Page 16 of Dead Beat

“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.

The Yale Club (opened June 1915) was designed by James Gamble Rogers, and at twenty-two stories, it remains the largest college clubhouse ever built. It was deliberately sited near the spot believed to mark the execution of Nathan Hale, though the precise location of the hanging has never been confirmed. (Two plaques at entirely separate locations make warring and equally dubious claims.) The club is heavily warded, but protections extend beyond the uncanny. The Tyrolean plaster in the Tap Room—textured to resemble hand-cut medieval limestone—contains a calcium compound (provided by Berzelius in one of their few worthwhile contributions to the work of the societies) that repels scrying and listening charms, thereby guaranteeing discretion for those inside. The building was rendered fireproof by St. Elmo’s in 1916 (before their falling out with university leadership), and Aurelian added a general pacification casting in 1925 in return for the club clearing their bar tab. The latter is bound to the ten gilded Y’s on the wooden corbels, which were leafed in real twenty-two-karat gold.

The efficacy of these protections is difficult to overstate. In over one hundred years of continuous operation, the Yale Club hasn’t experienced a single fire, act of violence, or unexplained death. This is not merely unusual but, by any actuarial measure, nearly impossible. The Princeton Club, before its closure in 2021, had no protections at all—and the less said about its final years, the better.

—from Lethe: A Legacy

7

On Saturday morning, Darlington rose early, went for his run, and met with a boxing instructor for a session at Payne Whitney, then showered and breakfasted in the Il Bastone parlor. He didn’t mind the quiet of the house in the morning. He had the sense it was glad of his presence, that it welcomed company in a way Black Elm could not. He wasn’t reenrolled yet, so he had no classes to prepare for and instead spent the morning trying to repair the old intercom system that seemed to function depending on its mood and the afternoon rereading the relevant debates in Kittscher’s Daemonologie. He couldn’t absent himself from future rituals, but if he could better understand the influence of the demonic, maybe he could avoid another disaster like the one at St. Elmo’s.

He was also uncomfortably aware that because he might be a portable nexus he could become a target for anyone looking to work magic. But for now he needed to focus on their meeting with the Lethe board. This wasn’t an opportunity they’d get again. It was four o’clock, the sky dense with gray clouds and promising more snow when Dawes knocked on the door of the library. They gathered the materials they needed from the armory and called a car to take them to Union Station.

The Praetor was waiting for them beneath the clock arch, rosy-cheeked and fizzing with good cheer. Alex and Turner already looked annoyed.

“Very good,” Walsh-Whiteley said, clapping his hands together and ushering them along like a docent at a museum. He was bundled into an overcoat and a striped scarf in the maroon and gold of Trumbull College, his white hair combed into a shape somewhere between a pompadour and the meringue atop a pie. As they took their seats on the train, he held forth on Lethe, on the board, on the emails he’d sent over the last decade and how he truly hoped the new board president would be ushering in an era of renewed vigor for the Ninth House. “This meeting is a step in the right direction. We need greater engagement from the alumni and a proper protocol for oversight. It may not be comfortable, but it is necessary!”

“Absolutely,” Darlington said.

“We can’t go on like this,” Walsh-Whiteley continued in an unconscious echo of Turner’s words only the night before. “Delegates vanishing and reappearing. Elliot Sandow’s ludicrous tenure as Praetor. Michael Anselm’s still unexplained disappearance. We are in desperate need of oversight and more active participation by the board and finally—” He held up a finger as if testing the wind. “They are listening!”

Darlington met Turner’s gaze briefly. Walsh-Whiteley could pontificate as much as he liked; none of them really knew what was waiting for them in New York.

Thankfully the professor had papers to grade, and as the train trundled south to the city, he lapsed into relative silence, slashing away with a red pen and occasionally bleating “Not bad!” or “Preposterous!” He taught Swift and Pope, and Darlington was mildly impressed to see him marking up essays himself rather than leaving the work to a teaching assistant.

They had stashed their coats on the seats or in the rack overhead and Darlington noted that everyone had made an effort at impressing the board.

Dawes wore a pair of dark gray wool trousers and a pale pink sweater, a Christmas gift from the Westport sister that didn’t suit her at all. She had braided her bright red hair into a crown to keep it under control, and Darlington was reminded disturbingly of the way she’d appeared as the scholar in hell. She already had her laptop out and her headphones on. Turner still looked tired, but he was freshly shaven and dressed in a tidy charcoal suit with a burgundy pocket square. Alex wore a short black velvet dress, high-necked, long-sleeved, her dark hair parted in the middle and drawn into a tight bun. If you disregarded the plum tights and battered black boots, she looked like a Renaissance portrait. Even her wary expression, reflected in the dark shine of the window, seemed ready to be caught by an artist’s hand, rendered in candlelight instead of the harsh fluorescents of the train. He gave himself a mental kick. This was not a woman to demurely pour water from a pitcher or pose stoically with a rosary in hand. Unless she was preparing to stab you with it.