“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.”
What might have been a smile curled the corner of Dawes’s mouth.
“Maybe. Tell me about the Praetor.”
Alex sat down. “He’s a delight.”
“Really?”
“Dawes.”
Dawes’s cheeks pinked. “I did a little dive on him, and he wasn’t a popular figure at Lethe. His Virgil hated him and lobbied against his selection, but there’s no denying he was an academic superstar.”
“The bad news is he has not mellowed with age. The good news is it looks like Anselm and the board are keeping him in the dark about what really happened at Scroll and Key.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Because this guy seems to be held together by righteous indignation. I think he’s been complaining to Lethe for years about how we’re all slouching toward Bethlehem. They just want him to shut up and leave them alone.”
“So now he’s our problem.”
