Chapter 50
The dorm room was quiet when Alex returned to JE, and she couldn’t help feeling that this might be her last time there. If she craned her neck, she could see Harkness Tower from their window. And two barn owls settled on the college roof.
When she’d left for New Haven and the promise of Yale, she’d brought almost nothing with her.
The paramedics had taken her out of Ground Zero in her underwear and she hadn’t wanted to go back to retrieve her few belongings.
With money from Lethe, she’d thrifted a pair of boots and bought new T-shirts and two sweaters from Target.
She’d had to replace almost everything more than once because of the beating they’d taken from Lethe—soot, stabbings, trips to the netherworld, jackal bites.
Atop her dresser she had a collection of crystals and geodes her mother had sent over the last year, Estrea’s old recipe box, and a photo she’d taken with Mercy and Lauren, all of them crowded around the courtyard swing.
There was a plate with a serpent and an apple on it she’d nabbed from the JE dining hall and the sketchbooks she was meant to use to keep up the illusion she was an artist. She hadn’t touched them for months.
Alex packed a duffel with her few remaining clothes, then slipped the photo from the courtyard and her grandmother’s recipe for kuajado into her back pocket.
She wanted to believe she would return, but even if she survived what was waiting at the top of that tower, she wasn’t sure she belonged here anymore.
She had always been a good liar, but the gulf between who she was and who she had to pretend to be had widened until she couldn’t even see herself waving from the opposite shore.
Lethe had been the bridge to help her span that distance, the place where the blood on her hands could be washed away with milk and magic, where she could reassemble the illusion of a normal, sane Alex.
She had been so sure she could manage four years of this for the sake of coming out clean on the other side.
But she hadn’t even made it to the halfway point.
There was something embarrassing about dying as a sophomore. It just lacked dignity.
She put a fresh box of Pop-Tarts atop the toaster oven, then she made her bed and headed to the dining hall.
Mercy and Lauren were seated at the end of one of the long tables by the high, mullioned windows.
“Holy shit,” said Lauren when she looked up from her plate of pasta. “Snap a picture. An Alex Stern in the wild!”
“You’re hilarious,” Alex said, sitting down beside her.
Mercy was watching her closely. Unconsciously her hand had gone to her collar, where Alex knew the fringe of salt lace lay.
Lauren hiked her thumb at the duffel. “What’s with the bag?”
“Just laundry,” Alex lied.
“Sure. Does this mean I’m not going to get the unabridged tale of your night of excitement? Mercy came back with sand in her shoes and refused to give in to interrogation.”
Mercy set down her fork. “All I said was that it’s Alex’s story to tell.”
“Very mysterious,” Lauren said, waggling her fingers. Then her smile fell. “Why do you look like someone just crashed your car and ate the last doughnut?”
Alex had no idea where to start.
“You know what?” Lauren rose and grabbed her plate. “I’m going to get seconds. You two make up before I’m back, or I’ll stab you both with my butter knife.”
As soon as Lauren vanished into the serving line, Mercy asked, “Did you get Reiter?”
“Not yet. But this is bigger than Reiter. You need to be away from campus on Thursday night. Take Lauren too. And anyone else you want to see safe. Have a sleepover at the church or something. Or better yet, go into the city. Just get as far away from Harkness as you can.”
“What’s happening at Harkness?”
“It’s too hard to explain. But I don’t want you to lose anything else to Lethe.” She drew a folded sheet of paper from her pocket and pushed it across the table. “Dawes put this together. It’s a spell.”
Mercy shoved it back toward Alex. “I told you I don’t want anything to do with that anymore.”
“Mercy, just take it. If you decide not to use it, that’s fine. But if things go wrong—”
“I don’t need magic. I have God.”
It occurred to Alex that she should have brought Turner with her. “How about both? If things go wrong, I need to know you’re not bringing a Bible to a gunfight.”
Mercy eyed the paper as if it were crawling with bacteria. “What does it do?”
“You know how there are weapons all over the buildings at Yale?”
“Not real ones.”
“No. But they can be.” The executioner’s hatchet at the law school, the swords and shields in the Commons rotunda, the revolutionary soldier holding a musket atop Harkness itself, the barefoot sailor with his cutlass, knights carrying shields and maces, cops with nightsticks, and robbers with pistols.
They were everywhere. The incantation Dawes had found was based on a bit of old Aurelian magic that interpreted the dedications of buildings at Yale literally “for the use and enjoyment of students.” The magical argument was that any object depicted in the stained glass and stonework of Yale should be available for a student’s use.
But the trick was giving the student the skill to wield it.
Most undergrads weren’t going to know what to do with a bow and arrow or a broadsword or a blunderbuss.
Dawes had developed that bit of spellwork herself, with Darlington’s help.
“You don’t need anything fancy for the incantation. ”
She set the pouch Dawes had given her beside the folded paper.
“Herbs?” asked Mercy.
Alex nodded. She couldn’t remember the Latin names. “True unicorn root. True mistletoe. True dandelion. That kind of stuff.”
“That’s clever,” Mercy said wistfully, the pull of magic tugging at her. “And it really works?”
“It should,” said Alex. “You’ve seen Dawes in action. But your best bet is to be out of town before it all goes down.”
Mercy blew out a shaky breath then snatched the pouch and paper from the table, shoving them in her cardigan pocket. “Are you coming back? When this is over?”
“I don’t know.” If she could withstand whatever this trial required, if she could outthink Alban Reed, if she could dodge an order of murderous priests and their henchmen owls. “If I can put this all right, then maybe.”
Mercy nodded. “Okay.”
Alex rose as Lauren approached, her plate heaped with noodles. “Mercy is about to tell you some extremely crazy shit. It doesn’t matter if you believe her, just get out of town on Thursday night.”
Lauren set down her plate. “What are you talking about?”
“Get away from campus. That’s all I’m asking.”
“Are you wrapped up in some Weather Underground Baader- Meinhof stuff? Because—”
“Lauren, just listen to Mercy, okay? I have to go.”
She picked up her duffel, but as Alex passed, Mercy snagged her hand. “Be careful.”
Alex swallowed the sudden ache of tears in her throat and managed a wink. “You know I won’t.”
She squeezed Mercy’s hand, and then she did the hard part. She let go.