Chapter 33
She was back on campus, heading home to JE.
The sky was thick with clouds, heavy and gray-bellied with rain.
The trees looked like slender flames in their autumn colors.
Except it wasn’t autumn. It was winter and those branches should have long since shed their leaves.
Had she slept at Il Bastone? Why didn’t she remember walking back to campus?
She felt wobbly. She’d lost too much blood.
And what about her father? Had they gotten rid of him? Why couldn’t she remember?
Three students decked out in newsboy caps and white sweaters emblazoned with the Yale Y rode past on vintage bicycles, their trousers tucked into their socks. It had to be a theater thing or a corny singing group stunt.
She grabbed the cool iron of the Branford gate, trying to stay upright.
She loved this gate with all its tiny figures and symbols, beautiful for no reason, complicated for no reason.
This was one of the entrances to the quadrangle.
She remembered the plans glowing blue, Darlington’s voice saying, It creates a kind of mirror.
“You all right, Hec?”
Her stomach settled. Her head stopped spinning.
She made herself open her eyes. Something was off—the scale of the place, the colors.
The metal fence and corkboard at the entrance to the Old Campus gate were gone.
Was she dreaming? Even the sounds of traffic were strange, dimmer, more sparse.
Why were the trees so small? The boy holding open the gate was handsome, dark-haired.
He was wearing a suit. Everyone was wearing a suit.
“Too much tipple,” she heard herself say. Except it wasn’t her voice; those weren’t her words. That same sense of vertigo struck.
“Hec can’t hold his drink!” shouted another young man, and Alex had to bite back a scream.
Linus Reiter was pushing past her into the courtyard. His pale blond hair was slicked back from his elegant profile. He seemed buoyant and his face had a loose elasticity in it. He looks human.
No white suit either. He wore the same variation on a uniform they all wore: dark suit, white shirt, neatly knotted tie.
For a moment she thought she saw Dawes beckoning to her from a doorway that she knew led to the Branford dean’s apartment, then Alex blinked and a bespectacled boy was standing in the shadows—Rudolph Kittscher.
Then this was Lionel Reiter, not Linus, the boy the demon had consumed.
“Come on, you cards,” Kittscher said, waving them all forward. He winked. “Devil won’t wait.”
She followed him, less because she wanted to than her body was simply moving.
Beside her, the other young men climbed in a jostling pack, a tide of gamboling energy heading up the stairs.
Briefly they seemed to flicker. She glimpsed Turner’s grim face, Darlington’s expression a mix of fear and fascination.
They were all riding shotgun, each with one of the original pilgrims. Here was Hector, the soldier, at last.
She could feel his thoughts bumping up against hers, anxious, preoccupied.
She had drawn souls into her before, the dead, and then Darlington and Theo, the living.
Belbalm had forced her own soul into the body of her maid.
It was how she had survived, stealing another woman’s life, then consuming souls to sustain it.
Abomination. Marguerite Belbalm, Wheelwalker and serial killer.
Was that what her father and his secret club had been trying to prevent?
All worlds are open to us, she had said. If we are bold enough to enter.
Alex—Hector—stumbled, and together they took a deep breath. Hec gave himself a shake. Just what did Buggs put in that punch? I’m going to be no good at practice.
Alex had been in the Branford dean’s apartment once before, when she’d attended a section for a philosophy lecture.
But these didn’t look like the public rooms she’d seen.
They were more like dorm rooms: a big Yale Bulldogs banner hanging over a fireplace, a desk laden with the remnants of a loaf of bread beside a stack of books, a tidily made bed.
They passed through a small door and into a seminar room with a long oval table.
Alex realized they were standing above the entrance to the college courtyard.
This room connected the dorms directly to Harkness Tower.
“Hair of the dog, Hec?” Kittscher asked, already mixing himself a drink at an elaborate bar cart parked beside one of the windows.
“You’re a mind reader,” she said in the voice that was not her voice.
Bootleg whiskey, Hec’s fleeting thoughts supplied.
Brought to campus by Reiter’s chauffer. Well, really, it’s his ma’s chauffeur, but can you imagine?
