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Chapter Text

Una Noche al Bordre de la Mar

Una noche al bodre de la mar
cuando ampezi' a amar
una ninya con ojos pretos
sin poderle declarar

No quero mas verte
prefiero mi muerte
me estas enganyando
con tu falso amor

Me voy ir por siempre
muy lejos del mundo
un sueno profundo
fuera tu querer

Cuando ampezaba a cantar
y de la alegria a llorar
en mi cama iba yo llorando
sin poderle declarar

--------

One Night By The Edge Of The Sea

One night by the edge of the sea
When I had begun to fall in love
With a girl with a pair of dark eyes
Without being able to declare [my love].
 
I don't want to see you anymore
I'd much rather die
You're cheating on me
With your false love.
 
I'm leaving forever
Far away from the world
In a deep dream
Far away from your desire.
 
When I began to sing
And from joy I began to cry
It was in my bed that I was crying
Without being able to declare [my love].

- Sephardic Folk Song

All the hot days of the year crowd together in New Haven, like people pressed tight against each other in a room, fogging up the windows and coating the air with the musty damp of their sweating bodies. Alex had been surprised to find that, for all its crisp autumns and winters of wet snow and dry air, New Haven’s summers got as hot as California’s. The humidity, though, had been an unwelcome discovery. The way her clothes clung wetly  to her and the sweat would bead and pool in every crevice, her hair lying limply down her back, wet with sweat at the roots. But she had found that she liked the long, slow build of a summer storm, when the humidity finally broke and the sky purpled and tipped down vast buckets of warm rain. Somehow, it always made her think of being a kid, knees scraped and stinging where she had skinned them falling from a tree, looking up at the sky and watching the clouds gather and darken.

She would leave her notes in the window seat at the hutch, or spread over the carpet at Il Bastone (she missed Dawes. She missed seeing her sprawled across the carpet, index card laid out like a tarot deck. She missed Dawes’ cooking.) and head out to get drenched.

But today it was not raining. Today it was as sticky and sullen as it had been for the last week, the red sun just beginning to creep towards the edge of the sky and the overcast heat of the day abating a little. Alex closed the door to Il Bastone behind her grudgingly, wishing she could stay inside until the rain broke. But she couldn’t. She had got a call from Andrea Pinsky, the alumna who was looking after the Scroll and Key tomb, summoning her to College Street.

During the summer, the Houses of the Vale had a rolling rotation of members and alumni that came in to occupy the tombs, do their research, dust the shelves, and carry out necessary maintenance — mostly routine spell work, though Dawes had told her that Skull and Bones had what would seem to be an excellent reproduction of the Bayoux tapestry hung in an upstairs room. The latin text woven into the fabric of the border, in fact, morphed into new words biweekly, and had to be read in a specific sequence and translated according to a specific tradition to divine an accurate prediction for the result of any sports league, series, or game, so long as someone went in regularly to stroke it very, very carefully, whispered to it soothingly in Latin, and left a scrap of paper on the floor in front of it telling it what they wanted to know. If not maintained, the text would rapidly transform into a series of obscenities, and the tapestry would begin to unravel.

She had received the call just before 18:00, telling her there was a situation at the tomb that required the presence of a Lethe delegate and Alex, who had so far enjoyed a blissfully un-magical summer, had shut her eyes, closed her copy of To The Lighthouse, sighed inwardly, and agreed. She had opted to spend the summer in New Haven for several reasons. First, that her best bet for finding some obscure tome that might tell her how to get to the underworld, rescue a (potential) demon, and come back out alive was probably scouring the Lethe House library. Second, that she couldn’t bring herself to tell her mother her job with Bellebalm had fallen through (more like disintegrated in a well-furnished study). And third, that, seeing as she’d have no deal with Dean Sandow to make it through her next year, she had signed on to an extra credit summer essay writing course. The Lethe board had consented to her staying at Il Bastone in exchange for her word that she would be on call for Lethe house duties, should the need arise.

And so, at 19:15, Alex stood under the high moorish arches of the Scroll and Key tomb, knocked, and was shown inside by a tall, fox-like girl in an expensive-looking cream skirt and blouse, with sharp features and an expression that was more annoyed than worried. The face of someone who knew something was wrong, but also knew they didn’t have to deal with it.

She had a long, pointy nose, which she put to good use by looking down it at Alex and sniffing daintily. This must be Andrea Pinsky.

“You came.” Her voice was throaty, her accent held just a hint of something eastern European. She closed the door behind Alex.

Alex resisted the urge to make a sardonic bow. “You called?”

Andrea’s mouth twisted a little and she sniffed again, then turned on her heel and began striding towards the staircase that led into the crypt of the tomb, heels clacking on the marble floor. Without looking back, she made a little flicking gesture with her wrist, which Alex took to mean “ Follow me and don’t touch anything.”

Alex reached out and flicked a finger against the great brass gong on a plinth next to the doorway and took great pleasure in watching Andrea flinch. She looked back over her shoulder and sniffed again. “Yes?”

Alex shrugged innocently. “Do you have a cold?”

Andrea didn’t answer, simply rolled her eyes, turned back around, and resumed her march, the sound of her footsteps echoing through the empty entrance hall. Alex followed, grinning.

Andrea led her through a small door just to the right of the stairs and through a narrow corridor into what looked like a pantry, stocked with shelves upon shelves of small, red-clay figurines, each with a small stylus laid next to them on the shelf. There was a gap on one of the shelves at hip height on her left.

“Nice collection,” said Alex, wracking her brain to try to remember if she was supposed to know what these things were.

Andrea clicked her tongue and pointed to the gap on the shelf. “It was removed some time last night. Nobody has been in except me. I have not been to count them since yesterday evening when I did the rounds before I left.”

Alex felt like she was being asked one of those strange logic problems. On Friday, Andrea has a cupboard full of 138 creepy clay art projects. Nobody goes in or out, but 24 hours later there are 137. Where did the little clay man go?

“And it couldn’t have just… wandered away?” Alex asked hopefully. 

Andrea rolled her eyes. “It’s a golem. It must be inscribed with the stylus to give it purpose and called by its name to give it breath.” She shot Alex a look. “But of course, you knew that already. You were making a joke.” She said “joke” in an ironic, exaggerated way, her accent thickening so it sounded like “dscho-oke”.

“Of course,” Alex agreed smoothly, smiling blithely. She could speak this language if she had to. “Well I hate to be difficult but I don’t see what you want me to do about it. This is your rogue magic, Lethe didn’t put down the binding spells to keep your little cabinet of monsters in place, did they?”

Andrea pursed her lips disapprovingly and clicked her tongue again. “The bindings were tampered with. I will fix them.” She fluttered a beautifully manicured hand, as if to wave off the annoyance of having to cast complicated binding spells on a weekend. “You must find this golem and de-animate it.” She turned and began walking back the way they had come.

“Me?” Spluttered Alex, following behind her.

Andrea nodded stiffly. “That is your role, no? Take care of rogue magic before it gets dangerous? Besides,” she added, glancing over her shoulder and looking Alex up and down once, “I think you will have better luck. Jewish family, no?”

Alex felt furious that she didn’t have the technical knowledge to tell whether Andrea was making a valid point or insinuating something vaguely unflattering. She also resented that, from the university’s perspective, Andrea was right. Alex didn’t like being called to heel or being sent to clean up other people’s messes, but that, to a large extent, was how the houses (and, by extension, the university administration) saw Lethe.

“And how exactly do I de-animate a golem?” She asked acidly. "Is there a handy button? Or maybe a ring-pull?"

“You must reclaim the name it took and return it to dust,” she said, as if that explained everything. “Say a Shem over it.”

“Return it to dust,” Alex repeated, skeptically. That was a phrase that felt  like it might be very much easier said than done. 

“Say a Shem over it,” Andrea repeated, and opened the front door, gesturing Alex back out into the heavy air. The sun had set while they were inside, and the street lamps cast double shadows.

Alex stepped out and took a deep breath. A Shem. That sounded vaguely familiar. She turned to ask Andrea what exactly that might entail, but found that the girl had already shut the door behind her.

“Bitch,” Alex muttered, and made her way down the steps and onto College street. A fucking golem. Someone else’s golem. And she was supposed to, what, say some magic words over it and return it to dust?

She was tired. She’d spent most of the day holed up at Il Bastone, researching first Hell and then Virginia Woolf, only taking a break to wander into the kitchen and make herself one of the little pots of gourmet instant mashed potatoes that Dawes had stocked the cupboards with before she had gone to stay with her sister for a few weeks. It had little croutons and rosemary in it. Alex missed Dawes for a lot of reasons, and she was reminded of this every time she opened the fridge and saw her collection of takeout containers and pickled jalapeños.

She was half way down College street and already pulling out her phone to hail a ride when a sudden breeze threw her hair up around her face, carrying with it the rotten, unmissable stink of the uncanny. She turned. It seemed to be coming from Grove street.

Go home , Alex thought. Go home and sleep. Do some more research, finish your essay. Whatever it is, it can wait.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a couple of greys drifting towards the cemetery, as if they, too, were pulled by the stench of the uncanny. Fuck. If it’s weird enough to draw greys to a cemetery at night… She sighed, pushed her hair out of her eyes, and headed down the street, towards Grove street cemetery.

As she turned the corner she was greeted by the sight of a familiar figure, crouching by police tape that cordoned off the main entrance to the cemetery, police cars blocking the gates.

The dead shall be raised , thought Alex ominously, and the inanimate shall wander around fucking up my summer of rest and relaxation. And, following the smell, she headed towards detective Abel Turner.

Chapter Text

Once or twice in his life, a man
is peeled like apples.
 
What’s left is a voice
that splits his being
 
down to the center.
We see: obscenity, fright, mud
 - Ilya Kaminsky, Musica Humana

As Alex approached him, she thought of the last time she’d seen detective Abel Turner. He had not been pleased with her. 

“You left me a body to find?”

“Sorry, you’re really hard to shop for.”

“Did you kill him?”

“I didn’t have to.”

Somehow it seemed to her that every time she saw him she was convinced it might be the last time, that he would finally be done with her bullshit for good and refuse to answer the next time she was in need.

“I’m pretty sure when my mother was talking about the devil, she had you in mind.”

“You’re not wrong,” muttered Alex under her breath. But there was no helping it. Greys were drifting through the iron-bar fencing and milling about inside the cemetery grounds. Just like the living, she thought, slowing their cars to gawk at the wreckage of a crash as they drive past. She had to get past the gates to find the source of the uncanny that was drawing them. She came to a stop a good 20 feet behind Turner and the assembled cops in uniform.

She pulled out her phone.

Nice suit , she texted him..  

It was. Abel Turner looked clean and sharp as ever, even standing amidst the turned earth and smears of clay that covered the ground just past the police tape he stood next to. She bet he got his hair cut weekly and never missed a day.

She saw him slip one hand into his pocket and pull out his phone to check the message. He read it, looked around, and his eyebrows shot up as he caught sight of her. He hesitated for a moment, then exchanged a few, brief words with the man beside him and stepped away from the other officers, joining her on the corner. 

“Stern.” He gave her a fleeting, ironic smile. “Thought you’d be spending the summer in the Hamptons or trashing someone’s Yacht.” He took a sip from the cardboard cup of coffee held casually in one hand. “The full Yale schedule.”

She quirked a brow at him. “You really still think I summer in the Hamptons, Turner?”

He didn’t, really, she could see it in the corner of a real smile pretending not to curl at the edges of his mouth. The street lamp above them flickered to life and the sudden flush of orange light cast their shadows in a doubled cross beneath them.

“What happened here?” She gestured at the scene before them.

“Alex.” He started, with an air of indulgence, “It’s good to see you when you’re not bleeding all over my shoes. But,” he gave her an easy, charming smile, “this is a crime scene. A man was killed here. And I can’t just let you walk through here. Sorry.”

He didn’t look sorry. He looked smooth and relaxed, as always. Alex was about to formulate a witty retort ( come on, Turner, this is like our origin story reunion. Deja vu and all that ), but the words died on her lips. Because just at that moment she was busy staring past him, at the place where the body must have lain until very recently. The patch of earth was covered in red clay, exactly the shade of the figurines in Scroll and Key’s pantry. The wind changed direction and once more she was hit by the rotten garbage smell of the uncanny. Looking back at Turner, she saw him watching her warily. 

She sucked her teeth, thinking. It was almost too obvious. The golem. The clay. The body… “I really think you’re gonna want to let me see what’s happened here,” she told him. 

He shifted so his back was between her and the officers milling around behind them and dropped his easy manner.

“Listen, Stern, sometimes a murder is just a murder. There’s no reason to think this has anything to do with your hooded maniacs.” He held her gaze. “So why don’t you run along and let me do my job, okay? 

Condescending asshole. So that’s how it was going to be, huh? Well, two could play that game. She dropped her friendly manner,. 

“Let me see the body.”

He laughed, not the false, clear laugh of officer friendly, but a low, almost threatening chuckle. “That’s not how this works.”

“Evidence suggests I’ll get my way in the end, detective. Might as well save us both a visit to the morgue and let me see it now.”

“Fuck off, Stern.”

“You’d miss me if I did.”

She couldn’t read him. A muscle ticked in his jaw and his eyes were bright, though with humour or frustration she couldn’t tell. 

Alex softened. “I’m not trying to get in yourway, Turner. Trust me,” she smiled humourlessly, “I prefer to stay away from cops if I can.”

“Police,” he corrected half heartedly.

Alex pressed on. “Sometimes a murder is just a murder but not this one —- don’t look at me like that. I have evidence.” Evidence might be a strong word for what she had, but he didn’t need to know that. He still looked unconvinced. Fine. 

“Do you smell that?” She asked, stepping in closer to him. “Smells like someone cracked some rotten eggs over the pavement and tried to scramble them with shit?”

“You’re truly a gifted poet, Alex. I can see why Yale values you so highly.”

“That,” she said, “is the smell of some magical bullshit gone wrong. You’ve smelled it on me before.  And unless I’m much mistaken it’s smeared all over your crime scene like someone stepped in dog shit and decided to clean it off on the grass.” She pulled back, crossed her arms. “So I think that as much as both of us would prefer otherwise, I can’t just run along .”

Turner was silent for a few moments. He grimaced, took another sip of coffee, and looked around. Alex could see his nostrils flaring.

“Alright. I'll call you tomorrow and we can talk.”

Alex was momentarily speechless. She let her arms drop. Just like that? She hadn’t actually expected him to give in. Had expected that she would need to do more wheedling and cajoling, maybe some more bullying of morgue assistants.

Turner noticed her raised eyebrows. He smiled again, this time wry, but honest. “I’m stubborn, Alex, not stupid. If you say you have evidence, I want to hear it. Your instincts have been right before. And it seems I’m willing to entertain the possibility that they might be right again.”

“Stop it, I’m blushing.”

 He shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe it himself. “Just… Try not to get into trouble for the next twenty-four hours. One body at a time is enough.” 

And with that, he walked away, still shaking his head very slightly.

Alex watched him go. God but it was strange to be working with a cop. She shivered. Old hang ups die hard and police in uniform still made her uneasy, made her want to melt away down a side street and out of sight. It’s all in the suit, she thought to herself. And that pretty smile. 

It was now almost fully dark, the scene lit by the orange glow of the street lamps and the white chemical beams of blacklight torches being flashed on the ground by forensic officers. Alex felt a single, large, warm raindrop hit her cheek and looked up. The clouds were pressing in, heavy and ominous, and the air felt pulled taught around her skin, electric.

The gas yellow glow of New Haven had coloured the undersides of the clouds a murky brown, like they were trying to disintegrate straight into the soil below, like they were full of mud.

Alex thought of her notes, scattered across the carpet back at Il Bastone, and sighed. Term wouldn’t start for another two weeks and already she felt like she was drowning in research projects. Modern British Classics, Golems , Darlington, Hell…

Darlington. Now that she had committed to finding a way to drag him out of whatever hellscape he was sequestered in, Alex had been working her way through different underworld mythologies for stories, clues about how to approach a trip to hell and back. She had started by actually reading The Inferno, which had given her a handful of notes on potentially auspicious locations to look for an entrance that she intended to check through with Dawes, and a whole lot of nightmares about screaming trees and cavernous stairs. She had move on to the Greeks, because she remembered they were pretty hot on flitting to hell and back, but had so far been frustrated by the Albemarle Book, which seemed to want her to learn Greek in order to find relevant texts. She began walking back along prospect street, peering though the fence of the cemetery and the rain now beginning to fall in earnest. She was going to have to shave a word with the house when she got back, she thought absently.

The greys inside caught sight of her and she averted her eyes, but they were already drifting towards her en mass, like another wave descending from the muddy skies. Alex shrugged her thin jacket around her shoulders and started singing Gloomy Sunday tunelessly under her breath. She had found it topping a list of “saddest songs ever”. ‘The Hungarian suicide song,’ they called it. She hoped nobody ever saw her search history. It worked, though, the greys scattering entirely before she had made it through the second verse. Some Orpheus she made.

She went on humming the rest, just to keep any stragglers away, but stopped after another minute. Was that…?

