“Without any elixir or potion?”

“I can.”

Alex had read the room as soon as she’d entered. The driftwood on the shelf beside the photo, shells and pieces of sea glass, the quote framed in a paperweight: Be secret and exult, because of all things known, that is most difficult. But she hadn’t read Walsh-Whiteley—not successfully. She’d been too nervous to see the desperation lurking behind all of that bluster.

“There’s a Gray here now,” she lied. The office was blessedly free of ghosts, probably because the Praetor was one step shy of a cadaver himself.

He started, then tried to remain composed. “Is there?”

“Yes, a man…” A gamble now. “An older man.” A frown puckered the professor’s brow. “No … he’s hard to make out. Young. And very handsome.”

“He…” Walsh-Whiteley looked around.

“To the left of your chair,” said Alex.

Walsh-Whiteley stretched out his hand, as if he could reach through the Veil. The gesture was so hopeful, so vulnerable, Alex felt an acute pang of guilt. But she needed this man on her side.

“Has he said anything?” the Praetor asked. The longing in his voice had an edge, sharpened over years of loneliness. He’d loved this man. He’d lost him. Alex resisted the urge to take another look at that photo on the mantel, but she felt sure Walsh-Whiteley was one of those smiling faces, young and suntanned and sure that life would be long.

“I can see Grays, not hear them,” Alex lied again. Then added primly,

“I’m not a Ouija board.”

“Of course not,” he said. “I didn’t mean that.”

Where’s your sneer now? But she knew she had to tread carefully. Her grandmother had read fortunes in the leavings of Turkish coffee, bitter, dark, and so thick it seemed to take its own slow time down your gullet.

“You’re selling people lies,” Alex’s mother had complained. A funny irony from Mira, who lived on the hope she found in crystals, energy baths, bundles of sage that promised purity, prosperity, renewal.

“I don’t sell them anything,” Estrea had said to her daughter.

That was true. Estrea Stern never charged for the fortunes she told. But people would bring over loaves of bread, tinfoil skillets of Jiffy Pop, babka, chewy strawberry candies. They would leave kissing her hands, tears in their eyes.

“They love you,” Alex had said, marveling, watching with wide eyes from the kitchen table.

“Mija, they love me until they hate me.”

Alex hadn’t understood until she’d seen the way those same people had turned from her grandmother in the street, treated her like a stranger in line at the store, the cashier’s eyes darting away, a perfunctory smile on her lips.

“I’ve seen them at their lowest,” Estrea had explained. “When someone shows you their longing, they don’t want to see you out buying cherry tomatoes. Now don’t tell your mother.”

Alex hadn’t said a word about the people who came and went at her grandmother’s apartment, because whenever her mother did find out about Estrea telling fortunes, she would spend the whole car ride home ranting.

“She laughs at me because I pay to have my tarot read, and then she does this,” Mira would rage, pounding the heel of her hand against the steering wheel. “Hypocrite.”

But Alex knew why Estrea laughed at the fakes her mother cycled through in an endless wave of hope and disillusionment. Because they were liars and Estrea only told the truth. She saw the present. She saw the future.

If there was nothing in the cup, she told her visitors that too.

“Read me,” Alex had begged.

“I don’t need a cup of coffee to read you, presiada,” Estrea had said. “You will endure so much. But the pain you feel?” She took Alex’s chin in her bony fingers. “You will give it back tenfold.”

Alex wasn’t sure about the math on that, but Estrea Stern had never been wrong before.

Now she studied the Praetor. He had that same hopeful look she’d seen at her grandmother’s kitchen table, the ache in him radiating like an aura.

Estrea had said she could never look into a heart and lie. Alex didn’t seem to have inherited that particular trait. For the first time in a while, she thought of her father, the mystery of him, little more than a handsome face and a smile. She looked like him—at least that was what her mother had told her.

Maybe he’d been a liar too.

“The Gray seems comfortable,” she said. “He likes being here, watching you work.”

“That’s good,” Walsh-Whiteley said, his voice hoarse. “That’s … that’s good.”

“It can take time for them to share what they need to share.”

“Of course. Yes.” He slid his glasses back on, cleared his throat. “I’ll have Oculus prepare a schedule of rituals the societies are seeking approval for.

We’ll go over that tomorrow evening.”

He opened his laptop and returned to whatever work he’d been doing. It was a dismissal.

Alex looked at the old man in front of her. He would cry when she left; she knew that. He would ask her about this young man again; she knew that too. He might be kinder or more just with her for a time. That had been the goal, to ingratiate herself. But as soon as he doubted her, he would turn on her. Fine. She just had to stay in his good graces until Darlington really came home. Then the golden boy of Lethe could make it right.

She was halfway back to the dorms before the Praetor’s words returned to her: There is no room in Lethe for glad-handers or charlatans. Three professors had confronted Mercy to try to keep her in the English department, and one of them had called the beloved Dean Beekman a gladhander. An uncommon term. He was not a man who could stand to remain unknown.

Becoming Praetor meant gaining full access to Lethe’s archives and resources—including an armory full of potions and poisons. The professor had been instated as Praetor just last week, right before the murders began, and he certainly didn’t like Dean Beekman.

Motive and means, Alex considered as she unlocked the gate to JE. As for opportunity, she knew better than anyone: You had to make it for yourself.

19

Alex found Dawes in the JE reading room, hunched over a blueprint of Sterling and Kittscher’s Daemonologie.

“This is the book Michelle told me to read,” Alex said, picking it up and paging through it. “Does it talk about the Gauntlet?”

“No, it’s a series of debates about the nature of hell.”

“So more like a travel guide.”

Dawes rolled her eyes, then wrapped her hands around her headphones as if she were clinging to a buoy. “Are you really not scared?”

Alex wished she could say no. “Michelle told me we’d have to die to complete the ritual. I’m terrified. And I really don’t want to do this.”

“Neither do I,” Dawes said. “I want to know how to be brave. Like you.”

“I’m reckless. There’s a difference.”