Alex felt like she was standing in a swift running river, dipping her hand in, catching fragments of thought like wriggling fish that slipped away in an instant.
She remembered that, thanks to James Gamble Rogers, Lethe was supposed to have rooms and safehouses built all over campus.
Was this one of them? Every surface was bizarrely detailed, even for Yale, the roof peaked and set with thick beams heavily carved with symbols: an hourglass, scales, and there—a wheel.
Carved figures of students ascended to the apex of the ceiling, then descended with graduation caps on and diplomas in hand.
At the base of the four biggest beams, stone inscriptions read, PURITY, GENEROSITY, NOBILITY, FORTITUDE.
She would need to eat before practice and again after.
She could meet up with Buggs and they’d sort it out, but no more late nights.
Not until the Game was behind them. She wanted to make a good showing.
More wriggling fish, Hec’s thoughts bleeding into hers, all football and the future.
He’s distracted, she realized. None of this is quite real to him.
Not the way football and his friends and his fraternity are.
Alex caught a glimpse of herself—of Hec—in the window, little more than an outline, but she could see, even feel, that she was built differently than these other boys, broader in the shoulders, thick with muscle.
A perfect soldier. Reiter fidgeted at the table, carefully arranging papers—the same blueprints of the quadrangle and Harkness they’d found hidden in the staircase.
He wants something to do with his hands.
Reiter, wealthy and handsome, heir to Sweetwell, but he was jittery, maybe a little shy.
Beside him sat the young man who she now knew had been labeled Nick Zanca in the photo.
He was long-limbed, neatly dressed, a gold pin glinting on his tie.
He seemed preternaturally poised beside Reiter’s restlessness.
The Wheel had spun and she’d led them there, walking along a new spoke to another time.
Yale in the fall of 1933, when the doors to the Memorial Quadrangle had first opened, when the pilgrims had met to contemplate their Halloween descent.
How was she supposed to bring them back to their own time?
Alex caught a glimpse of Turner’s strained face.
He had just begun to accept magic, and only by shoving it into a framework of superheroes and villains, of the righteous and the depraved.
How would he make this bizarre moment fit his moral model?
“Should we start?” Nick asked. “I have a paper for Smith that won’t wait.”
Kittscher dropped into one of the big leather chairs. “I can write it for you if you’re so worried. You know I’ll get you a better mark.”
Reiter laughed nervously.
The gaze Nick fixed on Kittscher was cool and unruffled. “I can manage.”
Kittscher rolled his eyes theatrically. “Oh, very well. We meet here on neutral territory. All present agree that we are acting of our own free will and that any injury resulting from the actions we take are the fault of none but ourselves.” Then he set down his glass and clapped his hands together.
“One week until All Hallows’ Eve, lads. On Tuesday we bloody our hands.
On Thursday I’ll welcome you to Il Bastone and we’ll summon our salt guardians. Come Friday, we walk the Gauntlet.”
“Are we sure…” Reiter began. “That is to say, are we certain—”
“God help us all, we’re not going through this again. We were the men chosen and there’s no reason to delay.”
“There are countless reasons,” said Nick.
“Come on!” This was Hector now, and Alex felt his voice boom through her chest. “If we don’t have the courage, who will?
” He was saying it for Kittscher’s sake, for his approval.
That longing didn’t have the fully formed shape of language, but Alex could feel it just the same.
Rudy Kittscher was smarter than all of them put together.
He had the steady hand that would see them through.
“Boys,” Kittscher crooned, “it is not mere good luck that construction on the library finished when it did. It is not mere happenstance.”
Nick released a disbelieving huff and pulled a pack of Chesterfields from his pocket. “You don’t believe in God, but you believe in fate?”
“I believe that there are moments when great men are chosen and that if they shy away from the destiny laid before them, they choose the path of cowardice—or worse, mediocrity.”
“Neither fate nor God chose us,” Nick argued. “The donors did, and I think it’s worth remembering that our lives are on the line, not theirs.”
“Then walk out the door and let them choose some other mere mortal to raise up to Olympus. We won’t have trouble filling your spot.”