It was faint, but she had definitely heard something. An echo? She began humming again, ignoring the rain as it plastered her hair to her neck and soaked slowly through her clothes. There it was. No, not an echo… she looked around. The street was empty.

“Hello?” She called cautiously. Fucking set up to a horror movie, this.

The sound came again, floating gently to her through the drumming of the rain on the pavement, strange and tuneful and definitely nothing she had ever sung.

La espozica está n'el banyo,

Vestida de colorado,

Échate a la mar, échate a la mar y alcánsalo,

Échatea la mar

“Shit,” muttered Alex. This did not feel innocent.

Sí, a la mar yo bien m'echava,

Si la suegra licencia me dara,

Échate a la mar, échate a la mar y alcánsalo,

Échate a la mar.

Yeah, this was definitely not something she was going to walk into just now. Turner would kill her if she left him to find her body tomorrow.

She would give in to her better instincts. She would go back to Il Bastone. She would sleep. And tomorrow she would tackle this fucktonne of weird apparently bubbling up from under Grove Street.

She considered calling a ride, then decided against it, pocketed her phone, and began walking through the pounding rain towards Il Bastone. Home .

_______________________

Chapter Text

Alex dreamt of endless rain thundering down and caving her back in.  She dreamt of  running down a long, dim corridor with a ceiling that stretched up into darkness and no doors, hearing the heavy thud of giant footsteps close behind her. She was running towards a square of light at the end of the hallway. As she got closer, she saw that it was a glass case behind which a small jasmine bush crowded up against the pane, pressing outward. She was hurtling towards it quickly now, and could t seem to bring her legs to slow down. The footsteps still thudded along threateningly behind her. And the glass was flying towards her sickeningly fast, the glare of the reflection showing her a distorted image of her own face, eyes wide and black, mouth torn open in a scream, but her teeth sharp and gleaming, her hair a pool of black darker the surrounding night. Behind her was a shadow, huge and dull and ever shifting, continually disintegrating and reforming, like it was being torn apart and reshaped by an enormous hand, pushing it forward and onto her.

It reached for her and Alex tore her mouth open again to scream, but instead of sound, a Monarch flew out of her mouth and then she was smashing through the glass and into bright light. Her dream shattered.

She drifted.

Alex was eleven years old, sitting in her grandmother’s kitchen and playing with the walnuts on the table. Her grandmother was singing softly.

Ya salió de la mar la galana,

con un vestido de silma blanca.

Échate a la mar, échate a la mar y alcánsalo,

échate a la mar.

(The bride has emerged from the sea

with in a white silk dress

cast yourself into the sea,

cast yourself into the sea and reach him

cast yourself into the sea.)

Entre la mar i el río,

vestida de amariyo.

Échate a la mar, échate a la mar y alcánsalo,

échate a la mar.

(Between the sea and the river

dressed in yellow

cast yourself into the sea,

cast yourself into the sea and reach him

cast yourself into the sea.)

Entre la mar i l'arena/pinasco,

Mos cresió un árvol de canela.

Échate a la mar, échate a la mar y alcánsalo,

échate a la mar.

(Between the sea and the sand

a true cinnamon tree grew between us

cast yourself into the sea,

cast yourself into the sea and reach him

cast yourself into the sea.)

La novia se viste de amarillo,

ya se fue con su marido.

La novia se viste de colorado

ya se fue con su velado.

Ya salió de la mar la galana

ya salió de la mar

(The bride is dressed in yellow

she has gone off with her husband

the bride is dressed in red

she has gone off with her husband.

The bride has emerged from the sea

she has emerged from the sea.)

Alex was rolling walnuts between her palms and across the table so she would feel their little ridges and bumps..

“Come here and stir the pot,” said Estrella Stern. “And mind that you don’t burn it. I need those bones still.”

 Alex left the walnuts and drifted over to the stove. As she approached, the kitchen slid away and the stove was no longer a stove, but a great cauldron hanging over a cookfire. Alex stood on tiptoe and peered over the lip of the cauldron. Inside it swirled a vast, black ocean, rolling and forming whitecaps where it crashed against the sides of the cauldron. As she watched, several long, slender finger bones drifted in the waves, arranged in the shape of a hand, and they seemed to reach for her. Suddenly the sea seemed endless, the cauldron impossibly large.

Alex turned to her grandmother and laughed. “Avuela, how could I burn the ocean?” 

Her grandmother made no reply to her, but made the sign of the evil eye with one hand, and crushed a walnut with the other, continuing to sing.  

Ya salió de la mar la galana

con un vestido al y blanco

Ya salió de la mar.

Entre la mar y el rio,

mos creció un arbol de bimbrillo/membrillo.

Ya salió de la mar.

(The bride has emerged from the sea

dressed in pink and white

she has emerged from the sea.

Between the sea and the river

A quince tree grew between us

she has emerged from the sea.)

Alex had the sense of someone behind her, watching her, and turned around to look back into the pot. The ocean was on fire.

Mar, mar entre la mar y el río, échate.

Entre la mar y la arena,

mos creció un arbol de canela/almendra.

Ya salió de la mar

(Sea, between the sea and the river, cast yourself.

Between the sea and sand

a true cinnamon tree grew between us

she has emerged from the sea)

She cocked her head to the side and the world turned, the dream disintegrating.

—-

Alex dreamt of a cleaning in a shadowy forest, ringed by a moat of dark water. Darlington sat in the centre of the clearing, long legs crossed and hunched over with his back to her. Alex stepped over the water into the clearing, and as she approached she saw that he was bent over the ankle of his right foot, a sharp stylus gripped in one hand, scratching away at something. He turned as he heard her approach, and his face lit up.

“Alex,” he said, as if her name were a prayer. “You came.” He tilted his head and that lock of hair fell into his forehead. He was smiling at her knowingly. “I told them you’d come.”

Alex stared at his bare, bloodied ankle, and at the stylus he still held loosely in one hand, dripping blood onto the grass. It was made of bone. Falling to her knees in front of him, she reached out and traced the jagged lettering he had etched into the skin of his foot. Abandon all hope . Her fingers burned where she touched him and came away sticky. She looked up and met his clear eyes.

“Darlington?” She whispered.

“I told them you’d come,” he murmured gently, taking her bloody hand in his. “I told them you’d remember me. Come.” He stood abruptly, pulling her to her feet, their hands both slick with his blood. “Let me show you my kingdom.”

Alex couldn’t breathe. She tried to free her hand from his grip, but it was clamped tightly in his and he was tugging her along, pulling her out of the clearing, stepping over the moat and into the dark forest, leaving one bloodied footprint for every two steps he took.

“Darlington, cut the bullshit,” Alex said, annoyed and doing her best to keep the fear out of her voice.

He looked back at her and grinned, and his hair seemed wilder, his limbs longer, his gaze darker. “Alex.” He said, voice deeper and rougher now. “Alex.” It was no longer a prayer but a threat. A promise.

Alex yanked her hand free of his. “Where’s Darlington?” She demanded.

He laughed, and the leaves shook loose from the trees around her, catching and swirling in the air like little black snowflakes in a snow globe. “Not man; man once I was.”

Alex took a step backward, shaking her head. This was a dream. This had to end. Let me out of here you fucking bitch , Alex thought furiously at her mind. Darlington took a step towards her.

“Art thou, too, of the other fools?

Here pity lives when it is wholly dead;

Who is a greater reprobate than he

Who feels compassion at the doom divine?”

Alex took another step backwards and felt her foot sink into water, biting cold and much deeper than it should be, and then she was falling.

—-

Gasping, she shot upright in her bed. Her heart was racing and for a moment she thought she could see the white finger bones stretching towards her out of the darkness, but as she gripped the sheets and forced her eyes to focus she saw that it was only slivers of palest dawn light winding between the curtains and wrapping around their fringed edges in distorted ridges.  She was breathing hard and trying to slow the hammering of her pulse in her neck.

Annoyed with herself, Alex tossed the covers off her and slipped out of the bed, stumbling a little. She was still a little shaky on her feet when she made it up the stairs and into the Virgil bathroom. The white tiles felt cool under her feet, and she realised she was leaving faint, damp footprints of sweat on the clean floor. She looked up and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, face harrowed and pale, the large grey t-shirt she had been sleeping in plastered to her body, sweat patched visible. She looked like some kind of wraith. She had filled out a little during her first year at Yale, but the summer seemed to be eating it away again, leaving her as ropey as before, though her skin tinted a little darker.

She turned her back on her reflection, pulled the t-shirt over her head and stepped under the rain shower, turning it to the highest temperature and sitting down on the tiles. The water at Il Bastone always took a while to warm up, the old pipes having escaped any magical renovations that had been undertaken in the years since it was first built. But Alex didn’t mind. She could tell herself that her shuddering breaths were from the shock of cold water that rained down on her, before it slowly began to warm and steam filled the room. She had felt irrationally guilty about using the Virgil bathroom at the start of summer, but personal interest and the lure of the rain shower had won out in the end over the hazy and non-specific sense that she was intruding. 

The air in the room was gradually thickening with steam, and Alex felt her muscles loosen a little. She pulled her legs up and slung her arms around them, resting one temple on her knees and staring blankly at the clean white and blue tiles. She still struggled to conceive of bathrooms without black mould in all the corners and between all the tiles. This strange life of borrowed luxury felt like a veneer of bleach that could not remove a stain.

She propped her chin on her knees and looked down at her hands. No blood. Of course there was no blood. The warm water washed the dirt out from under her fingernails and she watched it trickle in a stream towards the drain. A little line of grit and black sand. She thought of the turned earth and red clay of the crime scene, dug up like someone had tried to bury the body in the entrance to the cemetery. Police crawling over the scene like ants on a mound.

Turning over the scene in her mind, her thoughts stumbled and caught on seeing Turner again. On the strange sense of deja vu, almost the way seeing Tara dead for the first time had taken her back to Hellie. Deja vu. Only this time, he had listened. She got the sense that his barbs were now more formality than malice. And he was taking her seriously. Nobody had ever done that before, not really. Not her mother, not Len, not Hellie, not Sandow, not even Darlington.

Alex flexed her hand, watching the bones ripple under her skin. She thought of Turner’s fingers drumming on his coffee cup, the tap tap tap of his nails scraping the plastic lid, like a prelude to the rain. His hands slender and his fingers long, like Darlington’s. Darlington had a pianist’s hands, all delicate joints and smooth skin, except for that small burn mark just on the inside of his wrist, on the raised flesh of his thumb joint. Tracery of dark blue veins visible through the skin. She doubted Turner’s hands would be smooth. Quick fingers with callouses and scars, clever but not clean… Estrella Stern wouldn’t have trusted any of them, her pretty men with tempting hands. 

Abruptly, Alex felt flushed and strangely guilty. She could have slapped herself. What the hell was she doing? She turned the water off and stepped out of the shower, wrapping one towel around herself and another around her hair. She opened the cabinet above the sink, fished around, and pulled out a bottle of codeine pills. She put two in her mouth, bent over, and swallowed them with a mouthful of water straight from the tap.

Shuffling out of the bathroom, she didn’t bother going downstairs. She crawled back the massive bed in Virgil’s rooms and slept dreamlessly.

Chapter Text

When Alex finally awoke it was early afternoon and her brain felt puffy and swollen, like someone had stretched it out and filled her grey matter with wads of cotton soaked in sleep and listerine. She ate a sad breakfast of toaster waffles and gatorade and spent the next hour dedicating herself to researching the history of Grove Street cemetery.

 Her first thought had been to see if there were any clues to there being a nexus there, so she scoured archived issues of The Daily New Havener for any instances of suspicious deaths occurring on the site. But none of Bellebalm’s (-no, Daisy’s) victims had been anywhere near grove street when she killed them. Ate them. Alex shuddered. If there was another method of making nexuses, Alex didn’t know it, didn’t want to know it, and as the Lethe library held no clues to the contrary, she decided to rule out the possibility of a nexus. She spent the next hour in considerable frustration trying to refine her search to suit the library’s pedantic tastes. There were only so many obituaries she could struggle through in search of something -anything- that might help her. Sure, there were plenty of entries in the Lethe house record about Aurelian rites to inscribe gravestones and the occasional intelligence-gathering resurrection by Book and Snake, but nothing to indicate shit spontaneously manifesting or creepy singing.

All she had to show for her work was a tracing she’d sketched out of the land that Grove Street had been built on — an empty plot of semi-urban wilderness with a stream running through the middle of it and coming out into a canal that ran alongside the cemetery walls. She supposed they must have paved it over or that it had dried up in the years since New Haven had started graciously disposing of  its wealthy deceased in the Grove Street green. 

Alex slid the Albemarle book back onto the shelf with a sigh. Time for a new angle. She thought for a minute, then pulled the book back out, opened it to the page that held the substance of her afternoon’s work,, and wrote ‘ghosts singing’ underneath her last entry (Suspicious deaths near Grove Street cemetery, New Haven). She replaced the book and waited.

The shelf groaned a little, then stilled. Alex pushed the library open and a gust of cold air rose up to her, smelling like damp stones and the gentle rot of wet leaves. Stepping inside, Alex could just about make out the outlines of rows upon rows of shelving in the dim light of gas flames flickering on the walls. She reached out and ran her finger down the spine of a large, leather-bound book and it left a clean streak through the thick layer of grey dust. A cobweb blew gently into Alex’s face and she waved it away with one hand. She felt like she was in one of Len’s video games, retrieving some treasure from a dank dungeon to add to her tool belt. 

Surveying the books, she realised almost all of them, beneath the layer of dust, were children’s books. Fairytales, myths, legends, a few Grimoires, the occasional newspaper clipping about changeling children left in their cradles at the edge of the woods tucked between the pages of the heavy tomes. Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, bound in bottle green vellum and pages brittle with age; at least twenty different editions of Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen , most in indecipherable slanting gothic German script, with notes and marginalia in a slew of different languages and alphabets; a few academic books like Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio ; Archetypes and Motifs in Folklore and Literature: A Handbook ; Unbecoming Female Monsters: Witches, Vampires and Virgins; several books on sirens, including: Sirens - a study in autoerotic bloodlust and Hymns for the Dead and Dying at Sea, which was an exercise in guesswork written entirely in Linear B. Fairytales and stories about Banshees, Women in White, Sirens, and a whole section dedicated to academic postulations on the purpose of the funeral songs of the ancient Greeks, and how to read the fragmented records of their music.

Sighing, Alex closed another heavy volume of Maleus Maleficarum and heaved it back onto the shelf. Darlington’s voice trailed through her mind, “Gloves, Stern! Some of these books are hundreds of years old!”

Trailing her fingers along the spines of the books on the shelf, her attention caught on a slim volume bound in a light tan felt softcover and embossed with gold at the fringes. Canciones del Dolor . Pulling it out, she flicked through to the page of contents and ran her finger down the list. Aqua vitae. La Mala Hora. La Llorona . Alex stopped. That name rang a bell. La Llorona. Wasn’t she some kind of woman in white who haunted rivers? Alex had always kept a weary distance from local stories of ghosts and the like in California, perhaps intuitively knowing that it was better not to know details of the greys around her, but she remembered now the stories she’d heard as a child, her grandmother refusing to let her play near rivers. California wasn’t Mexico, but Alex remembered plenty of stories about children drowning in the Los Angeles river, and something about the dry, concrete heat of city basins sprawling over hills burning through their own brush year by year cast an echoing, distorted mirror to the sands of the Mexican deserts. And hadn’t the voice been singing in Spanish? Or something very near it, anyway, the old mishmash of Hebrew and Spanish her grandmother muttered in as she cracked walnuts and pounded herbs for soup?

Turning to the page listed for La Llorona, Alex lifted the thin tissue-guard paper covering an embossed picture plate of a woman standing on the shore of a great river rendered in dark, oily colours but for the gleaming zinc oxide of her dress, her back to Alex and the long sheaf of her hair hanging down her back in delicate brushstrokes. Something about the picture put Alex on edge, made the silence around her hang more heavily in the air, pressing against her ear drums. Frowning at herself, Alex moved on, leafing through the rest of the section. It outlined a series of origin myths for La Llorona, the wailing woman who cries into the night for her lost children, whom she killed.

Variously, she either drowned her children and then herself in fear or spite of her husband, or, distraught after her husband or lover had drowned their children, threw herself into the same river.

“That’s it?” Alex muttered to herself, turning the page to find the next section, which concerned early Spanish translations of Sappho’s lamentations. “Come on, buddy, I’m gonna need more from you than that.”

Replacing the book on the shelf, Alex exited the library and grabbed her notebook from her room (the Dante rooms, she reminded herself sternly, nothing here is yours , so don’t get too comfortable) and headed back down.

Alright. She squared her shoulders and pulled the Albemarle book back out. Let’s see what you’ve got .

—————-

A few hours later, Alex rolled her neck, bones cracking loudly, put down her pencil, and surveyed the stack of books and loose note paper that surrounded her. For the sake of comfort, she had retrieved several volumesshe deemed relevant and bunkered down on the plush carpet of the living room. When she had asked the Lethe library for information on La Llorona, it had opened with a woody whiff of toasting corn and the fruity tickle of dried chiles, and Alex had been unable to stop her stomach growling, eventually leaving the library in favour of the living room floor and pot noodles (she could hear Darlington’s again, something about eating over ancient books. She took great care not to splatter greasy MSG goodness on the parchment).

