wife who stayed in shape.
“Hi, Michael, sorry to bother you in the middle of the day—”
“Is everything okay?”
“Everything is fine. But I need to go home for the weekend. To see my mom.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, as if she’d told him her mother was ill. Which Alex had been perfectly prepared to do.
“Can you, I mean, can Lethe help me out with the fare?” Alex knew she was supposed to be embarrassed, but since nearly dying in this house, she hadn’t hesitated to ask Lethe for anything and everything she might need.
They owed her, and Dawes, and Darlington. Dawes wasn’t asking and Darlington sure as hell wasn’t going to collect, so it was up to Alex to clear the ledger.
“Of course!” Michael said. “Whatever you need. I’ll put you on with my assistant.”
And that was that. Anselm’s assistant arranged for a car to the airport and the return flight. Alex wondered if she would be on it or if she would die at the top of Mulholland Drive. She packed underwear and a toothbrush in her backpack, and made a stop in the armory, but then realized she had no idea what to bring with her. She felt like she was walking into a trap, but Lethe didn’t traffic in the kinds of objects that could stop men like Eitan. At least not anything she could bring on a plane.
“I’ll be back,” she murmured to the house as the front door locked behind her. She paused to listen to the soft whining of the jackals beneath the porch and she hoped it was true.
Alex had made good on that promise. She’d even finished that Ray Bradbury paperback. She just hadn’t known she would return with fresh blood on her hands.
The Coat of Many Foxes
Provenance: Goslar, Germany; 15th century
Donor: Scroll and Key, 1993
Believed to be the work of Alaric Förstner, who was subsequentlyburned at the stake for his decimation of the local fox population. Thecoat changed hands multiple times, and there are records that indicateit belonged to an Oxford don around the same time that C. S. Lewis wasteaching there, but this has never been fully substantiated. There isspeculation that at one time, hanging the coat in a closet, armoire, orwardrobe would create a portal, but whatever magic the coat may ormay not have possessed is long gone. Yet another example of theinstability of portal magic. See Tayyaara for a rare exception.
—from the Lethe Armory Catalogue as revised and edited by
Pamela Dawes, Oculus
5
October
On Friday morning, Alex went to Modern Poets and EE101 with Mercy and did her best to pay attention. It was too early in the year for her to be short on sleep.
She wanted to stay in that night, catch up on rest, finish hanging posters in her room. Mercy’s side was already elaborately turned out in art prints and strips of poetry in Chinese characters collaged with fashion illustrations.
She’d created a kind of makeshift canopy over her bed in blue tulle that made the whole place feel glamorous.
But Mercy and Lauren wanted to go out, so they went out. Alex even put on a dress, short and black, held up by cobweb straps, identical in all but color to Mercy’s and Lauren’s. Alex felt like they were a tiny army, three sleepwalkers in dainty nightgowns. Mercy and Lauren wore strappy sandals, but Alex didn’t have any and she stuck to her battered black boots. Easier to run in.
They paused by the swing to take pictures and Alex chose one to send to her mom, the one where she looked happiest, the one where she looked all right. Lauren on her left—thick honey-blond hair and teeth brighter than a flashlight beam. Mercy on her right—hair in a shiny black bob, big vintage earrings in the shape of daisies, caution in her eyes.
Were Eitan’s people still watching Mira? Or had he decided to leave her mother alone now that Alex was doing what she was told? California seemed less like another coast than another age, a hazy time before that Alex wanted to keep blurry, the details too painful to draw into focus.
The party was at a house on Lynwood, not far from St. Elmo’s sad slump of an apartment, its hopeful weather vanes spinning slowly on the roof. Alex drank water the whole night and was bored out of her skull, but she didn’t mind. She liked standing with a red Solo cup in her hand, flanked by her friends, pretending to be buzzed. Well, not quite pretending. She’d dosed herself with basso belladonna. She’d told herself she was going to get through the year clean, but the year was being a dick, so she’d do what she had to.
Saturday morning, she slipped out while Mercy was still asleep and called over to Scroll and Key. As promised, she was nothing but polite; then she curled up in bed and went back to sleep until Mercy woke her.
They ate breakfast late in the dining hall, and Alex piled her plate high as she always did. They were about to try to open a portal to hell; she should be too nervous to eat. Instead, she felt like she couldn’t get full. She wanted more syrup, more bacon, more everything. Grays loved this place, the smells of the food, the gossip. Alex could have warded it, the same way she had set up protections on her dorm room. But if something came after her, she wanted a Gray close enough to use—just not near enough to bother her. And here, they seemed to blend into the crowd. There was something peaceable about all of it, the dead breaking bread with the living.
Alex knew there were more beautiful rooms at Yale, but this was her favorite, the dark wood of the rafters floating high above, the great stone fireplace. She loved to sit here and let the clatter of trays, the roar of chatter wash over her. She had expected Darlington to smirk when she’d told him how much she loved JE’s dining hall, but he’d only nodded and said, “It’s too grand to be the common room of a tavern or an inn, but that’s how it feels.
As if you could put up your feet here and wait for any storm to pass.” Maybe that was true for some weary traveler, for the student she was pretending to be. But the real Alex belonged in the storm, a lightning rod for trouble. That would change when Darlington returned. It wouldn’t just be her and Dawes trying to bar the door against the dark anymore.
“Where are you going?” Mercy asked as Alex rose and shoved a piece of buttered toast in her mouth. “We’ve got reading.”
“I finished ‘The Knight’s Tale.’”
“And ‘The Wife of Bath’?”
“Yup.”
Lauren leaned back in her chair. “Hold up. Alex, you’re ahead on the reading?”
“I’m very scholarly now.”
“We have to memorize the first eighteen lines,” said Mercy. “And it isn’t easy.”
Alex set down her bag. “What? Why?”
“So we know how it all sounds? They’re in Middle English.” “I had to learn them in high school,” said Lauren.
“That’s because you went to a fancy prep school in Brookline,” said Mercy. “Alex and I were stuck in public school, honing our street smarts.”
