Chapter 21
Alex didn’t sleep. She lay in her narrow bed in the room she shared with Mercy, staring at the wash of streetlight across the ceiling.
She knew it was her own damn fault, but she and Darlington had crossed an unmarked border. She didn’t know the customs here or how to survive. Maybe it was less like passing into new territory than crash-landing on an alien planet. How was she supposed to breathe in this atmosphere?
She understood that Darlington was embarrassed.
He hated losing control, loathed the idea of being anything less than gentlemanly and proper.
An abuse of his office. A lapse in etiquette.
But Alex didn’t feel ashamed; she felt greedy.
Gluttonous. Covetous. She wanted to walk to Il Bastone and sneak into his bed. She wanted to roll around in his scent.
But then what? She had craved Hellie. There were even moments, early on, maybe too early, when she’d felt something like lust for Len, when her body responded even if her head and her heart were trailing somewhere far behind.
She had always been able to hide the moments when eager wanting fell away.
She made the right sounds, kept her body following the steps of the dance, preserved the illusion of her desire.
She wasn’t sure she could sell that lie to Darlington, not with the hellfire bond there to tell on her.
He’s expensive. Too costly. Too pretty. But was it so wrong to want him, to have him, even if she couldn’t keep him?
She had held his soul inside her, tasted honey on her tongue.
It wasn’t enough. She had spent her life hungry, getting by on crumbs and pretending it was a meal.
If she was going to die, why couldn’t she eat until she’d had her fill of him, until she’d made herself sick with him?
Let them be fed on honey until they are overwhelmed with sweetness.
She must have slept, because when she woke, the room was bleached in daylight and Mercy had already gone.
Alex didn’t feel up to the dining hall, so she toasted a couple of Pop-Tarts and then hurried to her Art of the Italian Renaissance survey, which was taught in a grim gray-and-white building just two doors down from Wolf’s Head.
She couldn’t help but think she was returning to the scene of the crime, though she wasn’t at all sure she meant the theft of the breastplate.
Alex liked the class, but there was too much to memorize on top of her work for Lethe and she had to struggle not to doze off when the professor darkened the lecture hall to show them slides.
The whole room seemed to jolt awake when the Barberini Faun appeared on-screen, lolling with legs spread in all his marble glory.
Alex pressed her fingers to her temples.
She was in danger of becoming a very artsy pervert.
She had lunch back at JE with some people she’d met when Mercy had dragged her to a wine-and-cheese happy hour at the college head’s house.
Back when Mercy had still been trying to include her in everything.
Alex did her best to look interested as two of them talked about planning a tour for their sketch comedy group, but she was eager to get away to the library upstairs.
Maybe if she gave these people a real chance, she might like them as much as she liked Mercy and Lauren and Turner and Dawes.
But they were barely more than strangers and she could feel her wrongness around them, the gulf that lay between her and all the precocious, passionate children of Yale.
Alex had been on campus almost two years and she still didn’t know how to close that gap.
She had lived with too much violence. An Ivy League degree couldn’t scrub it away.
And did she feel some contempt for their shining optimism, their certainty?
They knew so much more than she ever would—knowledge gleaned from summer camps, family vacations, shelves filled with the right books.
People had paid attention to their feelings, fostered their gifts, curated the world for their benefit.
But maybe that kind of knowing was its own ignorance.
They looked at life and thought they understood it, made their judgments accordingly.
They couldn’t see the threats that were so obvious to her.
An education could be a lot of things. Maybe taking a punch and knowing you could get back up was just as valuable as a philosophy seminar or a trip to the symphony.
Death comes on swift wings. She could feel it now, above her in the rafters, peering from behind doorways, patient and inevitable.
She couldn’t pretend to look forward to some exciting future when she was always watching her back.
So she smiled, and she tried to look like she cared, and when there was a pause in the conversation, she fled.
The JE library was busy on a Friday afternoon, and she had to share a table, but she didn’t like working at Sterling anymore.
She always had the sense that the fountain at the center of the courtyard would start to overflow, and she’d find herself falling through a hidden doorway where Golgarot would be waiting, jeweled yoke in hand.
That wasn’t the way it worked. The Gauntlet had been built to make sure only pilgrims with very clear intentions could make that journey.
But she was a Wheelwalker and that meant the rules could bend in unexpected ways.
What else did it mean? Had her father been a demon?
A pilgrim himself? Or had the magic in her veins come from her mother’s line?
How many times had she looked into Mira’s face, seeking some phantom image of herself, her eyes, her nose, the shape of her jaw superimposed over her mother’s features but never really lining up?
Alex was working on an essay on coded language, searching for textual support in her paperback copy of Howards End, but she was struggling to think straight.
Her mind kept straying to the temple room, to the low thunder of the water, those chanting voices, Darlington seizing her hips.
Her skin felt too tight. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to fight or fuck.
They’d always been a little too similar for her, the wires crossing when they weren’t meant to.
And this. This felt perilous.
“I am losing my goddamn mind.” She shoved the paperback so hard it flew off the desk.
The little boy ghost who always lingered by the plaque commemorating his death like a macabre tour guide giggled and Alex pretended not to hear him.
She didn’t need her focus wandering between sex and death, tormented by thoughts of hell one minute, rattled by memories of Darlington’s lips pressed to her neck the next.
She checked the time. Professor Girard held office hours between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. Maybe a fight wasn’t such a bad idea.
Alex considered her options on the short walk to Linsly-Chittenden Hall.
Girard’s office was just a few doors down from the Praetor’s office and she had no desire to run into Raymond Walsh-Whiteley.
He’d been sending long emails complete with footnotes on vampire lore since the meeting in New York.
He’d even suggested Lethe host an international colloquium on vampirism and succubi.
How about a mob with pitchforks to break down the gate to Reiter’s mansion?
How about vengeance for Michelle Alameddine and every body lying beneath the gardens at Sweetwell?
How about some protection, a legion of bodyguards armed with salt, to protect her from a vampire whom she’d seen levitate in his fashionable living room and who could descend from the Connecticut skies at any moment?
But sure, a symposium seemed like a great plan.
Linsly-Chittenden looked like a big brick hearth, its stones a warm red, welcoming in the gray winter cold. She wasn’t sure exactly what approach to take with Girard. He had an ego on him, so maybe flattery was the sensible way to go, but she wasn’t feeling very sensible.
It was only when she knocked on his door that she realized she might run into Mercy here. That could be a good thing. She could observe them together and Mercy would think Alex was taking her coursework seriously.
“Enter.”
No sign of Mercy, but the Gray in the hospital gown was perched on Girard’s desk.
Alex was ready with death words on her lips, but she didn’t need them.
The Gray took one look at her and vanished through the wall.
She hadn’t enjoyed what Alex had done to her.
Even so, Alex could sense the Gray hadn’t gone far.
She was lingering outside the window, too tied to this man by her jealousy and rage.
Girard looked up from his desk as Alex closed the door. He gave her a warm smile, but she hadn’t missed the assessment in his gaze or the hardness there. It was calculating in a way truly confident people rarely were.
“Welcome,” he said. “Have a seat.”
Alex had come to understand how carefully staged most professors’ offices were—photos of family to disarm you, objects from their travels to impress you, shelves packed with essential books for reference or reputation.
Girard was leaning into his middle-aged rock-star performance—a framed Nine Inch Nails poster on the wall, a black-and-white photo of a dramatically lit mosh pit, an acoustic guitar propped up in the corner.