Now, she sat surrounded by pages of notes on the origins, symbolism, motifs and close encounters of La Llorona, as well as notes on La Malinche and a good handful on the various Aztec goddesses (Cihuacoatl and Chalchiuhtliycue) the myth of La Llorona had supposedly likely grown out of. 

She scoffed. Myth. Not so sure about that.

She had also compiled a list of all mothers buried in Grove Street after committing suicide, and had circled in red the ones who’s children were buried with them, and had copied out translations of multiple Ladino lullabies that concerned water and suicide (a more common theme than she’d realised).

She had texted Dawes her findings, and had received a string of messages in reply, a list of useful artefacts to arm herself with when confronting vengeful spirits, and confirmation that Grove Street was indeed built on an old river bed, the location chosen by Senator James Hillhouse in 1796 after an outbreak of yellow fever in New Haven. There were rumours that he had been influenced by an early occult practitioner under the mistaken belief that he could access the power of borderland rivers by consecrating the ground so as to ease the crossing of the dead into the next world. 

Don’t go at it alone, Dawes had added, Take care of yourself, Alex .

Alex rubbed at her temples and checked her phone again. No word from Turner, yet. She didn’t want to feel disappointed, didn’t want to admit that she’d been hoping for his support, or at the very least his cooperation in figuring out this tangle of disparate threads that all seemed to centre around Grove Street. But maybe she liked having him in her corner, that tether to the real world, outside Lethe, outside Yale, a reminder that demons and ghouls and ghosts lived in her world, rather than she in theirs. But if she had to do this the hard way, that was fine - that was her way anyway.

Early evening light was filtering in through the windows and splaying buttery fingers of light across the carpet. She sat back, suddenly feeling swallowed by the silence of the place. Il Bastone had never felt lonely to her before, had always felt like the house itself was keeping her company, but now she felt like a small creature staring down dusk alone. 

Rousing herself, Alex got to her feet, crammed her notes into her satchel and headed to the armoury for supplies. Bone dust. A small, sharp knife made entirely of flint ( a sacrificial knife, Dawes had said. Vengeful ghosts in folklore often leave behind sacrificial knives in the place of souls they’ve taken. So hopefully that should mean if you have a knife it will consider you already of its world and not worth taking. “I’m always hopeful,” Alex muttered. She was just happy to have a knife).  A beeswax candle and lighter. And… Alex paused on her way to the door, then turned right into the kitchen and filled a Tupperware with coarse sea salt, not sure exactly what drove her to do it, but she felt safer with it stashed in her bag. 

She stood in front of the door, gnawing on her lip, sweat already dampening the hairs at the nape of her neck. With an effort, she lowered her shoulders, reached for the door handle, and stepped out into the damp, fading sunlight, headed for Grove Street.

_____________

“I thought salt kept them out.”

“Did you see that on television?”

“Would it make you happier if I say I learned it from an ancient book?”

“Actually, yes.”

“Too bad.”

“Salt is a purifier, so it’s good for banishing demons— though to my great sorrow I’ve never personally had the honour.”

Chapter Text

26 ‘In loving memory of’s

13 ‘Sacred to the Memory of’s

8 ‘In Affectionate Remembrance of’s

2 ‘Peacefully Sleeping’s

And one noteworthy instance of ‘Remembered by all, missed by one’, onto which someone had etched an extra ‘n’ before the ‘one’.

But no sign of anything spooky beyond the usual standards of a graveyard full of mouldering tombs in the fading light of an endless summer evening. Alex wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but she had traced a winding path in pursuit of her list of dead mothers, and had so far gotten nothing out of it except several badly bruised toes from tripping over gravestones in the half light.

The sun hung low and hazy in the sky, the air thick and cloying with the smell of elderflower and jasmine blooming in sprawling bushes at the cemetery gates wafting up towards her.

Stepping carefully around an enormous stylised amphora made of black marble (“14,” she hummed under her breath, eyeing the gold embossed Sacred to the Memory of Eliza Whitby ), Alex retraced her steps the the path, then took a left where before she had gone right, picking her way uphill through mossy stones and creeping vines, flashing her torch over the names on the graves. Her restless night’s sleep must have been catching up to her, because she stumbled, tripping over a loose stone.

No, not a loose stone. A slab. Lying propped at an angle at the foot of the grave to her right. Shining her torch on the headstone, she saw that there was no description, only a cylinder of curled red bark laid atop the stone. 

Leaning in closer, she was hit by a waft of spicy cinnamon. Brow furrowed, Alex tucked her hand into the fabric of her shirt and carefully reached out to pick it up. It was heavy and a little soft. Not cinnamon at all, but red clay, half baked in the heat of the day but still malleable. She reached into her satchel and pulled out her note paper, carefully wrapped it around the clay, and tucked the edges up around it. She didn’t feel like doing forensic research in a graveyard at dusk. She would take it back to Il Bastone and see what she could find out about it.

Glancing back down, Alex frowned at the slab of limestone she had stumbled over. There were faint letters etched onto it, worn away by time and weather.

Entrance .

Tipping the slab aside, Alex looked down through a hole into a narrow tunnel carved into the hillside.

“Hell,” Alex muttered. She missed California. There, the horrors of her life had felt real, had felt like they at least belonged to her age. New Haven’s gothic pretentions were really grinding on her nerves. It made her feel like she was in a Scooby-doo story, like she should be able to tear off the mask to reveal the irritable groundskeeper. 

But she knew better. And so she gripped her flint knife, adjusted her satchel, and lowered herself into the hole.

It was barely big enough to stand up in, shallow enough that she could haul herself back out without too much effort at the entrance.

This might be one of my worse ideas , she admitted to herself, and started off down the tunnel, flashlight illuminating the way ahead in a hazy stretch of light, sloping walls gleaming with drips of moisture. As she went deeper, the tunnel widened, and the loamy smell of earth intensified, the air growing more frigid. The drops of water on the walls gradually turned to trickles, little streaming rivulets that turned the earth muddy under her feet, sucking wetly at her boots with every step she took. After what might have been two minutes or ten, Alex came to a point where the path split in two. Both looked identical to her, and she paused, squinting and listening for any clue to help her.

And there it was. A faint sound, almost like rustling leaves, or maybe like the burble of water, coming from the path on the right. She followed the sloping ground towards the sound, and after a while the roof of the tunnel slanted upwards and opened into a rocky cavern, bisected by a wide stream of water flowing rapidly out of the darkness to her left and into the shadows to her right. The rushing of water echoed up to her, and with it came a faint humming sound, like the buzz of electrical wires turned to melody, and she was just about able to make out the sound of words, warped nearly unrecognisable.

Alex approached carefully. “What do you want?” She shouted out across the cave, knife gripped tightly in her right hand. There was a pause, then the singing resumed, closer and more clearly.

Porque lloras blanca niña,

porque lloras blanca flor?

lloro por vos caballero

que vos vas y me dejas

It was a melody that smelled like wet flowers. Invisible, overpowering, somehow it reached inside Alex and tugged. Some part of her knew that she should turn around. Some small remnant of her self preservation demanded that she stuff her fingers in her ears and run from this place. But she realised with a vague and very distant sense of horror that she was no longer in control of the forward motion of her limbs. That her legs were carrying her towards the sound without her having consciously instructed them to do so. The sound of that voice pierced her skin, it penetrated her muscles and jabbed at them, smothering the neurons firing weakly in protest in her brain. 

So una sin todo amor

So una, lloro kon dolor

Tengo solo mi cian

She was dimly aware of a splash as she stepped into the water, the stream ahead of her seeming somehow to have widened into a river, the other shore now looking further and further away. And on the shore, darkness. Textured and somehow thick, a bruised, magnetic black, broken only by a faint gleam of white fluttering like a veil. And I’m that instant she was overcome with a paralysing, unutterable sense of loss. No, not just loss, but mourning . 

Me dejas niña y muchacha

chica y de poca edad.

tengo niños chiquiticos

lloran y demandan pan

She felt what it was to be fifteen and staring down the loss of a home with her mother, felt herself at twenty, losing Hellie with none of the vengeful wrath that had occupied the upper layers of her brain, falling instead into an ache that carved out her abdomen and left her hollow, aching with a listless hunger she did not wish to fill. And she felt the sadness of the voice singing to her, beckoning her to cry.

Venderes viñas y campos,

media patre de la sivdad.

venderes viñas y campos

de la patre de la mar

Alex felt her lips moving and was surprised to find that she was singing along, the word coming out in a lurching stutter, as if they were being pulled like teeth from the gaping maw of  blank pain welling up somewhere deeper inside her chest. Cold water lapped over her shoes, pulled at her ankles, and she took another step forwards. The shore seemed even further now, and somewhere behind her eye was a voice shouting that this was bad, this was wrong—

Vos asperares a los siete años

si no, a los Échate a la mar, échate a la mar y alcánsalo,

échate a la mar.

She tasted salt, reached up numbly and felt her that her face was wet. Stop , she ordered her legs, jerking with all her remaining willand they did, buckling underneath her so that she fell to her knees in the water, the shock ricocheting through her body as she caught herself on her hands. It was so cold. Colder than freezing, like she felt the water trying to form ice around her wrists and failing to solidify, tiny ripples emanating from the places where her hot tears fell into the icy water. Still crying, she thought, why am I still crying?  

But in that moment she noticed the silence. Her lips had stopped moving. The river had stopped rushing. The keening thrum of that ghostly voice had fallen away. The only sound was the quiet drip of her tears hitting the water.

Wrenching her head up, Alex searched the shoreline for the flash of white, her mind surging back into focus like a head rush, and she staggered to her feet. Nothing. Only a black darkness spreading like an ink stain towards her from the distant opposite shore. And then a rustling sound, padding, shuffling, clicking and the sound of growling, animal breath.

No , Alex had time to think. Fucking. No. Enough with the fucking hounds!

And then she tore her feet loose from the river’s icy hold and ran, splashing, shivering, fighting her way back the way she had come, muscles spasming from the cold. She heard a splash from the distant shore as something jumped I to the water after her. Legs pumping, knife still in hand, Alex scrambled out of the river and back up the passageway. A howl echoed from behind her, closer now, and she forced herself to go faster, desperately climbing higher as the tunnel slopes upwards. Darlington flashed through her mind — “You're in terrible shape” — and she swore to him, to herself, to anyone listening that if she got out of this alive she would start actually exercising. 

She heard the clicking of claws on rock close behind her, heard one howl, then another, then a third, all ricochetting towards her back. Was there more than one of them? Rounding a corner, she caught sight of a dim pinprick of light in the distance, weak evening light falling through the entrance above. Alex cast a look over her shoulder but could see nothing but the damp, dark tunnel stretching behind her. 

And then she stumbled, catching herself awkwardly on her arm, the knife flying from her hand in the same moment as she felt a pair of jaws clamp down on her leg. Alex screamed. There was no head, no teeth that she could see, only teeth marks in her leg and pain, pain, shooting up her leg like a jolt tearing into her heart. A second pair of invisible jaws shut on her ankle and she screamed again, grappling desperately with her satchel, pulling it open and grabbing the container of salt. She ripped it open, bringing out a fistful and flinging it at her leg with no real intention or plan, unable to think straighy.

The jaws released with a whine, and Alex drew in a shuddering breath, rolling away. Shining her flashlight down, she saw the salt seemingly suspended in mid-air, showing her the outline of the body of an enormous hound that branched at the neck into three great heads, all whimpering and twitching, her blood dripping in glistening strands from its mouths. They howled in unison again and the hound shook itself, dispelling the salt and dirt that had landed on it. She heard it padding towards her again, slower now that she was lying on the ground before it, heard it’s panting, felt it’s fetid breath sweep over her body.

Not for the first time, Alex Stern was facing down a monstrous hound with nothing on her side except her wits, salt container lying empty at her side and knife out of reach. And again, not for the first time, and not knowing where exactly it came from,  she found herself opening her mouth and singing into the face of danger. The words came to her from somewhere unidentifiable, carried on a rasping voice by fear and desperation.

Ven kerida, ven amada,

Ven al bodre de la mar.

Ven te kontaré mis males,

Ke te metas a yorar.

Come beloved, come my love

Come to the edge of the sea.

Come, so I may tell you what ills me

So much that you'll start to cry.

Haltingly at first, and then stronger as she heard a low whine.

Guerfanó de padre i madre,

Yo no tengo onde arrimar.

I am an orphan, motherless, fatherless

I have nowhere that I can go.

She heard the soft padding of the beast’s feet, felt its hot breath on her neck as it circled behind her, sniffing at her. She felt a drip of her own blood fall from its mouth into her shoulder. 

Estira la tu pierna,

Un poko m'arrimare

Stretch out your leg,

I'll move over a little bit.

A tail brushed her side. She felt the hot air move against her as it slunk past her and heard it’s claws clicking on the stone as it padded away back down the hallway. Breathing heavily and still unsure if she was out of danger, she kept singing.

Azeré un buen esuenyo,

En tus brasos muereré

I'll have a very good dream

In your arms I will die.

She held the last note as long as she could. It took everything in her not to collapse on the tunnel floor, but she braced her arms against the rocky, earthen walls, testing her weight on her leg. 

“Uh-uh,” she managed to hiss out. Pulling herself with her arms and pushing with her one good leg, Alex dragged herself forward, toward the square of light ahead, so close now that she could smell the fresh air, heavy with jasmine and oncoming rain.

With a monumental effort, Alex heaved her body up over the lip of the tunnel and pulled with all her might on the stone slab, slamming it back in place over the entrance to the tomb, rolling off the grave and scraping her torn leg painfully over gravel as she did so. Gasping in ragged breaths, she fell flat on her back, and stared up at the faintest glint of stars appearing, sucking in lungfuls of air. After a moment, she braced herself up on her elbows to look down at her leg, which was bleeding into the dirt. 

There was a powdery white crust building up around the ragged edges of her torn flesh where the creature’s teeth had ripped through her jeans, and it stung fiercely. 

“Shit”, she whispered, reaching down to probe the wound gingerly with her fingers, a hiss escaping between her gritted teeth. Her hand came away wet with thin, watery blood. “Shit!”

The setting sun was casting golden light at a sharp slant across the sky and the shadows pooling out from the gravestones looked eerily long and spindly, stretching towards her like grasping hands. Grunting, Alex gripped the cold edge of the nearest grave and tried to haul herself to her feet. But as she pulled herself upright, she was overtaken by a wave of dizziness, her vision clouding purple and brown with a sea of stars, and fell backwards again, landing awkwardly on her injured leg and letting out a noise somewhere between a hiss and a groan. 

Biting down hard on her lip, she heaved herself back up and gripped the stone tightly until her vision cleared enough to see. She tasted blood. 

Step by staggering step, she lurched forwards, away from the grave and towards the street lamps flickering on just beyond the cemetery gates. Moving sent waves of dizziness through her. All of her limbs felt unconscionably heavy. She felt her eyes drooping to the ground, all the sounds of evening seeming to come from far away. She was nearly at the gates — just a bit further, she tried to tell herself, just get out and get back home.

Distantly, she heard hurried footsteps on gravel, and it took her a moment to register that they were getting louder. The edges of her vision were becoming a blurry mass of hazy stars. Her eyelids drooped.

Suddenly, a pair of shoes appeared directly in her line of sight. In another moment there was one hand on her shoulder and another hovering in front of her face. She stumbled backwards, tripping over a grave and a pair of arms shot out to catch her. 

“Alex?” She heard a voice call, as if from a great distance, the sound strangely compressed, like it was coming to her through a bad phone line. She felt herself being pulled upright and blinked hazily, squinting up at the face of detective Abel Turner, lit by the golden glow of the sunset, and staring at her with what might have been twenty conflicting emotions chasing each other across his face, gilded by the sunset and gorgeous as ever. 

“Alex?” He said again. 

She blinked slowly at him. “Hey,” she managed with a forced smile. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

He was holding her upright, glancing her up and down for signs of injury, catching on her bloody leg. He squeezed his eyes shut, pressing his lips into a hard line.

“Shit.” He said. “Shit.” Alex found this very funny.

Ignoring her giggles, Turner bent his knees, looped an arm around her waist and slung one of hers over his shoulder, then proceeded to half haul, half carry her through the cemetery gates and over to the passenger side of his car. Lifting her arm from his shoulders, he leaned her up against the car.

What am I, a prop dummy? Alex thought to herself, a little indignant, but the moment he let go of her to open the car door, her leg gave way and she slipped down a little, and Turner lurched back towards her, catching her by the armpits and pushing her upright against the car with his body so they were pressed chest to chest.

“Gotta say,” Alex found herself saying, “it’s a whole different dynamic being pushed up against a car by a cop this way round.” 

His eyes narrowed and he glowered at her, but that just made him look more like an avenging angel, glowing with some divine fire, skin gleaming in the slanting sunlight. 

Not helpful , she noted mentally. She was clearly becoming delirious. She felt like she was running a fever. Turner smelled faintly of sandalwood and almonds under a crisp laundry smell. Alex could practically hear his teeth grinding, something in him clearly fraying.

