But maybe that meant there was an opportunity here.
Alex waited to make sure he’d finished, weighing possible strategies. She knew it was probably pointless to try to make Walsh-Whiteley an ally, but shouldn’t he want Daniel Arlington—a deputy of Lethe with all the proper credentials—back?
“My Virgil—”
“A tremendous loss.”
The same words he’d used to describe Dean Beekman’s murder.
Meaningless. A wave of the hand.
Alex tried again. “But if there’s a way to reach him, to bring him back
—”
The Praetor’s brows rose in disbelief and Alex braced for another rant, but his voice was gentle. “Dear child, the end is the end. Mors vincit omnia. ”
But he’s not dead. He’s sitting in the ballroom at Black Elm. Or some part of him was.
Again Alex wondered how much Walsh-Whiteley knew.
“At Scroll and Key—” she ventured.
“Do not look for sympathy from me,” he said sternly. “I expect you to know your own limitations. Any inspection or ritual activity must be vetted by me first. I will not see the Lethe name further degraded because the board has seen fit to relax standards that exist for a reason.”
Inspection. That was the cover story Alex had offered Scroll and Key, and that Anselm had backed with their alumni. Alex had assumed Anselm would share all of his suspicions with the Lethe board. But maybe the board had kept them from the Praetor. After all, why rile a dog you knew loved to bark? And if the Praetor didn’t know she and Dawes were trying to break into hell, that would be one less thing to worry about.
“I understand,” she said, trying to hide her relief.
Walsh-Whiteley shook his head. His look was pitying. “It’s not your fault you were put in this position. You simply don’t have the skills or background to cope with what’s being thrown at you. You are not Daniel Arlington. You are ill-equipped to play the role of Dante, let alone Virgil. But with my supervision and some humility on your part, we’ll get through this together.”
Alex considered stabbing him with a pen. “Thank you, sir.”
Walsh-Whiteley took off his glasses, withdrew a cloth from his desk drawer, and polished the lenses slowly. His eyes darted left and Alex tracked the movement to a yellowing photograph of two young men, perched on a sailboat.
He cleared his throat. “Is it true you can see the dead?”
Alex nodded.
“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.
