Chapter 10 #2
Now, watching Charlie Girard, she hated to acknowledge it, but she got the appeal.
He had a rock-star vibe—expensive jeans, black T-shirt, black boots, leather cuff.
The man clearly liked the gym, and he had a head of messy honey-blond hair that took the edge off early middle age.
He prowled back and forth on the stage, gesturing to the slides on the screen behind him grandly like he was conducting an orchestra.
Alex was surprised by the number of Grays in the classroom—usually they avoided the wandering thoughts and dozing students that went with lectures. Were they drawn by Professor Girard’s intensity or by all the adoration for him bubbling in the lecture hall?
The dead were easy enough to pick out—a young woman with a bashed-in skull, the wound caked black with blood, probably dead from a car accident; an elderly man in pajamas who had passed in his sleep.
Alex let her eyes drift over them, careful not to let her notice linger.
But one woman caught her eye—middle-aged, smooth dark brown hair in a braid, no sign of violence but spare in a way that said some disease had hollowed her out.
Grays appeared as they had in death, and she was barefoot, wearing a hospital gown.
She was watching the professor, but periodically she would turn to scan the room.
It was the object on the desk in front of her that snagged Alex’s attention: She’d removed her wedding ring.
“If you’re not going to even take notes, why are you here?” Mercy whispered angrily.
Alex gave her head a shake. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me. You’re only hurting yourself.”
Alex could feel her eyebrows rising. She felt shitty about what had happened with Mercy, but she didn’t like being scolded. “Okay.”
“I’m not going to help dig you out if you fall behind.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You know you will.”
Probably. If she was lucky enough to be around to take the final. The memory rose up again, the image of the empty throne beside Golgarot, the jeweled yoke in his hand. Alex was struggling to even imagine caring about how she finished the semester.
A kid wearing a beanie turned to glare and put a finger to his lips. Mercy stiffened. Alex wondered if this was the first time she’d been shushed in class. But Alex stayed quiet and tried to focus through the rest of the lecture. If she lived, her GPA was going to matter.
Girard was holding forth on what he called the holy trinity: Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello, insisting that while they were traditionally described as tragic heroes, they were in fact inversions of Campbell’s hero’s journey.
“They do what they believe they must,” Girard declared, “not what they should, and we can’t look away because their morality is so much closer to our own.
Let’s think on their female counterparts and what role they play in this inversion as driver, foil, and victim. ”
Girard finished up the lecture with a mention of his office hours, and Alex kept one eye on the woman in the hospital gown as they all filed out of the lecture hall.
“Are you trying to shake me?” she asked. Mercy was setting a ridiculous pace.
“Of course not.”
Alex felt her patience fraying. “You were the one who wanted to be a part of what Lethe does. I warned you.”
“You did,” Mercy admitted. “And I didn’t want to hear it.” She stopped short. “But Alex … has it occurred to you that maybe everything you’re doing—everything with the ghosts and … demons … and—”
“Magic.”
“Magic.” She said it like the name of an ex, one who wasn’t good for her, one she didn’t want to let go of. “Maybe all of it is … I don’t know … bad.”
“Bad as in evil? As in unholy?”
“I’m not kidding.”
“You should really have this talk with Turner. He’s the one who believes in good and evil.”
“You don’t?”
The woman in the hospital gown was moving farther down the corridor and Alex didn’t want to lose sight of her.
“I believe in surviving,” Alex said, more honestly than she should have. They do what they must, not what they should. So much for her hero’s journey. Maybe she could turn things around in the third act. “You can’t think too hard about good and evil when you’re fighting for your life.”
“You’re not fighting for your life right now.”
I am. Every day. It was something Mercy, raised by two parents in a nice house in the suburbs, would never understand.
Golgarot had told Alex that she was destined for hell.
He might be right. She was the serpent in the garden.
And if he’d come knocking when she’d been trapped at the squat in Van Nuys, tangled up in her own web of calamity, she might have made that deal.
She would have let him put that pretty yoke around her neck, because what else was there to hold her in the living world but Hellie and some naive hope for a better future?
Now Alex had made the mistake of pulling herself out of the muck, of beginning to build a life she liked, that felt worth something, and for the first time in her twenty-one years, she had too much to lose.
If you managed to crash a party like Yale, you didn’t just see yourself out when they didn’t find your name on the guest list. You made the bouncer drag you into the street.
“Fair enough,” Alex said, because she wasn’t sure what else to say.
“So do you believe in good and evil?” There was a desperate edge to Mercy’s voice, and Alex didn’t want to know if it was regret or zealotry.
“I think magic is like anything else,” she said carefully. “It isn’t good or bad; it just is. Somebody pushes you off a roof, you could say gravity killed you, but why not look for the person who did the pushing?”
“Spells don’t kill people, people do?”
“Sure.”
“No, Alex.” Mercy’s voice dropped. “You killed that man. And I helped you do it.”
“He hurt a lot of people before I hurt him.”
“I heard … I heard him scream. I heard the last sound he made on this earth.”
Mercy turned on her heel and shoved into the tide of students.
Alex knew she should follow, but what was the point?
Mercy had a conscience. Violence still disturbed her.
That was normal, natural, the way humanity stayed human.
She was the kind of person the world needed if the drumbeat of civilization was going to carry on, if cities were going to continue to rise, and people were going to refrain from stabbing each other when the line for coffee got too long.
Maybe Alex couldn’t fix the break between them, but she could make sure Mercy didn’t go looking for tea and sympathy and discover more pain at the bottom of her cup.
It wasn’t hard to find the woman in the hospital gown. The Gray was tracking Professor Girard, who was deep in conversation with two students.
What Alex was doing was dangerous and it would not be gentle, but she couldn’t afford to be kind.
There just wasn’t time, and if she simply spoke to this Gray, she risked other Grays knowing she could hear them.
The living were full of enough grief and grievance to keep her occupied.
She didn’t need to become a sounding board for the dead.
She waited until they were walking behind the vast brutalist slab of Becton Hall and slipped up behind the woman in her hospital gown.
“Sorry,” she whispered, “but I think you know a thing or two about the Slutty Professor.” She thrust out her hand, felt the woman’s spirit struggle, heard the beeping of a hospital monitor, tasted good red wine. Alex didn’t let go until she had the answers she needed.