“You,” he said, jabbing an accusatory finger in her direction, “need help. I’m beginning to think you’re pathologically incapable of walking away from trouble. What happened?”

Her brain felt blurry. She shrugged. “The dead shall be raised,” she said, not entirely in control of where her brain and her mouth was leading her. Turner’s expression told her that he was losing patience, fast.

“What is it going to take for you to start taking threats to your life seriously?” He ground out, pressing into her with a fierce look in his eye, and Alex stiffened against him, because in that moment she was suddenly very aware of their height difference, of how broad his shoulders were, of how injured and alone she was. She had learned to survive by avoiding situations like this when she was in no state to fight her way out of them.

And Turner must have felt her freeze because his eyes widened and he cursed, loosening his hold on her.

“Jesus, Stern. You really think I’d hurt you?” He looked genuinely alarmed.

Alex didn’t know what to think. Didn’t know where anyone would draw a line, had been shoved across too many boundaries to really trust that she was safe behind doors and walls, let alone pushed up against a car with a cop. Wasn’t sure she could keep up any semblance of bravado right now.

So she just said, “Get me out of here, Turner.”

He gave her a long, searching look. Up this close Alex could see the downward tilt of his lashes, could see their shadows reflected in his eyes. His jaw was still wound tight, but his eyes had lost their focused fierceness, were looking at her questioningly instead, like he might find an answer in the lines of her face. Still holding Alex up with one hand, he reached over and opened the passenger side door and slid her inside, hurrying around the hood of the car and sliding into the driver's seat, looking tense.

He started the car and pulled onto the road, fingers drumming angrily on the wheel, and sighed. “Fucking hell, Stern, when’s the last time you went three weeks without getting beat up?”

“Hey,” she protested weakly, “this is my first near death experience of the summer, okay?”

“Yeah, well.” He turned a corner sharply and Alex winced as she was rolled onto her injured leg. He glanced over and looked immediately contrite. “We can throw you a party later. I’m taking you to hospital.”

“No hospital.” Alex was trying to take deep breaths. Wasn’t that supposed to be good for everything? The edges of her vision came marginally more into focus.

“Shit,” Turner snorted, “not this again.” He turned another corner, though noticeably more carefully. ”Don’t tell me. You’re just gonna take another bath in camel milk.” 

Alex nodded, shook her head, then groaned as the world spun. The wound in her leg throbbed with a pulsing pain and it was becoming more and more difficult to focus on anything else. “I don’t know. Maybe. Just take me to il bastone alright? I’ll text Dawes. She’ll know what to do.” She closed her eyes.

Turner was silent for a moment, and Alex was distinctly aware that he might not listen to her. Might just take her to hospital and dump her there. He exhaled harshly. After a moment of silence, he relented. 

“Fine.” 

Alex forced her eyes open and concentrated all her effort on trying to lift her hips, propping herself up on one hand and fumbling with her back pocket for her phone. With a muffled grunt of pain, she pulled it out and dropped her weight back into the seat.

Alex sent Dawes a brief voice note, filling her in on the situation as best she could given her current  limited capacity to form thoughts in full sentences. Beside her, Turner’s eyes widened as she talked and his eyebrows seemed to be trying to migrate all the way up his forehead and off his face. Once or twice he made a little noise as if intending to protest, but thinking better of it.

And maybe, maybe , someone out there was still looking out for her – at least a little – because Dawes replied immediately, with a long series of exclamation marks before anything else. Then,

An underworld river? Under Grove Street?? And a demonic hound??? Shit.

And you said it’s stinging and that there’s a white crust forming on it? And you’re really lightheaded?

Maybe. I think so. Yes. Alex texted back. What do I do.

Three dots appeared and Alex waited, trying to keep the stars from her vision. Turner was casting her worried glances, which he clearly thought she couldn't see. Then, finally, the screen changed to an incoming call and Alex picked up immediately.

“ Okay, so this is just a theory ,” Dawes’ voice came from the speaker, tinny and worried. “ But I think the something in the bite is drawing the salt out of your blood and it’s crusting around the wound. It’s not unheard of for rivers of the underworld to… Well… Sources vary but-– ” Alex could practically hear her gnawing on her lip “ -- well… Some Greeks believed that the rivers of hell were, um. Hungry. That Lethe would steal your memories if you fell into it. The Cocytus would steal your voice… And I think… I think you may have entered the river Acheron.”

“The river of…” Alex fumbled, trying to remember her research into the Greek underworld.

“Pain.” Dawes supplied. “ I think you waded into the river of pain and sorrow, Alex, and cried into it. And now it’s trying to draw the rest of the salt out of you. I think. The Acheron is trying to steal your tears.”

“You think ?” Turner cut in.

“ Turner ?” Came Dawes’ voice.

“I trust Dawes’ theories more than most wonders of modern medicine,” Alex ground out. “What do I do about it, Dawes?”

She was silent a moment.

“... there’s a set of clear glass beads in the desk drawers in the armoury. The marbles of Jiaohe. They should just be loose in there, they don’t like not being able to move around a bit.”  

(Turner snorted softly.) 

“This won’t be pleasant but… you’ve got to heat them over a flame and place them in the open wound. They can draw any poison out of blood, so I’m hoping they can draw out whatever remnants of the Acheron might be in your bloodstream that are causing this.”

“Great,” huffed Alex, struggling to concentrate. “And that’s it?”

“More or less. You’ll still have lost a lot of blood, and you’ll still have the wound to deal with but,” she drew breath and said more confidently, “you should be fine. The marbles should restore your bloodsalts to a similar level as they were before the wound. Take another bath in the crucible if you don’t want to go to hospital.”

“Dawes, you’re an angel among devils and a genius and none of us deserve you.” Alex felt like there was an enormous weight attached to the back of her brain, pulling her backwards and tempting her with oblivion.

“Just… try not to die before I get back, Alex.” Dawes sounded tired.

Alex grimaced. “You colluding with Turner or something? I’ll see you soon Dawes.” She hung up just as they were drawing up to Il Bastone.

Turner helped her out of the car and together they limped up the steps to the door, which swung open for them. Alex was trying not to throw up or pass out, focusing all her energy on staying upright. They stumbled through the entry and up the stairs into the armoury, where Turner deposited her on the desk chair and started opening drawers at random, lifting boxes and rifling through papers.

“Wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she told him distantly, drifting a little way outside of full consciousness. “Some things in the drawers prefer not to be disturbed. Try the top drawer?” She had seen loose marbles rolling around in there the other day, when she had been looking for a translation stone.

He swore and knelt down next to her, opening the top drawer and reaching in for the marbles, then turned to her. “Alex? Alex, Are you still with me?” 

She heard him as if from a great distance, echoing down a hallway to her. Her eyes fluttered closed and against their lids she saw a blue flame dancing wildly, like the flame of a match flickering in the wind. Turner had reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, which was nice. Warm. Comforting. His hand felt bigger on her than it had looked holding that cup of coffee, nearly encircling her shoulder. Then the hand was gone and Alex wanted to protest, but couldn’t get herself to move enough to make it happen. The flame was thinning out, drawing itself into a circle, and the circle began spinning. Alex was dizzy.

Suddenly, a searing pain on her leg had her yelping and jerking forward. It felt like someone was branding her. A second stab of pain joined the first, and Alex opened her eyes, intending to protest. She looked down, her vision clearing just enough to show her the outline of Abel Turner on his knees before her, bent over her outstretched leg, holding a lighter to the small collection of marbles nestled inside her wound. As the pain intensified, her vision cleared further, and she felt herself settling back into her body a little. The marbles were no longer clear, but seemed instead to be filled with a swirling grey smoke that pulsed and grew darker as she watched. She became suddenly aware of Turner’s hand tucked behind her knee to hold her leg steady while he held the lighter over the marbles with his other hand.

Alex tipped her head back again. “Is that your lighter?” she asked the ceiling, confusedly. This suddenly seemed like an intriguing possibility, though Alex’s brain was still too foggy to provide her with any information as to why she found it interesting. “Do you smoke, Turner?” 

He exhaled, sitting back on his knees and dropping his hand from her leg. Again, she wanted to protest.

He said nothing and she looked down at him again. He looked a little sick. “Thank you. I guess… I guess if it weren’t for you I’d still be bleeding out and salting the earth in Grove Street.”

He ran a hand over his face. “I guess it’s just too late. I’ve committed to keeping you alive and at this point I don’t want to lose my investment.”

“You’re a real sweetheart, y’know that?”

“And you’re feeling better already, huh?”

Alex grimaced and looked down at her leg. “Well,” she said. “Hopefully soon. I’ve started stockpiling goat’s milk. For emergencies.”

Turner gave a dry chuckle and shook his head.

“I meant it,” said Alex after a moment. “Thank you. I can do this bit myself.” This was a lie. She wasn’t sure she could move from this chair alone. Now that the lightheadedneas was fading, the pain cut in sharply at the edges of her consciousness. She thought of Turner lifting her into the crucible. “You can go back home, if you want. Back to your bed and your girlfriend and your normal life and normal crimes.” One corner of his mouth twisted and there appeared to be a muscle jumping in his jaw. He didn’t say anything. Then —

“You keep the milk in the fridge?”

Alex glanced up at him, looking through her lashes. He was standing, now, heading for the doorway. “Yeah,” she managed, and he left the room, and her, feeling empty.

Chapter Text

It didn't take long for them to fill the bath. 

Turner’s solid footsteps, dampened by the carpet of the hallway, faded in and out of Alex’s hearing as he came and went, bringing cartons of milk up from the kitchen while she poured them into the crucible. It was surreal. Something about sitting on the floor and tearing open the cardboard tops of milk cartons just felt so… domestic. She stared at the milk as she poured another quart into the shining gold bowl and wondered absently what the cleaning protocol was for ancient Aztec relics. The milk was leaving a thin white film on the inside of the bowl where it lapped up against the sides. Dawes would know.

She tilted her head to one size, gazing at it. So white , she found herself thinking. Like zinc oxide. Like bleached bones. So much whiter than cow’s milk . It looked almost deep enough to get in. Emptying the last container that lay next to her, Alex reached with fumbling fingers for the hem of her shirt and stripped it over her head, wincing as several muscles cramped angrily. It wasn’t just the throbbing burn of the wound in her leg that hurt – her entire body ached, and all her muscles felt stiff, frozen into awkward, tense shapes. Her body felt thoroughly and unpleasantly used . She could see the darkening yellow of bruises forming on her arms and scrapes scabbing over along her torso from scuffing and scrambling through the tunnel. Shadows scraped over her skin like butter over bread, melting into her creases. She felt like burned toast. On reflection she was truly shocked that her body hadn’t called it quits long ago, battering and bruising it as she almost always did. That it hadn't just stopped cooperating with her ‘pathological incapability to walk away from danger’.

The memory of Turner pressing her into the car washed over Alex. She couldn’t say what had happened. Something had flashed into her mind, the faintest echo of what she had felt wading through the Acheron. Loss, yes, pain, yes, but fear, vague and nonspecific and directed at everything in sight. He had sounded so angry. And it had been a long time since she had truly feared anyone else’s anger, but hyped up on terror and bloodloss and the vaccuum of pain torn away from her without closure, she had been terrified.

He’s a good man, she reminded herself, thinking back to his expression of bewilderment and dismay as he’d asked ‘you really think I’d hurt you?’  

She liked teasing him, liked watching him react to her obscenities. Liked seeing his polished exterior crack and show that there was a real person in there under the suit and haircut and career. It called to something in her, watching him shed his skin. Maybe it was because among all the dead eyed trust fund kids spoon fed privilege and bleached of their differences, here, too, was someone with something hidden inside them, something that didn’t quite match the sleek fittings and expensive facade draped over it. Yale cultivated careful excellence in a pre determined margin. Turner wanted to succeed in the real world. And Alex… Alex just needed to keep herself afloat. Keep from falling over the lip of the precipice. Hell, she just needed to make it three months without sustaining another fatal injury from an encounter with the uncanny. She honestly didn’t think she could wrap her head about anything bigger than that. It seemed like a staggering thing to ask of the universe, to give her some respite.

Alex sighed. Her brain felt swollen. Clambering awkwardly to her feet, she gripped the edge of the desk tightly in one hand and fumbled with the button of her jeans with the other, trying to shimmy gingerly out of them without losing her balance or passing out from the pain.

She heard a small, half-swallowed noise from behind her, and looked over to see Turner clutching four cartons of goat’s milk and averting his eyes with precision. He had taken off his suit jacket and the image of it draped over a stool at the breakfast nook in the kitchen flashed through her sluggish mind. Domestic . Maybe Il Bastone liked him. He stood there for a second as if he had forgotten why he was entering the room, then he took several purposeful strides over to the crucible and emptied the milk into it. 

Alex tried, once again, to shove her jeans over her hips and fell backwards into the chair. Sighing in exasperation, she lifted her hips and managed to wiggle them down past her thighs and stripped off completely, face screwing up in pain as the fabric brushed against the wound on her leg. She looked up, and found herself making direct eye contact with Turner. Alex raised an eyebrow.

“Well?” She asked with all the bravado she could muster. “Are you just gonna stand there and watch?”

And maybe it was all worth it. All of it. Well, not quite worth almost desalinating in the Lethe house armoury, but nearly. Because she could have sworn she saw his cheeks colour just the tiniest bit. 

The corner of his mouth twisted up and he strode over, once more loose limbed and graceful, and slung her arm over his shoulder, one hand holding her naked waist, eyes fixed on the crucible as he steered her towards it. He radiated warmth and Alex realised for the first time just how cold she was.

“God, Turner, you’d think this was the first time you’d seen me cut out of my clothes and submerged in milk.” 

“Stern,” he said, “I think you might be concussed.” 

Alex entertained the possibility that she might be.

He lowered her carefully into the milk and Alex sighed happily as the blissful restorative magic went to work on her cuts and bruises. She sank down fully and closed her eyes, leaning her head back, until only her face was above the surface, ribbons of hair swirling black around her, stark against the starched white of the milk. The milk filled her ears and swallowed her hearing, cutting the high end out of her soundscape. This was what children imagined floating on a cloud would feel like. She heard a muffled sound and realised Turner must be saying something. Opening her eyes, she sat back up a little and blinked at him.

“Hmm?”

He paused for a minute, then shook his head and said, 

“I’ll be downstairs. I want to check your pupils when you’re done here. And then,” he told her, already headingtowards the door, “you can tell me your theories about my murder victim and why the fuck you decided to crawl into hell through a tomb on your own.”

Chapter Text

By the time Alex dragged herself out of the crucible the milk had turned entirely clear and her fingers and toes had thoroughly pruned. She eyed the pile of torn and bloody, dirt-stained clothes lying by the desk and sighed. This was becoming her most expensive habit.

Now that she was staying at Il Bastone, she had moved her meagre possessions into the Dante room. Padding along the carpet, Alex revelled in the feel of her feet sinking in, the individual soft fibres between her toes as she slunk through the hallway and grabbed a pair of sweats and a tank top before heading downstairs to face Turner. 

She found him in the kitchen, suit jacket slung over a chair back, standing at the counter with his back to the door and making himself coffee using the fancy pour-over chemex glass that Dawes liked. 

“Make yourself at home,” Alex said dryly, leaning against the door frame.

He turned halfway to her and inclined his head slightly. “Thank you,” he said smoothly, “I will. Coffee?” He held a mug out to her.  Ah. So Business Turner was back. Calm and collected and ready for a diplomatic discussion about her extensive breaches of legal boundaries, interference with an ongoing investigation, and lack of self preservation in investigating alone.

Alex realised she was staring at the mug - at his fingers holding it - and cleared her throat. “You have blood under your nails.”

He glanced down at his hands, then set the mug down on the counter. “So I do,” he said mildly.

They were silent a moment. Alex felt a flicker of annoyance. Stop being so polite , she wanted to tell him, there’s no one watching . Instead she picked up the mug and headed to the living room, where she nestled into the cushions of the large armchair by the empty hearth, cradling the coffee, and looked out at the hazy night sky. It must have been nearly midnight, the sky about as dark as it would get, and the odd star blinking through a thin veil of light pollution. Alex closed her eyes. She wanted to sleep. Sleep and not dream, and wake up after the storm had rolled through.

She felt rather than heard Turner follow her, quiet footsteps swallowed into silence by the carpet. There was the soft thunk of ceramic on wood to her left as he set down his own mug on the dark wood of the windowsill.

“So.” His voice was terribly pleasant, about as impersonal as he could make it.

She sighed. “So.”

“What do you have to tell me about what happened tonight, Miss Stern?” Miss Stern. So they were back to that then, huh? Not if she had her way.

“Don’t you get tired,” she asked back, just as mildly, eyes still closed, “Always pretending to be so… tame?” Domesticated , she had wanted to say. Maybe it was the delirium of the day catching up to her but she wanted to keep pushing him until his shell cracked. She was too tired to pretend she wasn’t a dirty fighter and too tired to process his bullshit pretence that he wasn’t, too. Turner was like a tiger pretending to be a house cat. A fox in a suit playing accountant to the hen house.

