“Not today at least.”
“Is Darlington why you don’t date?”
Alex paused with her hand on the doorframe. “What does he have to do with it?”
“I mean, he’s not your cousin and he’s one of the more beautiful humans I’ve seen.”
“He’s a friend. A mentor.”
“So?”
“He’s … expensive.” Darlington was too beautiful, too well-read, too well-traveled. He wasn’t just cut from a different cloth; he was too finely made and tailored.
Mercy grinned. “I like expensive things.”
“He’s not a cashmere scarf, Mercy. He has horns.”
“I have a birthmark shaped like Wisconsin.”
“I’m leaving.”
“Don’t forget you have to pick a book for our HumBrit section!” Mercy called after her.
Humor in the Modern British Novel. Alex had hoped for Monty Python but had gotten Lucky Jim and Novel on Yellow Paper. It wasn’t a bad trade.
She left Mercy with a promise to meet up for dinner, glad to flee the
inquisition. She’d been too busy trying not to die to think about dating or even hooking up. Darlington had nothing to do with it, no matter how good he looked with his clothes off.
Dawes was waiting at the entrance to Sterling, slouching by the sculptural slab of the Women’s Table as if she might doze off at any second. Alex felt an unwelcome rush of guilt. Dawes wasn’t made for this kind of work. She was supposed to stay safe at Il Bastone, tending to her thesis like a slow-growing garden. She was support staff, an indoor cat. Their ritual at Scroll and Key had been well outside her comfort zone, and it hadn’t exactly rewarded either of them with a feeling of accomplishment. Now Dawes looked almost like she’d been roughed up. She had dark smudges beneath her eyes from lack of sleep, her hair was unwashed, and Alex was fairly certain she was still in the clothes she’d worn last night, though with Dawes it could be tough to be sure.
Alex wanted to tell her to go home and get some rest, that she could handle this herself. But she absolutely couldn’t, and she didn’t know how much time they had before the bomb that was Darlington went off.
“Have you slept at all?” she asked.
Dawes gave a sharp shake of her head, fingers tight around the 1931 Yale Gazette Alex had fallen asleep with and a black moleskin notebook. “I was in the Lethe library all night, trying to find stories of people who walked Gauntlets.”
“Any luck?”
“There were a few.”
“That’s good, right?”
Dawes was so pale her freckles looked like they were floating above her skin. “I found less than five records that can be substantiated in any way and that left any trace of a ritual.”
“Is it enough to get us started?”
Dawes shot her an annoyed glance. “You’re not listening. These rituals aren’t on record, they aren’t discussed, because they were failures, because the participants tried to hide the results. People went mad, they vanished, they died horribly. It’s possible a Gauntlet was responsible for the destruction of Thonis. This is not something we should be messing around with.”
“Michelle said as much.”
Dawes blinked her bloodshot eyes. “I … You told her about the Gauntlet?”
“She came to see me. She was trying to warn us off trying.”
“With good reason.”
“So you want to stop?”
“It’s not that simple!”
Alex pulled Dawes over to the wall and lowered her voice. “It is. Unless you want to try breaking into Scroll and Key and opening another halfbaked portal, this is all we have. We do it or we have to destroy him. There aren’t any other choices.”
“The ritual starts with us being buried alive.” Dawes was shaking.
Alex rested an awkward hand on her shoulder. “Let’s see what we find, okay? We don’t have to go through with it. This is just research.” It was as if Alex had whispered a transformation spell.
Dawes released a jagged breath, nodded. Research she understood.
“Tell me about the scribe,” Alex said, eager to get her talking about something that wasn’t death or destruction.
“There are eight scribes,” Dawes said, taking a few steps back and pointing at the stonework above the Sterling doors. “All from different parts of the world. The more recent civilizations are on the right: Mayan, Chinese, Greek, Arabic. There’s the Athenian owl. And on the left, the four ancient scribes: Cro-Magnon cave drawings, an Assyrian inscription from the library at Nineveh, the Hebrew is from Psalms, and the Egyptian … the hieroglyphs were chosen by Dr. Ludlow Seguine Bull.”
Would that I might make thee love books more than thy mother. An apt inscription for a library but maybe something more.
Dawes smiled, her fear eaten up by the thrill of discovery. “Dr. Bull was a Locksmith. He was a member of Scroll and Key. He started out studying law but then switched to Egyptology.”
Quite a change. Alex felt a prickle of excitement. “This is the first step in the Gauntlet.”
