Alex hadn’t expected that. “I can make you a Pop-Tart or…” She reached into her satchel and took out Dawes’s chocolate chip pancakes.
“Do you just walk around with breakfast food in your bag?”
“Honestly? All the time.”
Mercy ate most of a pancake and Alex made coffee for both of them, and then she started talking. About the societies, Darlington, the mess of their freshman year. Mercy’s eyebrows rose slowly higher as Alex’s story spilled out. Occasionally she would nod, but Alex wasn’t sure if she was just encouraging her to continue or actually taking it all in.
Eventually Alex didn’t so much stop as wind down, as if there just weren’t enough words for all the secrets she’d been keeping. Everything around them felt too ordinary for a story like this. The sounds of doors opening and closing in the echoing stairwells, shouts from the courtyard, the rush of cars somewhere on York Street. Alex knew she was risking being late to meet Dawes, but she didn’t want to look down at her phone.
“So,” Mercy said slowly, “is that where you got the tattoos?”
Alex almost laughed. No one had mentioned her sleeves of peonies and snakes and stars that had suddenly appeared at the end of the school year. It was as if they hadn’t been able to grasp that such a thing was possible, so their minds had made the necessary corrections.
“Not where I got them, but Darlington helped me hide them for a while.”
“Using magic?” Mercy asked.
“Yup.”
“Which is real.”
“Yup.”
“And super deadly.”
“It is,” said Alex.
“And kind of gross.”
“Very gross.”
“I prayed a lot this summer.”
Alex tried not to show her surprise. “Did it help?”
“Some. I went to therapy too. I used this app and I talked to someone for a while, about what happened. It helped me stop thinking about it all the time.
I tried talking to our pastor too. But I’m just not sorry Blake’s dead.”
“Should you be?”
Mercy laughed. “Alex! Yes. Forgiveness is supposed to be healing.”
But Blake hadn’t asked for grace. He hadn’t asked for anything. He’d just moved through the world taking what he wanted until something got in his way.
“I don’t know how to forgive,” Alex admitted. “And I don’t think I want to learn.”
Mercy rubbed the hem of her sweater between her fingers, studying the weave as if it were a text to be translated. “Tell me how he died.”
Alex did. She didn’t talk about the new moon ritual or Darlington. She began with Blake breaking into Il Bastone, the fight, the way he’d controlled her, made her stay still while he beat her, the moment when Dawes had crushed his skull with the marble bust of Hiram Bingham III. She talked about the way Blake had wept, and how she’d discovered the coin of compulsion he’d clutched in his hand. He’d been under Dean Sandow’s control when he tried to kill her.
Mercy kept her eyes on that bit of pumpkin-colored wool, fingers moving back and forth, back and forth. “It’s not just that I’m not sorry…” she said at last. Her voice was low, shaking, almost a growl. “I’m glad he’s dead. I’m glad he got to feel what it was like to be out of control, to be frightened. I’m
… glad he died scared.” She looked up, her eyes full of tears. “Why am I like this? Why am I still so angry?”
“I don’t know,” said Alex. “But I’m like that too.”
“I’ve gone through every moment that led up to the party so many times.
What I wore, what I said. Why did he pick me that night? What did he see?”
Alex had no idea how to answer those questions. Forgive yourself for going to the party. Forgive yourself for assuming the world isn’t full of beasts at the door. But she knew it was never that easy.
“He didn’t see you at all,” Alex said. “People like that … they don’t see us. They just see opportunities. Something to grab.” Michelle was right about that at least.
Mercy wiped the tears from her eyes. “You make it sound like shoplifting.”
“A little.”
“Don’t lie to me again, okay?”
“I’ll try.” It was the best Alex could offer without lying all over again.
12
Mercy had peppered Alex with questions for the rest of the hour, all of them about magic and Lethe. It felt like an oral exam, but Alex figured Mercy was owed, and as she did her best to explain, she had to sit with the unpleasant truth that Mercy would have been a better candidate for Lethe. She was brilliant, she spoke fluent French, and she wasn’t bad on Latin either. But she hadn’t committed homicide, so Alex supposed that put her behind the curve on this assignment.
“Good luck,” Mercy said when Alex left to meet Dawes. “Try not to die or anything.”