She cracked an eyelid to watch him from under her lashes. She had expected him to snap back at her, but he was just letting her stew in her own antagonism. Frowning slightly at the mid distance out of the window, but looking unexpectedly sober. Alex frowned back at him.

“What were you doing there, anyway?”

He turned to meet her gaze, crossing his arms and leaning back against the window, one corner of his mouth tugging upwards. “It is my crime scene you were crawling through, Miss Stern.” Miss Stern.  

She shrugged. “You said you’d call to talk through the evidence. You didn’t. Patience is not one of my virtues.” Turner scoffed as if to indicate his doubt at her having any virtues at all. 

“You sound like a jealous girlfriend,” he parroted back at her. Aha. Progress. He was being petty, that meant they were getting somewhere. He sighed. “Patience is a virtue you may have to develop if we’re going to work together. My schedule is busy and my time is not yours to command.” She shot him a sharp look. Now he had her full attention. She had only been trying to prod a reaction out of him, giving in to her petty desire to rile him up. But if he was actually offering her a genuine invitation to work together… 

“…besides, it’s not like I can work with you in my regular hours. My captain doesn’t know about any of this shit.” He waved a hand around the room, a gesture encompassing the somewhat dilapidated grandeur of Il Bastone, the armoury of magical objects upstairs, and the last few frantic hours of blood and salt. His mouth twisted wryly. “There are a hundred different levels of bureaucratic bullshit between me and meaningful power. Not to mention, I can’t share police resources and confidential data with you without breaching some serious non-disclosure regulations.” 

He seemed genuinely conflicted. What are you doing in there, she thought to herself. What are you doing with all your upstanding zeal in such a fucking bullshit corrupt system. But she was a hypocrite on that count.

“Fine,” she offered carefully, “A trade, then. I’ll tell you what I know, help you with your case— which we both know is tied to the societies. If you let me in.” She left that hanging for a moment, then, more gently: “Talk to me. Why didn’t you call? New developments?”

Turner sighed, lifted his coffee as if to take a sip, then put it back down, long fingers tapping idly against the polished wood. He looked tense in a way Alex didn’t quite understand, like some manner of struggle was taking place inside him. He glanced at her and she tried to appear unconcerned, as if it didn’t much matter to her either way. As if she didn’t desperately want his help with this, wasn’t feeling like hell and like she could really use someone in her corner. Like she wasn’t watching his goddamn hands flex.

“Relax, tiger.” She feigned nonchalance, waving one hand at the couch. “I promise it’s more comfortable than it looks.”

She knew that this was the moment where he would either give in and decide to work with her on this, or give up and go home. And she was aware that this was a bigger matter than just here, just now. She was asking for help, in as much as Alex Stern ever asked for help, asking him to face down a world of power and magic that she knew hd to run counter to how he wanted to keep his world: clean, tidy, unaffected by the stink of the uncanny, by the wretched vale of trouble that came with her wherever she went. What the fuck was she thinking? This was stupid. But then —

Turner’s tension cracked open, mask sliding, body loosening, shoulders sagging and sharp edges smoothing a little. “If you really must know,” he said, pushing himself off from the windowsill, abandoning the mug and letting himself fall into the proffered couch, “I went to see my mother and got roped into helping her move her furniture around.” He leaned back, reached up and ran a hand over his short hair, eyes falling shut for a moment. “Takes longer than you’d think. She’s quite… exacting about the Feng Shui.”

Well that was… unexpected. Alex stared at him, mouth falling slightly open in a silent, indeterminate question. She didn’t realise she had been expecting some bullshit answer about his intense job or irregular office hours until she didn’t get it. 

And the way he had just crumpled into the worn couch. It was so. It was. Disarming. Her surprise must have been more obvious than she’d thought because he raised an eyebrow at her.

“What?”

Alex snapped her mouth shut so hard her teeth clacked together. “Nothing,” she lied. “Nothing. It’s just… That’s so… human.” The words came out before she’d really thought them through.

Turner let out a bark of surprised laughter. “I’d have thought you of all people would be an expert in exactly how human or otherwise I am, Alex.” Alex.

Something about that sounded oddly, unintentionally intimate, and the air suddenly hummed again, tension of a different kind filling the room. Turner immediately looked a little conflicted again, like he already regretted saying anything. Alex couldn’t pretend she didn’t like watching him squirm.

“She give you any more dire warnings? Devils at the door? Impending catastrophes?”

He sighed. “I’m assured I’ll be smote down for missing church last Sunday. And the Sunday before.”

Alex smiled faintly. “I’ve never been to church.”

“Not even for Christmas?”

She shook her head, thinking of her grandmother lighting the menorah and the quiet peace of her kitchen table.

“Well,” his mouth twisted up at a corner, “I wouldn’t bother starting now. The devils are among us.”

“Rude. You could just use my name.”

“Alex…”

They fell into silence again, and Alex thought he looked like he might be thinking about God, staring down at his hands, fingers loosely interlocked like a lazy attempt at prayer. He still looked pristinely put together, an odd contrast to the dilapidated grandeur of il bastone, but his entire bearing had dropped into something looser, and at the same time his eyes had grown perhaps more intense, his features falling into a natural alertness that was less professional and more constitutional. It made him look younger, leaner, ready for a fight, even eager for it. And hell, when had that become the kind of thing she found attractive. Alex thought about God briefly, too, looking at him. She thought of the way he had looked with the sunset blazing behind him, pushing her up against the car. God help her, maybe she had a thing for vengeful angelic types. Fuck.

She cleared her throat. “Your murder,” she forced out, “I think it’s tied to Book and Snake.”

That snapped him out of his reverie.

“What makes you say that?”

“The clay.”

“The red dirt at the crime scene?” Turner leaned forward, elbows propped on his knees as his dark eyes fixed on her. “We’re running tests on it. It's not local.”

No, Alex supposed it wouldn’t be. Probably from Jerusalem or Prague or something. Dawes would know. Alex would have to ask her. It had slipped her mind in the haze of losing blood salts. She sighed. “I think it’s linked with a rogue golem. A creature made from clay and brought to life by ritual incantations,” she added, catching his blank look. “Basically a violent little clay doll that any idiot with the right spellwork could set loose. Theoretically they’re only sanctioned for a very limited list of special uses but last night I got a call from Book and Snake about one that’s gone missing.”

She set her mug down on the coffee table and got up, moving across the room to her nest of notes and spread of books from the library on La llorona and vengeful spirits. Something about the piles looked different, neater than she had left them, sorted into categories and the books arranged in order of publication. She felt the air shift behind her as Turner got up and followed to stand behind her.

“What, no whiteboard?” He teased.

Alex frowned. “Did you move these?”

“What?” He seemed taken aback. “No. Why?”

She hummed thoughtfully. “No reason.” Settling down in the centre of the papers, she began to outline her findings. How she had been called to Book and Snake, Andrea Pinsky and the rogue golem, how she had stumbled onto the crime scene and then heard the ghostly voice singing. Turner crouched down next to her and began looking through her notes. She walked him through her research on wailing women and Grove Street, the strange, disparate threads that all seemed to hang in mid air around the cemetery. She felt sure that something bound the voice to the golem and the golem to the crime scene, but beyond their respective tenuous connections to Judaism through song and mythology, she couldn’t say what.

“Either way. Ghosts and golems - both Book and Snake territory, both in Grove Street, and both tied to the night of your murder.”

“Tenuous, Stern.”

Alex knew that, but it was a feeling she couldn’t let go of, an instinct that something bound these threads together.

“I don’t know. The ghost - the wailing woman, the… unmourned mother or whatever we want to call her — she sang me into submission. I think that hound of the Acheron is controlled through song. If there’s one magical maniac hanging around Grove Street singing her minions into violence, why not assume she can also sing the ritual incantations for the golem?”

“One undead thing possessing another to commit a murder? You really think that’s likely?”

“I don’t know,” Alex admitted. “But it’s something to start with.” 

Turner shook his head, flipping through an old edition of the Daily New Havener . “There’s no motive. It doesn’t make sense.”

She chewed on her lip. “No. Not yet. How soon can you get me a look at the body? Or the, uh, autopsy papers or whatever?”

“Tomorrow evening. Maybe.”

Tomorrow evening. What day was it? Alex had no idea. One summer evening always seemed to blend into the next with her curled up somewhere in this rickety, old, beloved house pouring over notes or standing at the counter making pot noodles.

Even this, sat next to Turner in the middle of her paper nest with one leg propped up, absently rubbing her thigh with the palm of one hand and staring at a charcoal sketch of a banshee— even this would feel unreal if her body didn’t hurt so much. Her skin itched like a healing scar in the spot where the hound’s jaws had sunk into her flesh, though there was no scar to heal. It wasn’t right, going through shit like that without it leaving a mark. Thinking about it made the skin on her side crawl, and her fingers ghosted over her ribs. Jackals. Hellhounds. Always with the fucking hounds. She didn’t even like dogs. 

Glancing over at Turner, she caught his eyes tracking her hand’s movements. She stopped, abruptly, dropping it into her lap and he went back to studying the stapled copy of a thesis Alex had found in the library ( ‘Mourning Mothers, Maidens, and Crones: Cultural methods of trauma management in the myth of the woman in white) . The room seemed suddenly smaller, shrinking down to their patch of carpet and Turner’s sharp, warm eyes burning a hole in her. She felt briefly dizzy again, felt an echo of the hot marbles rolling across her skin, thought she smelled singed hair. It came back to her suddenly —

“Turner, do you smoke?”

He looked up to meet her gaze at that and gave her a deadpan look. 

“Oh, relax, Turner. I meant cigarettes.”  Alex had never been a smoker per se, but she had always enjoyed cigarette breaks, the excuse to leave a room, to get some air, to shift the scene.

After a moment the corners of his lips crooked up in a smile that made her remember he could be very charming when he wanted to be. That made her think, ‘Where’s your girlfriend, Turner? Am I keeping you from her?’ 

She wouldn’t mind if she was. 

“I’ve got a very stressful job, Miss Stern,” he said. Alex rolled her eyes at him. She found she didn’t really mind his mocking tone. 

“Come on.” 

———————

There was a small ledge just outside the window created by the jutting roof of the bay window on the floor below and Alex hauled herself out to sit on it, leaning against the wall and staring out over the roofs and trees of the buildings and parks behind Il Bastone. The night air was pleasantly cool, some of the humidity had abated, and even the light pollution seemed less intense that night than it had been in recent memory. This town , Alex thought to herself, then cringed away from the thought. She didn’t want to think about Darlington.

As if summoned by her wish, a distraction swung its leg through the window and settled next to her. She kept expecting him to look out of place next to her, in her spaces — kept expecting to think he was too polished, the lines of his suit too crisp to sit on a window ledge overlooking a vacant lot behind a magic house next to a girl made of bruises. And he was, in a way. He was so steady, so damned correct that it made Alex itch to key through the polish. But god knew they all had faces and masks, and something about the way he swung himself out next to her felt like breaking a tinted window.

So they smoked together in companionable silence. It had been ages since she had had a cigarette, and she was overcome with a strange nostalgia, thinking of sitting on the roof in Van Nuys with Hellie, watching the sun rise over the city. Or maybe it was just the head rush messing with her, sending her falling backwards through her life. Alex shivered. Turner shifted beside her and she glanced over at him again. He was looking out over the city with a faraway expression on his face, and looking simultaneously older and younger than ever. Jaded and lost, his expression open and his posture weary.

“Why did you become a cop?” 

She hadn’t meant to ask, it just slipped out. 

He turned to face her, expression still unreadable, eyes dark and glinting. “It’s complicated,” he murmured, peering into her eyes like he was looking for something.

“What,” she asked softly, mustering some small measure bravado, “Still think I’m concussed?” 

He looked at her a moment longer, then dropped his gaze, smiling wryly and shrugged. “Hard to tell, Stern. Hard to tell.”

Chapter Text

Alex slept through the remaining night and much of the next day. Or rather, she did her best to sleep. 

Her mind had turned traitor and was refusing to give her body the sleep it so desperately craved. Tired as she was from her ordeal and general habit of living precariously, she fell into an unconsciousness that, if better than being awake, was still far from restful.

She drifted in and out of dreams.

She was a huge black bird, flying high above a foreign landscape, a mythic raven, swept along on the gust of a hot, dry wind. She smelled citrus and eucalyptus and wildfires and suddenly the landscape was no longer unfamiliar, its ridges and contours sharpening into the scruffy hills and valleys of the Angeles National Forest.

The Santa Anna winds at her back, pushing her out to sea, and then she was watching a boy fall from the sun, naked and lithe, glowing and curled in on himself like a secret, and covered in running rivulets of black wax, dripping from his eyes, his ears, the raw pads where his fingernails should be. He fell past her with an aching grace.

“Gladly,” she heard him whisper. To the wind. To her. “Gladly, I will be.”

She thought  of how he had told her of the elixir he had brewed at eighteen, desperate for something to devote himself to.

And then she was watching him read a slim volume of poetry by the flickering light of the fire hissing softly in the fireplace, book balanced on a knee, quiet eyes cast lazily down at the page so that the sweep of his long lashes tilted downwards. She imagined she could see them casting shadows over the page, like there was another fire behind his eyes, a sun, shining out and throwing a forest of sharp, dark blades across anything he turned his gaze on. Look at me . They looked dark and wet. Sticky. 

His fine-boned ankles draped over the arm of the sofa. Sweater visibly soft and tangibly blue.

The Hutch. Quiet. A neverending winter evening, in from the rain, safe from the rain, safe from the sun.

He looked up at her, eyes reflecting the light in a warm amber glow.

“What is a man?” he asked. The fire seemed to sigh. “A quiet between two bombardments.”

 He closed the book and the room dissolved.

She was following a hooded figure across a sheer and shifting rock face of basalt, iolite, obsidian. It looked like she had always imagined the Australian desert– vast and open, composed of jagged-edged sand and smooth stone. It was dark. It wasn’t night, precisely – it was just that there was no sky. If Alex tried to look up she simply found her vision carried straight ahead of her again, like eyes rolling back in their sockets and finding themselves seeing through the back of the head. Fixed on the figure before her, leading her by the hand. He walked tirelessly onwards, face hidden no matter how she twisted her hand in his, trying to pull him around to face her. 

It was Darlington, she knew this. And she knew that they were in hell, that he was guiding her through it. 

In the distance, she saw a city loom on the horizon, all razor edged shapes and ossuary spires.

The desert shifted as they walked through it, the rock sliding smooth and rough by turns under their feet. The whole plane tilted occasionally, causing Alex to stumble and catch herself on Darlington, who never faltered. Around them, huge sculptures rose from the sand, looming over them like monstrous sandcastles left to rot by giant toddlers. The looked jagged, their edges twisted so that they gave the impression of being inside out, half-formed organs and bulging bands of muscle sculpted from rough sand stretched across the surface of too many limbs, all either grotesquely large or frighteningly thin.

“What are they?” Alex asked Darlington. Her voice came out sounding raw and husky, like it had been days since she had last spoken.

He didn’t answer, just pulled on her hand, dragging her forwards. When she looked at him, she saw his shoulders shaking in silent laughter.

She squeezed his hand and he stopped laughing.

“Don’t be scared, Alex.” His voice was doubled, like he had multiple throats, multiple tongues, but kitten-soft.

“I’m not,” she told him, a half-truth for the half-light.

They drew nearer to the city.shapes circled overhead, miniatures of the shifting sand statues. Or maybe they were just further away.

I know this bit, she thought desperately as they approached the gates, remembered slogging through a side by side translation of The Inferno she’d found in Beinecke in the fall of her first year, floundering in the sea of references and allusions Lethe had thrown her into. The demons at the gates of Dis refuse Dante and Virgil entry, and an angel comes to push their case.

But the demons circling and perching on the city walls — great winged things made of claws and leathery skin strung together with sinew frayed and torn like a threadbare ribbon —the demons leaped up from the gate, circling and swooping, screeching inhuman laments. They fell in arching dives, hurling down towards them, pulling back up at the last minute, closer and closer each time.

Until Darlington stepped forwards, dropped her hand, dropped his head back into the nape of his neck and looked straight up at them, hood falling back and darkness springing free.

Lightning fast, they took to the skies, howling and keening in… shock? Terror? They took off as one, a cloud of stringy limbs and sharp wings, abandoning their gate and their city. 

Alex could see the contours of Darlington’s form blurring into smoke beside her, raggedy at the edges, ligaments shifting inside out, flashes of blacked meat and the metallic tang of blood in the air.

He turned to face her, then, and smiled.

His teeth were sharp and mean, something of the half-starved wolf hanging in the air around him. Feral. His eyes were gone, their empty sockets smoking. The skin of his face was glassy and stretched into shards over his cheekbones, all angles that looked like they might cut anyone that got too close. 

“You asked me to tell you what you were in for,” he said with a smile that might have been conceived as a smirk but had grown into its vindictiveness early.

Alex considered him, fearless in the dream. “I don’t care. You can’t scare me away.”

His grin flickered, expression hardening minutely, but he showed no other signs of having heard her.

“Come,” he reached for her hand again, fingers a cool glassy grip around hers, eyes full of promise, mouth full of knives. “Let me show you my kingdom.”

And as the city gates began to creak open, the ground started falling away beneath her feet.

