Go to community college. Hell, do some ghost-listening and hire herself out to some rich Malibu douchebags. Galaxy Stern, psychic to the stars.

She took a long hot shower, then changed into jeans and boots and the heaviest sweater she had. Their Shakespeare and the Metaphysical class was in LC, and Alex wondered what would happen if she ran into the Praetor.

Would Professor Walsh-Whiteley look at her with pity? Give her the cut direct? But if the professor was somewhere in the rush of students, she didn’t see him.

They were filing into class when Alex heard her name being called. She glimpsed a familiar head of dark hair in the crowd.

“Be right back,” she told Mercy, slipping into the flow of people.

“Michelle?”

Had the Praetor already sent for Michelle Alameddine to replace her?

“Hey,” Michelle said. “How are you holding up?”

Better than I told you so. “I don’t really know yet. Are you meeting with Walsh-Whiteley?”

There was the faintest pause before Michelle said, “I had an errand to run for the Butler.”

“Here?” Michelle did look put together for a work meeting—dark skirt, gray turtleneck, suede boots, and a matching bag. But she worked in gifts and acquisitions at the Butler Library. An errand should bring her to Beinecke or Sterling, not the English department.

“It was the easiest place to meet.”

Alex didn’t have Turner’s sense for truth, that prickle she’d felt when she’d been in his head, but she still knew Michelle was lying. Was she trying to spare Alex’s feelings? Or was she supposed to keep any Lethe business confidential now that Alex had been excommunicated?

“Michelle, I’m fine. You don’t have to tiptoe around me.”

Michelle smiled. “Okay, you got me. No meeting in LC. I had to be in New Haven and I wanted to see how you were.”

No one is looking out for us but us. That was what Michelle had said when she’d tried to warn Alex not to use the Gauntlet. Even so …

“All this back-and-forth must be wiping you out. How was dinner with your boyfriend’s parents?”

“Oh, fine,” she said with a small laugh. “I’ve met them before. As long as we avoid talking politics, they’re great.”

Alex considered her options. She didn’t want to spook Michelle, but she didn’t want to keep dancing either. “I know you didn’t go back to the city that night.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You told me you were going back to New York. You said you had a train to catch, but you didn’t leave until the next morning.”

Color flooded Michelle’s cheeks. “How is that any of your business?”

“Two murders on campus means I get to be skeptical.”

But Michelle had regained her composure. “Not that it’s your concern, but I’m seeing someone here and I try to come to town a few times a month.

My boyfriend is fine with it, and even if he weren’t, I don’t deserve to be interrogated. I was worried about you.”

Alex knew she was supposed to apologize, to make nice. But she was too tired to play diplomat. She had held Darlington’s soul in her hands, and in it she’d felt the heavy, slumberous tuning of a cello, the sudden, exultant flutter of birds taking flight. If Michelle had stuck her neck out, even a little bit, they might have been better prepared. They might have succeeded.

“Worried enough to show up with a smile,” Alex said, “but not enough to help Darlington.”

“I explained to you—”

“You didn’t have to make the descent with us. We needed your knowledge. Your experience.”

Michelle licked her lips. “You made the descent?”

So she hadn’t talked to Anselm or the board, hadn’t met with the Praetor.

Was she really just worried about Alex? Was Alex so unused to the idea of kindness that she instantly distrusted it? Or was Michelle Alameddine a champion liar?

“What are you doing here, Michelle? What were you really doing in New Haven the night Dean Beekman died?”

“You’re not a detective,” Michelle clipped out. “You’re barely a student.

Go to class and stay out of my personal life. I won’t waste my time on you again.”

She turned on her heel and disappeared into the crowd. Alex was tempted to follow her.

Instead she slipped into her Shakespeare lecture. Mercy had saved her a seat, and as soon as Alex was settled, she checked her phone. Dawes was headed to Tripp’s loft to cook.

Alex pinged Turner privately.

Michelle Alameddine is on campus and I think she just lied about why.

Turner’s reply came quickly. What did she tell you?

Said she was running an errand for the Butler Library.

She waited, watching the screen. Doubt it. She doesn’t work at the Butler.

Since when?

She never did.

What was this? Why had Michelle lied to her—and to Lethe—about her job at Columbia? Why was she really on campus, and why had she tracked Alex down? And what about the fact that, when Alex had referred to two murders, Michelle hadn’t blinked? As far as anyone on campus knew, there had been only one murder. Marjorie Stephen, a woman Michelle actually knew, had supposedly died of natural causes. But Michelle had no reason to hurt either professor. At least not one Alex knew about.

She couldn’t concentrate on the lecture, though she’d actually done the reading. Part of the reason she’d let Mercy talk her into this class was because she’d covered two semesters of Shakespeare’s plays already. There was plenty more to read, because there always was, but at least she hadn’t had to bluff her way through every lecture.

Maybe there was an upside to all this disaster. No more struggling through classes. No more watching divas swallow bird shit for the sake of a hit album. Alex tried to imagine what life might look like on the other side of all this, and it was too easy to picture. She didn’t want to go back to the hot, seasonless glare of Los Angeles. She didn’t want to work a shit job and make shit pay and get by on scraps of hope, days off, a beer and a fuck to make the month more bearable. She didn’t want to forget Il Bastone, with its tinny stereo and its velvet couches, the library that had to be cajoled into giving up its books, the pantry that was always full. She wanted late mornings and overheated classrooms, lectures on poetry, too-narrow wooden desks.

She wanted to stay here.

Here. Where their professor was comparing The Tempest to Doctor Faustus, tracing lines of influence, the words singing through the room. Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it. Here beneath the soaring ceiling, the brass chandeliers floating weightless above, surrounded by panels of tawny wood and that Tiffany window that had no business in a classroom, alight with deep blue and green, rich purple and gold, groupings of angels who weren’t quite angels despite their wings, pretty girls in glass gowns with halos that read Science, Intuition, Harmony, while Form, Color, and Imagination clustered around Art. The faces always looked strange to Alex, too solid and specific, like photographs that had been pasted into the scene, Rhythm the only figure who looked out of the frame, her gaze direct, and Alex always wondered why.

The Tiffany window had been commissioned in honor of a dead woman.