A ship sailed from New Haven,
And the keen and frosty airs
That filled her sails at parting
Were heavy with good men’s prayers.
“O Lord! if it be thy pleasure,”—
Thus prayed the old divine,—
“To bury our friends in the
ocean, Take them, for they are
thine!”
—“The Phantom Ship,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
My last entry as Virgil. I thought I would never wish to leave this office,but instead I find myself counting the days until I can close the door ofIl Bastone behind me and never darken the doorstep of this house again.
I leave with my fortunes secured, but I know I will see hell again. HowNownes would laugh at me if he knew the extent of our folly. How hewould weep if he knew the extent of our crimes. But why do I write? Iwill hide this book and in it our sins. I wish only that I believed in God,so that I might beg for His mercy.
—Lethe Days Diary of Rudolph Kittscher(Jonathan Edwards
College ’33)
42
By 1 a.m., Alex and Darlington were back on campus, shivering with cold, their ears still ringing with howls. They waited for the others by the Women’s
Table. The shadows seemed too thick, as if they had weight and form. She was nearly faint with hunger, and the terrible possibilities of all she’d set in motion were gnawing at her thoughts.
Alex made sure her phone was on and sent a last text to her mom, just in case.
I love you. Stay safe.
Absurd, a ridiculous message from a girl who had crashed through life like she was charging through a series of plate glass windows. She’d cut herself to ribbons, then patched herself up, only to do it again and again and again.
You too, little star. The reply came fast, as if her mother had been waiting.
But Mira had been waiting by the phone a very long time. For a call from the hospital, the cops, the morgue.
Alex knew they needed to get started, but when Dawes let them into the library, she went to check on Mercy in the courtyard first.
The air seemed colder by the basin, as if they’d truly left a door open and a draft was blowing through. There were no stars visible in the gray November sky, but Alex found herself drinking in the feel of the weather, the winter chill on her skin, the dim yellow light from the library windows, the textured gray of the stone. Hell had been like a vacuum, dead and empty, all color and life leached away, as if some demon had fed on the world as much as the souls that inhabited it. If this was her last look at anything real, she wanted to remember it.
She helped Mercy into her salt armor and they talked through the plan.
They still didn’t know what might be waiting for them—in this world or below. Mercy was armed with death words, bone dust, and a salt sword, but Alex had retrieved another item from the armory. She handed the jar to Mercy.
“I wouldn’t open—”
But Mercy had already lifted the lid. She gagged and hastily shut the jar.
“Alex,” she coughed, “you have to be kidding me.”
“Afraid not.” Alex hesitated. “Vampires hate strong smells. It’s where the garlic myth came from. It’s not too late to back out of this.” She needed to offer this chance at escape, at safety. Mercy had walked this path without
hesitation, but did she really know what she was moving toward with such happy momentum?
“Pretty sure it is.”
“It’s never too late to make a run for it, Mercy. Trust me on that.”
“I know.” Mercy looked down at the sword in her hands. “But I like this life better.”
“Better than what?”
“Better than what I was living before. Better than a world without magic.
I think I’ve been waiting my whole life for the moment someone would see something in me that wasn’t ordinary.”
“We all are.” Alex couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice. “That’s how they get you.”
Mercy’s eyes glinted. “Not if we get them first.”