Alex awoke in the Virgil bedroom, shaking violently, deeply terrified and unable to recall how she had gotten there. 

It was early morning, sun just peaking around the blinds. A day and a night, then. Like a ghost, Alex drifted downstairs and sat in the living room, staring at Turner’s abandoned mug.

Chapter Text

“Where the fuck have you been?” Alex hissed out of the corner of her mouth.

Alex had been standing at the edge of the green and watching the bright girls in summer dresses flitting between groups of friends, the guys in board shorts and Yale T-shirts clapping each other on the back like miniatures of their fathers at a business meeting. 

In all the blood and mystery, Alex had nearly forgotten about the imminent return of students to campus. 

New Haven, never really a city to begin with, had shrunk to a ghost town over summer with the departure of the student population, and Alex had gotten used to it. The sparsely populated cafes and high streets, the quiet bars and empty pockets of space. And now, it seemed, within a weekend, the city had crawled back to life.

And they weren’t the only things crawling back from the grave.

“I have been otherwise occupied,” Bertram Boyce North told her dryly.

She gazed out at the mingling student body with a cigarette held limply in her hand. It was Turner’s fucking fault. When North had cropped up at her side she had jumped and almost spilled coffee down herself. Glowering, she had jerked her head off to the side of the green, and he had followed her to where they now stood, sheltered from view between two buildings overlooking the flow of people through the green.

“Doing what, spending your summer on the darker shore with the best sun?” she sniped.

He raised a dark eyebrow. “I was under the impression our partnership had come to an end, Ms Stern. You were eager enough to cast me off.”

She had been, at first. But spending a few months having to listen to the other greys hanging around had actually made her rethink her position on having another grey, and one the others were scared of, in her immediate circle of… friends? Comrades in arms? Fellow guardians to the gate of darkness and disaster?

She took a drag on the cigarette. “You never held up your end of the bargain. You never found Tara’s soul.”

Everything about him seemed to darken at that, and Alex had to keep herself from shivering. She looked at him properly for the first time, meeting his gaze. “Oh relax, North. Wasn’t an accusation, I just meant this–-” she gestured between them, “--isn’t over. I still need you.”

“You do always know what to say, Alex. Deep down,” Hellie had told her once, sniffling while Alex rubbed soothing circles up and down her back after they had snuck into the hospital once to visit Hellie’s little brother when he was in to get a kidney transplant.

Alex had snorted and pressed her cheek to Hellie’s shoulder, letting her hair fall next to Hellie’s across her back. Sheen of black against blond, oil slick on the sun. “I feel like I never say the right thing. Never know the right thing to say.”

“You do, ” Hellie had insisted, choking on a laugh. “ Okay, maybe, like, really deep down. But yeah. You do. You just choose not to say the right thing most of the time. You save it up.” She had turned her head so they were practically nose to nose, smiling at Alex with watery red eyes. “You save it for people you give enough of a shit about to tell them what they need to hear.”

What a pretty way to say I know when to lie to my friends, Alex had thought, but she had known that Hellie only needed the silent brush of the tip of Alex’s nose across hers just then, and so Alex had said nothing.

She saw it in North now, too. She hadn’t consciously used his name to calm him, but she knew it would work, and it had. She hadn’t mean to manipulate him, but she knew the strings to pull, knew that if Darlington was a gentleman then so was North, of a kind, and he was equally susceptible to those magic words: “I need you.” The darkness receded and he took a deep breath, gazing out at the green archly.

“I forgot how… charming your company is,” he murmured, then turned his intense gaze on her. He seemed to be formulating something complex. Alex let him work it out. Then, 

“I know that Daisy was not what I thought she was. But I loved her in life and sought to take on all ills and troubles that were hers. In death, too, I find myself bound to her troubles. The deaths she caused… the suffering…” he gave an aborted shake of his head. “She cannot make amends. I can but try to do so in her place.” 

Alex tried to digest this level of noble dignity but found she could not. Revenge she got. Retribution. Justice. Reconciliation? Not her strong suit.

“It was not Daisy who killed her, but because of Daisy… I have been attempting to locate Tara Hutchens,” North admitted, frowning. “With mixed success.”

Alex perked up. Without North, she had given up hope of locating Tara, at least until after they had Darlington back. “You found something?” she asked him hopefully.

“Yes,” he said darkly, “and no.”

“Yes, yes, very cryptic and mysterious, very dead Victorian of you.” She ashed her cigarette onto his foot to see if he would react. He didn’t. “But I get enough mystery cult bullshit from my day job, thanks, so if you could just cut to the chase…?”

“You run the risk of alienating your friends with your callous tone, Ms Stern,” he told her. She snorted.

“Was that sarcasm, North? Didn’t know that was around back in your day.”

He ignored her. “Very well.” He grimaced. “I attempted to use that… repellent dental appliance, but it lead me to disparate and desolate places, places no souls should be, even after a life like hers and a death like hers.” His mouth was set in a deep frown. “I cannot say if I was merely led astray or not but I suspect Tara’s soul may have been fractured in the violence of her murder.”

Fractured. Scattered. Maybe caught between places. The violence of her death… but if violence fractured the soul then every other murder should lay waste to souls. North had said before that Len and Betcha, even Ariel had found him on the other side. Had smelled her on him. She guessed you needed to be a reasonably functioning soul to be able to smell. But was it the magic? The Lethe magic that had caused Tara’s death, somehow ripping her soul apart like a piñata? Alex shuddered thinking about it.

“Was there anything unusual about the places it took you?” she asked, “Anything they had in common?”

North looked uneasy. “Yes, Ms Stern. There was.”

She waited for him to continue, his face drawn into a tight mask of impassive cool only barely cloaking whatever lay beneath.

“Well?” She prompted, impatient. “I don’t have all day.”

He sighed. “There was… a darkness. An absence of all. No other souls dared linger in those places. It was as if…” North broke off and Alex saw the mask crack. Fear. Fear was what lay beneath. “It was as if a great beast had laid waste to the places. Each and every one I sought out, I found desolate. Deserted ruins, burned landscapes.”

Alex wasn’t sure what non-laid-waste-to planes beyond the veil looked like, but she could guess from North’s expression that whatever he had seen, it was commensurate with wholesale destruction of life. After death.

Alex dropped the cigarette butt, long since burned down to the bone, and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.

“Thank you,” she told North. “I appreciate it.”

But what the fuck was she going to do with this information? On top of Darlington and the golem? A thought occurred to her.

“You wouldn’t happen to have met any local women in white or mourning ghosts in all your years hanging around Grove Street, would you?”

North pursed his lips. “We do not meet every Sunday for tea, those of us that linger in this world, Ms Stern.”

“Right, right,” Alex muttered. Would have been too goddamn easy, anyway. “Just a thought.” She checked her phone. It was nearly four. “Listen, I gotta go. Keep me updated if you find anything else?”

North nodded and Alex turned, leaving him in the shadow between the two buildings, and made her way through the crowd of students, across the quad and towards halls.

She had awoken to a string of excited voice notes from Mercy asking where they should meet later and if Alex had already started setting up her room. It had taken her scrolling back through their previous messages and double checking the date to realise it was the sophomore move in day, and that she had agreed to going for pizza with Mercy and Lauren after they moved all their stuff into halls. 

This seemed impossible to Alex, a monumental endeavour. But it was the 25th of August and she couldn’t make it otherwise by wishing. So she had gotten up, she had thrown her things into bag and headed towards the Johnathan Edwards College. She’d picked up a small plastic tray of marjoram seedlings and a small bush of flowering hyssop  from the home and gardening goods store on the way and had set them out on the windowsills. She would have to re-ward the space properly later, but for now the plants would have to suffice to keep out wandering spirits.

She was entirely unprepared and yet still a little excited for normal life to resume around her. Not that she was entirely sure what normal life was, or if any life that happened around her could ever be normal.

—————

“Oh. My. God. Is Alex Stern wearing a dress?”

“Hi Mercy,” Alex smiled, turning on the sofa to face the door where Mercy stood with a large suitcase, looking radiant in a light blue sundress with a sunflower stitched onto the front. It looked handmade. “I missed you too. And it’s a skirt, actually.” She was, indeed, wearing a long wrap tie skirt in deep plum red with faint mandala designs embroidered across the hem in brown thread. Her mom had sent it to her over summer. 

It had come in a little package with a note: Thinking of you! Xoxo along with a badly drawn smiley face in her mom’s looping penmanship. It was light cotton, and she found she actually liked wearing it in the sticky heat of New Haven summers.

“Get out here and help us bring our shit in!” Came Lauren’s voice from outside, “We brought a new armchair!”

The next hours were spent unloading boxes and lining shelves and surfaces  with books, trinkets, tapestries and throws. Mercy had brought along her collection of house plants and was repositioning them around the living room, standing back occasionally to see the effect in different light from different angles. Lauren was clattering around in the kitchen, sorting shot glasses and saucepans into cupboards.

“What is that?” Came Mercy’s voice from behind Alex. 

Alex held up the book she’d been shelving. “This? Iris Murdoch. From my summer essay course.”

“No, you idiot,” Mercy swatted her affectionately. “I can read. I meant that thing you’re humming. It sounds so sad.”

Alex startled. She had gotten so used to humming her funeral dirges that she hadn’t even realised she was doing it. She'd been humming Gloomy Sunday again. She glanced at the marjoram on the windowsill. She probably didn’t need to right now anyway.

“Oh, nothing. Just an old song I’ve got stuck in my head.”

Mercy took her hand and pulled her to her feet. “Well it’s way too sad for this kind of weather. Come on, I know how to make you happy.”

She pulled Alex towards the door. “Lauren, let’s go get pizza!” She laughed at the look on Alex’s face. “You’re too easy, Alex. You’re like a puppy.”

Lauren snorted, joining them. “Sure, a dark and mysterious puppy that’ll fuck up anyone who looks at her wrong.”

“Exactly,” said Mercy, beaming.

They got pizza at a Greek restaurant not far from campus with blue and white tiles halfway up the walls and greasy laminated tables. A large glass nazar hung on the wall behind the counter, where a heavy-set man with a massive, bristly moustache took their orders.

Alex laughed when Mercy and Lauren told stories about their summers, about Lauren’s month as a camp counsellor in upstate New York (“there was this twelve year old who was obsessed with me. I had to stop him following me when I went to go pee.”), about Mercy being forced to play piano for all her parents friends at dinner parties (“I started pretending I was dating a guy in Brooklyn to get out of them but now they’re asking when they’re going to meet him.”)

“Anyway,” said Mercy, in an obvious bid to escape their teasing. “How was your summer, Alex? What’s New Haven like without all the students?”

“Creepy,” Alex replied, honestly, between bites of pizza. “It’s like a ghost town.”

“Where were you even staying? Not in halls?” asked Mercy, nibbling on the vegan cheese she’d picked off her pizza. She had picked all the toppings off when it arrived and was eating them one by one according to category. The man behind the counter was giving her a nasty look but Alex found it endearing.

Alex tried not to squirm. She didn’t like lying to Mercy and Lauren. “Darlington’s,” she said, after chewing through her mouthful of crust. 

Lauren grinned. “Is he back from Spain, then? Gonna be seeing more of that fine ass coming to pick you up for family dinners this year?” She wiggled her brows suggestively.

“Shut up,” Alex said, laughing, because that was the kind of thing she should say, she supposed, if her friends were hitting on her cousin.

“Hmm,” Mercy hummed, watching Alex. “Yeah, family dinners.” She have Alex a knowing look. “You don’t look much like him, y’know.”

“Yeah, yeah, he got all the good genes, trust me, I know. Nah, he’s not back yet.” She picked up a piece of Mercy’s crust. “Can we please stop talking about my family, I’m trying to have a nice time with my friends who I haven’t seen all summer.”

And they fell back into easy, safer conversation. It was nice. It was so sweet, it was good. Alex so wished that this could be it, that her biggest worries could be the year ahead and what start-of-term parties to go to. She was sick of living some kind of weird double life, of being what Mercy called mysterious. She’d give up the mystery in a heartbeat if she could. Or would she?

What do you want, Alex? Bellebalm’s voice drifted back to her. Maybe she was getting closer to an answer. Maybe she had changed. 

It felt so self-righteous to say she was born this way to fight some great darkness. She didn’t have Lethe’s pretensions to grandeur, to sanctifying, evangelising work guarding this realm from another. And yet she kept finding herself at the centre of a net of crusaders, holy warriors, and they all seemed the think she was one of them. Really one of them, not just barely fitting in with bargain cashmere sweaters and straggling English lit essays. And she felt like she could keep up, felt competent, at least to some degree, for the first time in her life. Darlington, Dawes, Turner… they all seemed to believe in her, at least a little.

Mercy waved another piece of crust in Alex’s face. “Pizza to Stern! Where are you?”

Alex smiled and snatched the crust. “Nowhere. Just… worrying about the year ahead, I guess.”

Mercy looked at her shrewdly. “Are you really doing okay?” She asked hesitantly.

Alex was saved having to reply by her phone ringing. Thank you, Dawes, Alex thought, because nobody else would be calling her. She probably wanted to go over their respective Darlington research and talk about Alex’s recent crucible bath. Sorry, she mouthed, answering without looking at her phone.

“Dawes?” She asked, grabbing a napkin with her other hand and slipping out of her rickety blue folding chair.

“Hate to disappoint.”

“Turner?!” Alex fumbled the napkin in surprise, dropping it.  She could see Lauren craning around in her seat to watch, clearly listening, and quickly slid outside.

“Don’t sound so pleased to hear me, Stern, I might start thinking you like me.”

Alex chewed on her lip. “What’s up?”

“I have the file on Michael Clarke.”

“Who?”

She heard a beleaguered sigh on the other end. “My murder victim, Stern. The one you were so sure was connected to Book and Snake.”

“Right. Okay. Yeah.” She balled up the napkin in her free hand. “When can you get it to me?”

“So demanding.”

Alex glanced through the window at Mercy and Lauren. “Tomorrow?” she asked. “I’m kind of in the middle of something.” She felt guilty for even saying it. He was being nice, insomuch as their relationship allowed-- he was working with her, letting her in. But she was selfish. She wanted one more evening of glowing peace. She would crawl into bed later and do more reading on hell anyway; her evening was spoken for.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” came Turner’s voice, dry and crackling through the phone. She could practically see his eyebrow lifting, his mouth quirking. “Am I interrupting something? Had a nice, murder-free evening planned? Truly, I’m shocked, Alex.” She rolled her eyes.

“You’re funny, you know that, Turner?”

“I need to drive past campus to get home anyway,” he said. “I can drop it off when I finish work.”

“It’s 8pm on a Friday, Turner, you should leave the office more.”

He sighed again. “So you want the files or not?”

"Yeah, yeah, okay, sure. Just text me when you pass by.”

He hung up without saying anything else.

“Asshole,” Alex grumbled half-heartedly as she headed back inside.

“Who was that? ” Lauren asked as she took her seat again, clearly intrigued. So much for shedding her mystery.

“No one,” Alex shrugged. “Just someone I met recently.” Technically true, depending on how recent counted as ‘recently’. Lauren clicked her tongue at her and Mercy smirked. Alex got up to pay just to get out from under their curious gaze.

—-----

About an hour later, Lauren had just retreated her bedroom and Mercy was headed to the bathroom to shower when Alex got a text from Turner.

Outside in 5.

Glancing at the light coming from under the bathroom doorway Alex grabbed Mercy’s shawl from the couch, shrugged it around her shoulders, and slipped outside.

Turner’s blue Dodge Charger was idling in front of the boarded-up coffee shop across the street. She padded barefoot across the street and slipped in the passenger side. Turner was wearing an impossibly crisp, light grey button-down shirt that, by all rights, should be showing sweat stains if he had worn it all day through the muggy heat. His suit jacket was draped across the back seat. He eyed her bare feet, toes pressing into the carpeted flooring.

“I forget how young you are, sometimes,” he said by way of greeting, looking away, out at the college dorm. She didn’t know what he was implying but she didn’t like it.

“I’m a thousand years old, Turner,” she told him.

The corner of his mouth turned up and he hummed in agreement. “I wouldn’t even be surprised.” He handed her a thick manilla file. “That’s all we’ve got on him. Stand-up citizen. Yale graduate. Donated to local charities. No known enemies.”

“You sound like a movie script.” She flipped open the file. Michael Clarke, 58, honorary fellow at the Yale School of Management. Consultant Director at the St Brides Leadership Academy. Former member of Book and Snake. She tapped the last line. “Book and Snake, huh? And you said it was a tenuous link.”

He dipped his head in acknowledgement, still gazing out at her building. “Any more genius insights for me, then? Any magical whiteboard diagrams to show me?”

Alex huffed. “I’ve been busy.” She closed the file and curled her toes into the carpet. “This is only my side-hustle, you know.”

“Ah yes,” he said languidly. “Had a hot date I interrupted?”

“Yeah,” Alex shot him a look. “He was real cut up when I said I had to leave early to go meet a police officer.”

Turner’s jaw flexed momentarily. “I’m sure he was devastated.”

Alex laughed dryly. “Go fight some crime you goddamn vigilante.”

