Chapter 6
Alex showered and then walked the short distance back to JE.
She never went anywhere without pockets full of salt and she had her guardians, the snakes that still took new demons by surprise.
She always made sure there were Grays nearby in case she needed a jolt of strength or speed.
Still she was afraid. Of Reiter, who had killed a woman and stuffed her in a trunk to make sure Alex stayed scared.
Of what came next. She felt better when she was back in the dorm, the door to the stairway clanging shut behind her, the wards in place.
Their room at JE overlooked the courtyard, and Alex liked the sense of protection that offered, even if she didn’t quite believe in it.
Sometimes she wished she had a view of the Library Walk, that stone stretch between the Gothic spires of Dwight Chapel and the Dramat—built to look like a cathedral as seemingly everything was at Yale—as if that way she could see trouble coming.
The campus lay quiet in its cold halos of light, the paths piled high with snow as if they’d been wrapped in cotton batting.
There were still a few signs of life in the college, despite the hour—a lit desk lamp, a gangly boy in navy sweats brewing tea in an electric kettle by the window.
Two a.m. was the cusp, when people started to fade, when they realized they’d only be getting a few hours of sleep before an early section or class, when the campus finally fell into real stillness.
Alex was surprised to find Mercy and Lauren both awake in the common room, Lauren curled up in the ugly recliner in her plaid pajama pants and a field hockey sweatshirt, Mercy tucked into the couch in her hyacinth robe, the glasses she didn’t need resting on a sparkling chain around her neck.
“How was sculpture gang?” Lauren asked.
“It’s weird that you’re meeting so late,” Mercy noted, throwing down a challenge. She knew where Alex would be on a Thursday night, and it wasn’t shaping clay with a bunch of art students.
“Right? I hate it,” Alex replied, because she’d been playing this game a lot longer than Mercy and she knew better than to get defensive. “But it’s the only time we can use the studio.”
Lauren cracked open another Diet Coke. She must have a test to cram for. “Are you getting good?”
“Not at all.” Lethe had created an artist’s backstory for Alex to justify her admission despite her iffy academic record.
So Alex had invented a student sculpture group to explain her late nights this semester.
Mercy knew the truth, and just a few months ago, she would have enthusiastically helped Alex lie, but that time had passed.
She’d gone home for the holidays and hadn’t replied to Alex’s Merry Christmas and Happy New Year texts.
Alex had worried over the lack of response.
Bad things happened quickly when magic was involved.
But Mercy was safe in the Chicago suburbs and there was no mystery to her silence.
Alex had made her friend an accessory to murder and now she had to live with the recoil from that particular shot.
She got it. But the strained smiles and awkward silences still stung.
“I keep hoping if I stick with it, I’ll have a miraculous breakthrough. What are you working on?”
Mercy’s eyes came alive, and Alex realized how much she had missed seeing that spark in her. “Hamlet as an inversion of the hero’s journey. Girard was pretty brilliant on it in lecture. Not just the usual Joseph Campbell retread. You’d know if you bothered coming to class.”
“I’m trying,” Alex said, and she wasn’t talking only about Girard’s lecture. “I’m just falling down a little.”
Mercy closed her laptop. “You’re missing out on a great class.”
She was probably right. Alex had never managed balance in her life at Yale. If she held too tight to one world, the other started crying out for attention. Lethe tended to make a lot more noise than her collapsing GPA.
“I need to sleep,” Mercy said and offered a quick Good night! over her shoulder before disappearing into their shared room.
“What is going on with you two?” Lauren whispered. “Last semester you were best Bible buddies.”
“I don’t know,” Alex lied, slumping on the couch. “I think she’s upset with me.”
“Because you’re not going to church anymore?”
Because I got her to help me kill a drug dealer. “Maybe.”
“Well, that prof has a reputation.”
“Girard?” Alex had taken Shakespeare in Cinema because Mercy wanted to and because Alex had hoped it would entail less reading and more watching of movies. But she’d missed two of the first three lectures.
“Yeah, I don’t know what’s true or if he’s just young and hot and a rumor magnet, but I think we should be careful. Mercy is sounding a little too … hero-worshippy, and I’m not sure this guy is worthy.”
“They never are.”
“But after last year.”
“I’m on it,” Alex said. “No more missed lectures, and I’ll keep an eye on Girard.”
“Good. I’m probably worried over nothing, but I feel better already.” Lauren resecured her ponytail. “I mentioned rooming together next year and Mercy talked about going to France again.”
“You think she’s serious?” Mercy had wanted to room without Lauren so that they wouldn’t have to keep lying about Lethe. But that was before Eitan had disappeared into the Gauntlet.
“I can’t tell. But you and I could get a place.”
Alex tried not to show her shock. She liked Lauren. Lauren was normal, steady, maybe even happy. She went to class, went to practice, partied with her friends. She had a hold on things in a way Alex couldn’t fathom.
“We don’t have to,” Lauren added hastily, and Alex realized she’d been staring at her instead of answering.
“No, I think we should. I just didn’t expect it.”
“Why?”
Alex found herself telling the truth. That happened a little too often now that she’d been to hell and she was hunting demons in her free time. It was as if all the lies she had to tell about Lethe and the monsters stalking her had exhausted her supply of falsehoods.
“I thought you might want to get an apartment with your field hockey friends or … Mercy and I haven’t been the most fun.”
“True. You’re both big fat squares.”
“Squares? Is the year 1958? Are you looking for a date to the hop?”
“Losers seemed rude.”
Alex winced. “Point taken.”
“Look, you always pay me back when you eat my chips or Tastykakes. You keep the toaster clean. I like parties. I like getting wasted. I also like coming home to a clean space with no one fucking a hockey player in my bed and where I can not talk about dicks for a while.”
“That is a low bar, Lauren.”
“You’d think.” She shrugged. “It’s peaceful with you and I like that.”
Alex tried to take that in. She’d gone to hell twice—three times, really.
She regularly saw human beings at their worst and occasionally demons at their best, and part of her preferred the company of the dead to the living.
She’d been saved from a falling ceiling tonight by a man …
well, by someone who was part monster and part man and who she was fairly sure could take a direct hit from a lightning bolt without flinching.
Peaceful was not the word that came to mind.
But she’d also lived with people who didn’t wipe the counter down, who left the heel of the bread without buying more, who you always had to remind that they owed you for rolling papers or that two-liter of Squirt or the quarters you’d given them for laundry. It wore you down.
“I like it too,” she said. “I’ll talk to Mercy, but if she wants to go eat baguettes and live in a garret, we can get a double.”
Lauren beamed. She had the most even, white teeth Alex had ever seen, a tan that never quite seemed to fade.
An athlete. A good girl from a good family.
Hellie if she’d never started using, if she’d never met Len.
Alex should hate Lauren, resent the easy time she’d had of just about everything.
But she didn’t. Alex had always known there was something wrong inside her, that the kind of damage she’d taken couldn’t be smoothed over with weekly therapy, a good haircut, quality clothes.
She worried she’d be wearing that damage for the rest of her life, a warning sign around her neck that the healthy, happy people of the world could see flashing.
But if someone like Lauren could look past it, maybe Alex wouldn’t have to carry that sign around forever.
Alex had told herself to stop hoping, that looking forward would only leave her disappointed or worse. But like most expensive habits, hope was a hard one to break.