“You’re going to be late to—”
“If I stand here talking to you, I will be. What’s up?”
“They’ve selected a new Praetor.”
“Damn. Already?” The Praetor was the faculty liaison for Lethe, who served as a go-between with the university administration. Only Yale’s president and dean knew about the real activities of the secret societies, and it was Lethe’s job to make sure it stayed that way. The Praetor was a kind of den mother. The responsible adult in the room. At least he was supposed to be. Dean Sandow had turned out to be a murderer.
Alex knew a Lethe Praetor had to be a former Lethe deputy and had to be a member of the Yale faculty or at least reside in New Haven. That couldn’t be easy to find. Alex and Dawes had assumed it would take the board at least another semester to find someone to replace the very dead Dean Sandow.
They’d counted on it. “Who is he?” Alex asked.
“It could be a woman.”
“Is it?”
“No. But Anselm didn’t give me a name.” “Did
you ask?” Alex pushed.
A long pause. “Not exactly.”
There was no point needling Dawes. Much like Alex, she didn’t like people, but unlike Alex, she avoided confrontation. And really, it wasn’t her job. Oculus kept Lethe running smoothly—fridge and armory stocked, rituals
scheduled, properties kept in order. She was the research arm of Lethe, not the harass-board-members arm.
Alex sighed. “When are they bringing him in?”
“Saturday. Anselm wants to set up a meeting, maybe a tea.”
“Nope. No way. I need more than a couple of days to prepare.” Alex turned away from the passing students, staring up at the stone scribes that guarded the Sterling Library doors. Darlington was with her here, picking away at Yale’s mysteries. “Egyptian, Mayan, Hebrew, Chinese, Arabic, engravings of cave paintings from Les Combarelles. They covered all their bases.”
“What do they mean?” Alex had asked.
“Quotes from libraries, holy texts. The Chinese quote is from a dead judge’s mausoleum. The Mayan comes from the Temple of the Cross, but they chose it at random because no one knew how to translate it until twenty years later.”
Alex had laughed. “Like a drunk dude getting a kanji tattoo.”
“To use one of your turns of phrase, they half-assed it. But it certainly looks impressive, doesn’t it, Stern?” It had. It still did.
Now Alex hunched over her phone and whispered to Dawes, knowing she probably looked like a girl in the middle of a breakup. “We need a delay.”
“What good is that going to do us?”
Alex didn’t have an answer for that. They’d been searching for the Gauntlet all summer and come up empty. “I went to First Presbyterian.”
“And?”
“Nothing. At least as far as I can tell. I’ll send you the photos.”
“Gateways to hell aren’t just lying around for people to walk through,”
Michelle Alameddine had warned when they’d all sat down together at Blue State after Dean Sandow’s funeral. “That would be way too dangerous. Think of the Gauntlet as a secret passage that appears when you say the magic words. But in this case, the magic words are a series of steps, a path you have to walk. You take your first steps in the labyrinth, and only then does the path become clear.”
“So we’re hunting for something we can’t even see?” Alex had asked.
“There would be signs, symbols.” Michelle had shrugged. “Or at least that’s one theory. That’s all hell and the afterlife are. Theories. Because the people who get to see the other side don’t come back to tell about it.”
She was right. Alex had only been to the borderlands when she’d made her bargain with the Bridegroom, and she’d barely survived that. People weren’t meant to move between this life and the next and back again. But that was exactly what they’d have to do to get Darlington home.
“There are rumors of a Gauntlet on Station Island in Lough Derg,”
Michelle continued. “There might have been one in the Imperial Library of Constantinople before it was destroyed. And according to Darlington, a bunch of society boys built one right here.”
Dawes had nearly spit out her tea. “Darlington said that?”
Michelle gave her a bemused look. “His little pet project was creating a magical map of New Haven, of all the places where power ebbed and flowed.
He said some society members had done it on a dare and that he intended to find it.”
“And?”
“I told him he was an idiot and that he should spend more time worrying about his future and less time digging into Lethe’s past.”
Alex found herself smiling. “How’d that go over?”
“How do you think?”
“I actually don’t know,” she’d said at the time, too tired and too raw to pretend. “Darlington loved Lethe, but he also would have wanted to listen to his Virgil. He took that seriously.”