“That’s rich, coming from you.”

“Hey, I’m not the one working into the night to catch criminals.”

He finally turned back to look at her, eyes glittering in the street light. “Aren’t you?”

Alex had nothing to say to that. She opened the car door. “Go home, Turner. I’m sure your girlfriend misses you.” She stepped out.

“You know,” he said, an amused smirk curling at the corner of his lips, “you talk an awful lot about my girlfriend, Stern.”

“Fine.” She leaned down to look him in the eyes. “Go rearrange your mom’s furniture.”

He smiled at her then, a proper smile that ran like butter into the creases of her mind and stuck there. She pushed the door shut and slunk back across the street and into her dorm. She replaced Mercy’s shawl and tucked the file into her pile of reading.

“He’s gorgeous,” came Mercy’s voice suddenly from behind her. Alex jumped.

“Fuck, Mercy!”

“What did he give you?" Mercy slid next to her onto the bed. "Is he… is he a drug dealer?” She sounded as if she didn’t know if she should be excited or scared at the possibility.

Alex couldn’t help herself, she laughed. She considered telling Mercy that he was, just to piss Turner off when she told him. She had never told Mercy much about her past, never mentioned drugs beyond admitting that she used to smoke weed every now and then.

“It’s California, I guess ,” Mercy had laughed, without any real judgement.

“No,” Alex said, finally. She wondered if she could tell Mercy about the person she used to be, whether Mercy would still want to be her friend if she knew the full story of Alex Stern. Or even a heavily edited version of it.

Mercy grinned at her. “He’s the one who called earlier, right?” When Alex didn’t deny it, she squealed. “Oh my god, Alex!”

Alex let Mercy draw her own conclusions. She needed an alibi, anyway, for why she would be off investigating with Turner. And nobody would believe he was her cousin.

“If you’re done,” she said, rising from the bed, “I’m gonna take a shower. I hope for your sake you didn’t use up the hot water.”

Chapter Text

If Alex had to spend one more minute trying to get her head around Judith Butler, she was going to go to Il Bastone, find Cuthbert’s Pearls of Protection, and strangle herself with them. Dawes wouldn’t even have to clean up any blood.

She was sitting in the library with Mercy, where they had holed up after lunch to get a head start on the Introductory Sociology class they were both taking. It was now after 17:00 and Alex had managed to fight her way through sixteen pages in the three hours they’d been there.

“It’s just. Not. Even. English.” Alex hissed across the table at Mercy. She felt a guilty kind of relief when Mercy looked at her with equally harried eyes.

“It’s incomprehensible,” she agreed. “But I think that’s a stylistic choice?”

“My ass is a stylistic choice,” Alex muttered.

Mercy smirked at her. “Hell yeah, it is.”

They both had to stifle their laughter when a librarian at the main desk looked up at them disapprovingly.

Alex hadn’t considered when she’d let Mercy cajole her into picking the module that she might find it hard to stomach reading hundreds of pages of dense, incomprehensible theory about marginalised people and the social dynamics of power and punishment written mostly by people who has never truly lived without the first or experienced the latter.

She was inordinately glad when her phone rang, interrupting the tranquil blanket of silence in the library. The librarian was looking at her incredulously from behind his desk, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing, and Alex shoved her books into her bag.

“Sorry,” she whispered to Mercy, fumbling with the lamp on the desk. “I’ve gotta take this. I’ll see you later.”

“I swear to God, Alex,” Mercy whispered back, dark eyes glittering, “It’s like you’re doing this mysterious shit on purpose.”

She glanced down at her phone, then slid the answer button. 

“Just a second, Dawes, I’ve gotta get out of the library,” she said, clamping the phone between her cheek and shoulder, slinging the strap of her bag over one shoulder. The librarian was making to get up, murder in his eyes, looking as if he might drag her outside and give her a beat down. 

“ You’re answering the phone in the library?! ” Dawes sounded genuinely distressed by the prospect. Alex huffed out a small laugh as she hurried across to the main entrance, passing the librarian now standing, mouth pinched, watching her like she was a pigeon that had somehow found its way into a house and he was willing her back out the window. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Alex muttered to both of them. Then when she was out on Elm Street, “What’s up?”

Dawes’ sigh crackled through the phone. “ Well… Nothing, really. I just… I’ll be back in New Haven later today and I thought we should… debrief?” She tipped the sentence up at the end, like it was a question she wasn’t sure was the right one to ask. “ ... After… You know. We should talk about our research. About… Hell. And, Alex… Are you…” She paused, like she wasn’t sure if she should say whatever it was aloud.

“Dawes.”

“ Right.” She sounded small. “ You’re okay. Sure.” She didn’t sound quite convinced, though. Alex felt a little ripple of guilt. She had gotten so used to her own prickly company over the summer, a streak broken only by bland, perfunctory interactions with the Lethe board and her exchanges with Turner, sparking with tension and something that wasn’t quite animosity, but might be recalcitrant respect. Dawes didn’t deserve her barbs.

“Sorry,” Alex said, awkwardly. “I’m managing. Just hungry. How are you doing, Dawes?”

“ I’m fine…” Dawes trailed off. “ Just. Go to Il Bastone. I’ll come and make dinner.”

Bless Dawes. “Bless you, Dawes,” Alex smiled into the phone. “I’ll see you later. I’ve got a lot to fill you in on.” 

And she had to get back to the file on Michael Clarke. She had spent an hour looking at it this morning, but hadn’t wanted to take it to the library with her. Turner had said he would need it back today, and she didn’t know when he’d want it back by. Given his working hours, she guessed she had another few hours.

After she had hung up, Alex hurried South, down York Street and back to her dorm, shrugged on a sweater, grabbed the file, and headed to Il Bastone. It felt like she’d barely left, gone for less than 48 hours, and yet still she had missed it. Maybe she was imagining things, but she felt like the house had missed her too. The door sprung open for her, lights twinkling happily, soft carpet greeting her like a sigh.

When had this place started feeling more like home than her dorm, her normal life with Mercy and Lauren? When had she become someone who thought of a carpet as home? Alex stripped her boots off, pulled out the file, dropped her bag in the hall, made her way to the living room and dropped onto the couch, ready to puzzle over Michael Clarke. As she sank into the cushions, a flash of white caught her eye in the window. At first she thought it was just a van driving by outside, or a flash of some reflection, but when she looked closer, she frowned. Bowie cat.

“Cosmo?” She murmured, and got up to push the sash window up and let him in. “What are you doing here, buddy?” She asked him gently. She squatted down and let his white tail run through her fingers as he twined around her legs.  He mrrrp’d at her conversationally.

Alex was unsurprised when the floorboards under her creaked vociferously. Il Bastone did not like animals. And Cosmo, to the best of her knowledge, did not particularly like Il Bastone. He had resisted all attempts to rehouse him from Black Elm after Darlington had disappeared.

“Yeah, yeah,” she told the house. “Don’t worry, he won’t leave hair everywhere, I promise.” A flat lie, but sometimes the house just needed a bit of sweet talking. “And you,” she turned to Cosmo, “are on thin ice in here, my friend, you better keep those claws tucked away.”

The cat blinked at her balefully with his mismatched eyes and yawned languidly, long pink tongue snaking out to lick his lips as he did so. Smug bastard. She turned back to the couch, intending to review the file, but then Cosmo was there again, twisting his small, warm body around her legs.

“What do you want, you little monster?” She bent and scratched him behind the ears and a rumbling purr started up in his little chest. Scratch slut .

“Believe it or not, you’re not actually the most pressing thing I need to pay attention to right now.” 

He mewed at this injustice, and slunk towards the hallway. Alex let him go. He would test the bounds of the house’s patience on his own, anyway. A few minutes later, though, Alex looked up from the file at the loud thunk that sounded from upstairs. The pipes moaned. This is why Il Bastone doesn’t like cats. Cosmo had probably found his way into the armoury and knocked some priceless artefact off a shelf.

But when she reached the landing upstairs, she found him sitting with his tail curled neatly over his paws beside the Albemarle book, which he had knocked down and was lying open on a crisp, fresh page. Alex bent down and picked it up. 

“You know,” she told Cosmo, “you’re the pushiest damn cat I’ve ever met.”

He looked pleased by this. Even worse, he was right. If she was trying to tease out any possible connections between Michale Clarke and the Houses, the library should have been her first port of call. She chewed absently on her lower lip. Might as well go for the obvious first. She took out a pencil, scrawled Michael Clarke, New Haven into the Albemarle book and slid it into the shelf. The shelf shuddered, briefly, then quieted and the hidden door swung open. A slightly musty smell drifted out to her, like moulding paper, a waft of powdery, damp lignin and inkjet mixed with a faint drift of stale cigar. Inside, the shelves stood half-empty, the only thing filling them piles of old newspaper, most of them stacked carelessly on the lower shelves. Alex had never seen the library spit out search results with such… could a library show disdain? Could a library feel disdain? Alex felt inexplicably sure this one could, and was making it known.

Picking up one of the newspapers from a nearby shelf, Alex smoothed it open along the crease. The Daily New Havener . 19th May 2005. The front page showed a headline about some disused amusement park out on Lighthouse Point and an interview with a mayoral candidate condemning his opponent’s stance on school districting. Flipping through it, she couldn’t see mention of Michael Clarke anywhere. She set the paper aside and pulled out a few more sheafs at random, going backwards from the present day. 2003, 1998, 1994. Nothing. Where are you, Michael Clarke? She thought. And why was the library showing her this. Thumbing through the paper from December 07th 1994, she heard a whisper of a laugh in her mind. Darlington, the arch of his eyebrow audible in his tone as he said “ You’re not thinking , Stern. Go beyond the obvious.”

Alex scowled. At Darlington? At herself? “God I wish there was a control F function in here,” she grumbled. She grabbed another paper, this one from 1989, and ran her finger down the contents. There! An article in the culture section, something incendiary about halal labels being added to products in local supermarkets. A student voice piece written by Michael Clarke. “Of course,” she muttered. Of course he was that type. So he’d written for the Daily New Havener in the 80s and 90s while at Yale, perhaps stayed on as editor later. And he’d been a member of Book and Snake… 

Looking around, Alex spied two small notebooks she hadn’t previously noticed tucked between stacks of mouldering paper on a low shelf. Lethe Days Diary of Theodore Blackwell , 1989-1993. She pulled them out and flipped one open to May 1991.

“Frank was in a foul mood last night, said his girl has been up his ass about the business with the S&B trust changing the locks to keep women out of the tomb. It’s a nasty scene, I’ll grant, but with Buckley behind them I don’t see it going anywhere. The necrolunar divination was mostly uneventful, as far as it goes, though Michael refused to clean up afterwards, said that was Lethe’s job…”

Michael… Could that be Michael Clarke? Grabbing both books and a selection of the papers, Alex made her way out of the library and back downstairs, dropped into the cushions of the couch and flipped open the first notebook. Cosmo, curled into the opposite corner of the couch, looked up languidly and blinked at her in a self-satisfied way. “If only you could read this drivel for me,” she sighed.

________

Alex looked up when she heard the front door click open. How long had she been there? Glancing out the window, she saw a sky still bright along the horizon, but with a single bright star peaking eagerly through the gathering dark above. Venus, maybe? Or Vega? She had always liked knowing the names of stars, liked leaning over Hellie’s shoulder, breathing in the warm smell of her hair and pointing up, one eye squeezed shut to align their vision. “I think that’s Mars,” she would say. “I think that’s Sirius.”

There came the thud of a bag being set down, then, a moment later, Dawes emerged from the hallway, string bag of groceries in hand, the warm glow of light from the hallway illuminating her from behind, hair  tucked into the headphones around her neck catching the light like a coppery halo. She looked like a byzantine icon. Snatches of music spilled in soft strains from her headphones while she stood in the doorway, fingers readjusting their grip on the bag of groceries as she stared at the white ball of Cosmo on the couch beside Alex.

“Is that LCD Soundsystem?” Alex asked casually, swinging her legs down from where she had her feet propped on the armrest.

The crease in Dawes’ forehead deepened as she set the bag down and moved into the room. “Is that Cosmo?” Her voice was a little husky, as if she were getting over a cold. She met Alex’s gaze. “But Il Bastone…”

“I know,” sighed Alex. They both turned to look at the small ball of fluff moulting all over the couch. “But he’s helping me do research. Filling in for absent parties.”

Dawes gave a choked laugh. Darlington’s name hung unspoken in the air. Alex set aside her reading and rose to her feet. “Come on,” she said, picking up the groceries and heading for the kitchen. “I’ve got a lot to catch you up on. And I’m starving.”

Despite Alex’s offers to help, Dawes refused to let her help make dinner, which was probably for the best. Alex held Dawes’ kitchen witchery in the highest esteem and didn’t trust herself not to mess it up. Within minutes, delightful smells were beginning to waft through the house. By the time Alex had filled Dawes in on her summer, her research, the golem situation, and what had happened to Michael Clarke, a chicken was in the oven, Dawes seemed to have relaxed significantly, and Cosmo sat on the warm tiles, basking in the radiant warmth emanating from the oven and staring through the glass with the rapt attention of a predator, tail swishing back and forth in precise little flicks. Dawes was magic, alright, casting this spell of peace and warmth over the house, filling the empty cracks in their home with nourishing light.

“Turner brought you in? He wants to work together?” Dawes blotted dry the little sage leaves she was frying into shatteringly delicious little crisps in a shallow layer of olive oil.

Alex had brought out Michal Clarke’s file. “I think so,” she said. “He can say he just wants to rule out the possibility of society involvement, but I can tell he thinks there’s a connection.”

“And you do, too?”

“And I do, too,” Alex confirmed. “I don’t know how it all ties together, yet, but he comes up a lot in the Lethe Days Diaries from the 80s and 90s, when he was a student and graduate. Apparently he had a lot of opinions and really wanted to make sure they were heard.”

Dawes made a face. “Anything worth looking into further?”

“The main thing I got is that he seems to have been kind of a massive misogynist with very questionable views around race and particularly the ‘Jewish problem’.”

“I hate Yale,” muttered Dawes, looking sick. Alex agreed. It had been uncomfortable enough reading accounts of debates between Michael Clarke and local civil rights activists, which even Theodore Blackwell and Bobby Fischer (the two Virgils whose diaries she had found) had found vitriolic and off-putting. She wasn’t sure she really felt all that inclined to seek justice for this man. But if the societies were involved, it was her duty to make sure that no stray magic spilled out and did further harm. She didn’t have to be sorry it had already done some damage in this particular case.

“Any… known enemies?” suggested Dawes, sounding a little sheepish, as though she still didn’t quite know how to talk about this without relying on crime procedurals for a script. Alex thought of her interactions with Turner and felt the same.

“No one given by name,” Alex admitted, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if he made enemies among the societies, particularly those who let in women before 1992, when Bones did. Clarke was apparently pretty buddy-buddy with William F. Buckley.”

Dawes paused. “Buckley led the movement against admitting women to Skull and Bones. He was… pretty outspoken about it.” 

Alex nodded. “And he took Clarke under his wing. Maybe Buckely took part in a ritual as an alum and they got to talking about the natural inferiority of women and how much they believed in the superiority of the white master race or some shit. Who knows.”

Dawes went to the cabinet, pulled out two elegant wine glasses with slender stems and poured them each a glass of red wine. “So,” she said grimly, “he was a bastard.”

Alex smiled, clinked their glasses. Cosmo jumped onto the kitchen island counter and settled on the open file spread out there. Dawes looked conflicted. “Has he been… hanging around long?” Cosmo nuzzled at Dawes’ hand.

Alex could see the thought of Darlington ghosting across her face. She took a sip of wine. “No. I’ve been going to Black Elm to feed him.” Alex briefly considered telling Dawes about her dreams. About Darlington, hair wild, eyes black, feet bloody, crown of teeth smiling at her with hungry, threatening desire, spooling himself out into blood and darkness, leading her into Dis. She decided against it. Probably not what Dawes needed to hear right now. Instead, she said: “The bridegroom turned back up. He’s been searching for Tara beyond the vale. Something about honour and setting Daisy’s wrongs right or something, but Dawes, he said –”

“You’ve done enough for Tara Hutchens,” Dawes cut her off, her tone unexpectedly sharp. Alex looked over at her. Dawes was looking fixedly away from her, the corners of her mouth pulling down as her gaze swept the room, catching for a moment on Cosmo again. “You’ve done enough,” she repeated, more evenly. “Let it go. You’ve done all you can for a girl you never met.”

But Alex couldn’t just let it go. She felt her own temper rise a little. “She was brutally murdered by our boss , Dawes–”

“ Ex -boss. Whom you killed.”

“I didn’t kill him.” Alex snapped, heatedly. “And besides, do you think that cancels out the harm to her soul? I thought you’d be the one counselling me about how vengeance doesn’t set things right.” She couldn’t understand how Dawes – timid, anxious Dawes – could make that kind of calculation.

Dawes’ eyes snapped to hers, then, corners of her mouth softening. Her eyes shone. “Of course not. No. Of course…” She set her glass down on the counter with an abortive ring, staring into the dark cherry of the wine. “Maybe I just…” she whispered, voice cracking. “Maybe I’m just angry at you for taking up someone else’s cause when we’ve still got Darlington to find…”

Alex fumbled for words, but found none. That’s not what it is. That’s not what I meant by it. But instead she reached out and gripped Dawes’ hand where it lay on the counter. That’s not what it is. I’m just a fool trying to pay someone else’s debts.

“We don’t owe the dead the same as the…” Dawes’s whisper trailed off again. She couldn’t bring herself to say definitively that Darlington was alive. Alex didn’t blame her. Neither of them wanted to give themselves fully over to hope. They were too afraid of the fall.

“We’ll find him, Pammie.”

Cosmo made a small noise of agreement from beside them. Dawes gave them both a watery smile. 

“I should check on the chicken,” she murmured, sliding down from the counter to peer into the oven.

There was a muffled buzz from Cosmo’s direction. Alex looked at him suspiciously. “What was that, buddy?”

The cat mrrp ’d and got to his feet, arching his back in a deep stretch, forepaws out ahead of him and tail in the air. Under his belly, Alex saw her phone lying on the file where he had been settled, screen lit up with a text. 

Dawes picked up Cosmo and scratched him behind the ears. “Who is it?”

“Turner.”

Turner: Update

Alex waited a moment, unsure if that was him sharing or demanding. A few seconds later, he followed up with a

?

She rolled her eyes. Clearly the latter. “And people call me rude,” she muttered. 

“That’s because you are,” Dawes mumbled into Cosmo’s fur. Alex grinned, cheerfully ignoring her as she dialled Turner’s number. He picked up on the second ring.

“Detective Turner,” Alex sang, leaning back against the counter. She put him on speaker. “What a delight to hear from you. How’re the kids?”

“ Tell me you’ve got something, Alex.” His voice sounded strangely bleached out over the speaker, losing some of its usual smooth richness. Alex noticed that she noticed this.

“Oh, I’m doing great, thanks.” She realised, to her own surprise, that she was smiling. “Just once, Turner, you could try charming my information out of me. I know you can do it.“

Turner made an amused noise, blending into the rumble of an engine in the background. “ You don’t want me to charm you, Alex, you want an excuse to bully me back.”

Well damn. He had her there. She heard the regular clicking sound of his indicator. “On the phone while you’re driving?” She clicked her tongue. “And people call me reckless.” 

“That’s because —,” Dawes began under her breath.

“—yes, thank you, Dawes. You two can work on a list of my flaws together. Go wild. Use the whiteboard.”

Turner coughed pointedly. “I need that file back, Alex. What’ve you got?”  

Alex exchanged a look with Dawes. “I’m not sure right now,” she said into the phone. “Maybe nothing, but maybe…” she trailed off, uncertain how much to tell Turner before they had hard evidence of anything. “You can come pick up the file and I’ll fill you in. We’re at Il Bastone.”

“ I’m in the neighbourhood. I’ll be there in twenty. ” What easy acquiescence. Alex wondered how often Turner was in the neighbourhood. The bass thrum of the engine cut off on the other side, and Alex heard the car door open and swing shut with a thud.

“Staking out a suspect, Turner? Is it me?”

He gave a beleaguered sigh, but his voice sounded as if he might be smiling, as if he knew he was damning himself when he said, “... I had some suits to pick up from the dry cleaner.”

Alex was still laughing when he hung up on her.

Chapter Text

“Twenty minutes?!” Dawes had squeaked, and rushed to parboil more potatoes in case Turner wanted to stay for dinner. The idea seemed absurd to Alex, but she decided it was easier to let Dawes busy herself with the project of perfectly glazed root vegetables than get into it.

But it hadn’t been twenty minutes. At half an hour, Alex frowned and hovered in the kitchen doorway, stomach grumbling. “We can save him some, Dawes, just come eat with me,” she whined. The sky had darkened quickly, and what might be the last of the late summer storms rumbled overhead, making it feel suddenly much later.

At forty minutes, Alex sent a tentative text, chewing on a juicy pearl onion: “ all good ? ” There was no reply. The storm passed them by, but a dense wetness still clung to the air and sudden showers of rain kept bursting forth like an over eager soprano before dying back, rain falling in enormous drops, the kind where Alex felt like she could follow the path of each one down from the sky as she watched them through the kitchen window.

Dawes had retreated to the living room, headphones firmly on and hoodie tucked up over the copper splash of her hair, and Alex was putting away clean dishes when Turner eventually showed. The front door made the kind of sound a front door might make if it had a throat to clear and a polite announcement to make, a creaking chime against the gentle backdrop of the rain. Alex almost dropped the fancy  chemex glass she held when she heard the door open and swung herself out into the hallway still holding it in time to catch Turner’s hoarse noise of surprise and see him silhouetted against the deep blue of night falling to ground along with the rain, his outstretched hand limned in harsh orange by a street lamp reflecting off his wet skin. He looked like he’d been going for the door knocker when it swung open for him.

“You got a licence for the facial recognition tech on this door?” He asked stiffly, stepping inside. His coat dripped steadily onto the doormat. The door glided closed behind him with a happy click, dipping the hallway back into a comfortable quiet.

“No,” said Alex, deeply amused. Turner. Resisting the idea of magic to the last. “I think the house just likes you.”

Turner twisted around and stared at the door for a minute, then shook his head once on a sharp exhale and turned to strip off his coat, apparently determining to put it behind him. He held himself stiffly, his face set in hard lines, shallow movements sketched out with a formal edge, not at all what Alex had been expecting (hoping?) after their call. He had seemed positively in the mood for bantering. Now he wouldn’t look at her.

What kept you? Alex wanted to ask. Why do you look quite so ready to kill?

Instead, she asked, “You hungry? Dawes made extra.” The sweet smell of something savoury roasting still hung in the air, curling around them like smoke. Alex could go for seconds. Thirds, really.

His gaze swept across the hall, fluid until it fell to the glass she still held, dark eyes gleaming wet, like he’d brought the storm inside quietly with him. He looked not less crisp for all his slightly drowned demeanour, his shoulders moulded into the clean lines of his suit. Even his voice sounded a little drowned: “Alex, I’m not–”

“Alex, is that–?” Dawes’ head appeared through the door frame to the living room. She almost shrank back at the sight of Turner in the hall. “Oh. Hello, detective.” She tugged her headphones fully off and shifted her weight onto the back foot, glancing at Turner’s dripping coat on the stand. With a twitch of effort, he seemed to reign in some of the storm, gentling his posture and giving her a polite, somewhat bland smile, like a wolf demonstrating that it was not hungry. He still hadn’t looked at her. Alex tore her own gaze away and turned to Dawes.

“Dawes, shall we heat up the–”

“--Yes!” Dawes sprang to life at the idea, eyes brightening a fraction and spine zipping into more of an upright position. “Of course. Yes. Just a moment.” She moved towards the kitchen with renewed vigour, leaving them in the hallway. Alex trailed after her, mouth tugging up helplessly to one side. She glanced over her shoulder at Turner. “She’ll be less jumpy if you eat,” she told him.

Alex wandered over to the sink again, looking out through the window and into the dark, the rain now the brightest part of the dregs of the storm – catching flashes of street lamps and headlights sweeping through the smooth gloom of dark where before it had darkened the sky into premature night.

Dawes shuffled over and plucked the glass Alex was still holding from her hands, returning it to the cupboard above the toaster. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Alex, but I honestly wouldn’t have guessed you were into speciality coffee,” she said, brow wrinkling gently. Alex felt suddenly, oddly, uncomfortable. Her neck twitched almost involuntarily, gaze drawn back to where Turner now stood in the doorway to the kitchen, silently watching. Dawes nudged her. “Go to the living room. I’ll come through in a moment.” She smelled like rosemary and a hint of lavender, warm and nourishing. Alex just nodded.

“Come on,” she said as she brushed past Turner, and drifted into the living room, carefully skirting Dawes’ circle of notes and flashcards. She heard him sigh and follow. Turner let out a harsh, amused sound.

“You all do this?”

“Do what?” Alex asked, dropping, feline, onto a low couch.

“Nest,” he said, still on his feet and gesturing down at the papers. She looked down, considering it, hair falling in a curtain across her face. She liked the sound of it. ‘ You all’. Like she was a real girl. She couldn’t quite put her finger on why shared research methods should make her feel so warm inside. She leaned back and tilted her head up at him with a grin, feeling full and lazy, like cosmo curled by the fire. “Yeah,” she said, “I guess we do.”

But her grin faded. Turner was looking at her now. His face switched masks, flickering between shades she couldn’t quite identify, and she almost got caught in the flash of it, found herself focused in on it like there was something very important she might catch a glimpse of in the moment of the switch. A card trick she desperately wanted to learn. He was still standing over her as she sat, now curled loosely into the couch, head tilted back and unable to break his gaze, which still seemed to glitter with rain. He blinked, once, slowly, long lashes scraping down like an implication and Alex had no idea what it meant, only knew that yes, she had wanted him to meet her eye, but now they couldn’t keep looking at each other, and definitely not in this soft, silent way and place because there was something haunted about it, about them, about her, and so she finally asked,

“What kept you?”

Only that was no good, because he only looked at her more intently, even as he sat down on the other end of the couch, and why would he do that? And why would he–

“There was–”

But Dawes ( bless Dawes) came in just in time to cut him off, once more, and bless Dawes , because she was once more not sure what she was doing and food would surely help.

“There’s enough in the kitchen for a plate for you, too, Alex, if you want you seconds.”

Alex jumped to her feet. “Dawes,” she said, seriously, “How do you feel about ardent declarations of love?”

Dawes blushed. “Um… I prefer them in writing?” She ventured.

“Noted,” Alex nodded, making her way back to the kitchen. “I’ll write you a letter.”

—

Alex and Turner ate in silence while Dawes caught Turner up on their findings. Alex had to restrain herself from licking her plate clean. Turner followed Dawes’ explanation diligently, refraining from commenting when Dawes brought out the whiteboard, his eyes flicking only occasionally to Alex as she ate. Alex considered licking her fingers clean one by one just to see if he’d look away. Maybe that would help her figure out what they were doing. In light of the documents they needed to handle she decided not to, and felt she was showing a great deal of restraint and propriety in this decision. She did, however, lick first her knife, then the corner of her lip, where a drop of gravy had settled, in a moment where Dawes had her back to her in a small act of indulgence.

“So,” finished Dawes, “Clarke was a misogynist, anti-Semite, racist, and federalist with close ties to Skull and Bones. He was presumably murdered by a rogue golem, given the clay at the…” she faltered briefly, then rallied, “… the site of the crime. That implicates Scroll and Key, or at least someone with access to their tomb. And Alex was lured into a tomb in Grove Street by a Woman in White with a hellhound at her command not two days later, which is suspicious in and of itself, but given that Grove Street is connected to Scroll and Key underground…”

“I’d say that’s the start of a pretty solid case,” Turner finished for her. “If even a single part of it was admissible evidence I could show my commanding officer.”

Dawes chewed on her lip. “Of course. Yes. Still…” she trailed off, looking at the whiteboard. Alex heard what she didn’t say. We should investigate . It felt a silly thing to say to an actual detective, but Alex was glad she wasn’t the only one thinking it.

“Well, I’ve got to track down this rogue golem, anyway,” she said with as much conviction as she could muster. “And it looks like Clarke is mixed up in it. And I’d like to know who the fuck is haunting Grove Street and why there was a goddamn borderland river flowing down there.”

Dawes nodded. “We should… we should go back to see if there are any other traces of supernatural activity — Alex, do you think you could find the tomb again?”

Alex’s stomach twisted sourly. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe we can just follow the trail of my blood across the gravel.”

“Unlikely,” Turner put in evenly, “It’s rained quite a lot since then.” Alex shot him a dark look.

“Actually, that probably won’t be necessary,” Dawes said, thoughtfully, ignoring them both. “I can research a way use the clay cinnamon you found on the grave to trace it… I’ve taken a look at it and from what I can tell it does appear to just be… clay.”

Alex had made an effort not to think about the particulars of that night, but now a trickle of something floated through her head, a hazy sigh of drowning, a melody of water. “The song,” she started, “The song mentioned cinnamon.” A shot of cold memory ran through her. Of a cauldron and a sliding landscape of hearth and storming sea.  “Fuck. It was the same. It was the same song…” She faltered. Was she really about to start talking about her dreams with Dawes and Turner, of all people? Wisps of her grandmother’s half-remembered voice flared at the corners of her mind..

“Come here and stir the pot,” said Estrella Stern. Walnuts on a table. A sea of bones.

She frowned at the whiteboard. “It’s a lullaby, I guess. The song, échate a la mar– it’s about... A girl, I think? She drowns herself and then emerges from the sea.”

“Avuela, how could I burn the ocean?” 

Dawes made a small noise. “Oh! Of course… I wonder… Maybe sonic resonance would do it? Curious that it used the clay as an anchor– or maybe the cinnamon was the anchor?” Alex and Turner were cautiously silent, letting Dawes talk through her thoughts. “Or maybe the melody… Wait, the song is Ladino, yes?”

Alex shifted in her seat, curling her legs up undeneath her. “Yes. My grandmother used to sing it.” A half-truth.

“Hmm. You don’t need any connection to Judaism beyond knowledge of some esoteric rabbinic texts to animate a golem, really, but I suppose if the goal was symbolic resonance…?”

A language of diaspora. A language of death .

Turner sighed and bent forward, picking up the file on Michael Clarke. “I don’t like this shit. I’m not looking for goddamn conspiracy theories and I can practically hear the red string unspooling here.” Dawes looked slightly guilty and Alex wondered if she had a pinboard ready to go. Turner started flipping through the file, neat nails scraping over the dry pages. “So Clarke was a bigot. If every misogynist or anti-Semite that graduated from Yale got murdered in a revenge killing then I’d have no time to eat or sleep–” Are you sleeping? Alex wanted to ask. He looked tired. “-- hell, even if it was this golem creature that killed him, how am I supposed to convict any reasonable suspect, then?”

Alex leaned against the arm rest and propped her chin up on her hand, watching him with slow eyes. “Mayeb you don’t convict anyone.”

He cut his eyes up to meet her gaze. “Maybe,” she said, “You just help us figure out the truth. And if we find someone responsible at the end..” she shrugged, rolling one should forward, “Then we find a way to make it make sense for your report.”

“You’re suggesting I lie,” Turner said flatly, dark gaze pinning her in place. He set the file aside and fixed her with the full weight of his attention. She made a point to blink at him languidly to show she didn’t care for it. “You’re suggesting I fabricate a report and frame someone for a crime.”

“I’m suggesting that I think you might consider it more important to find justice than transparency in the police system.”

“Alex…” Dawes shifted nervously.

“ Justice ,” Turner said like it was a knife in his mouth, “isn’t something you generally find by framing people. It’s not a game, Alex.”

Alex leaned forward. “I’m not suggesting we frame an innocent person. I’m just saying that I thought you might care more about the truth in the world than on paper.”

“I’m gonna go wash up!” Dawes announced, gathering their plates and fleeing to the kitchen.

Shit. “Dawes–” Alex tried, softer. “I’m sorry, I didn’t…” But she was gone. Something about this dynamic with Turner was making her sharper than she wanted to be, and Dawes didn’t do well with confrontation, certainly not in this space, on her safe, hallowed ground, her nest of research papers. Alex fell back into the sofa on an exhale and stared at the ceiling. Turner sighed, too, and he looked tired again, sleepless and on edge. Maybe they were on the same edge.

“I’m sorry,” she admitted to the ceiling, sliding her eyes down to him. She felt like that wasn’t really enough to explain it, but she couldn’t find the words for the rest. Turner stayed silent a moment. Then–

“You’re not wrong.” He smoothed his hands down his legs and cast her another lingering glance before rising and picking the file back up. His voice was softer than she had expected. Alex fixed her gaze on his hands, long, bare skin tucked around the edge of the paper.

“I was late because they found a body,” he said, suddenly.

“Was it–?”

“No.” Turner shook his head, face tight. “Nothing to do with this. Just a girl. She overdosed. They found her body near Evergreen. She…”

Alex felt something burning in her throat. He didn’t have to say it. Some girl has overdosed and it had reminded Turner who she really was. He must know her file. He had sat next to her and thought of the life she slipped out of, her phantom life sharpening like an image for him until it cut through the veil of Yale Alex like a knife. She couldn’t look at him, only nodded and got up to follow Dawes out of the room.

“Alex-“ his voice was still soft. She hated everything and hated that, apparently, he could tell. She stopped on the verge, where the carpet of the living room went over into the gleaming wooden floor of the hall. The house shifted around her soothingly.

“You eat like someone who went hungry for a long time, but not...” Turner spoke to her back. He sounded careful, and just a little uncertain.

“Cute, Turner.”

She felt him move closer.

“Did you take the fentanyl that night?”

She twisted to look at him, eyes dull. He was too goddamned sharp. She didn’t like getting cut. She didn’t like getting cut. At least he didn’t pity her.

“Would you think less of me if I said yes?.”

He shook his head. “I’d think you were a liar.”

“You know I’m a liar.”

He looked a little relieved. His skin was so smooth.

 “Go home, Turner. We’re not angry at each other,” she said simply.