Page 26 of Dead Beat

“Of course not.”

Alex felt her patience fraying. “You were the one who wanted to be a part of what Lethe does. I warned you.”

“You did,” Mercy admitted. “And I didn’t want to hear it.” She stopped short. “But Alex … has it occurred to you that maybe everything you’re doing—everything with the ghosts and … demons … and—”

“Magic.”

“Magic.” She said it like the name of an ex, one who wasn’t good for her, one she didn’t want to let go of. “Maybe all of it is … I don’t know … bad.”

“Bad as in evil? As in unholy?”

“I’m not kidding.”

“You should really have this talk with Turner. He’s the one who believes in good and evil.”

“You don’t?”

The woman in the hospital gown was moving farther down the corridor and Alex didn’t want to lose sight of her.

“I believe in surviving,” Alex said, more honestly than she should have. They do what they must, not what they should. So much for her hero’s journey. Maybe she could turn things around in the third act. “You can’t think too hard about good and evil when you’re fighting for your life.”

“You’re not fighting for your life right now.”

I am. Every day. It was something Mercy, raised by two parents in a nice house in the suburbs, would never understand. Golgarot had told Alex that she was destined for hell. He might be right. She was the serpent in the garden. And if he’d come knocking when she’d been trapped at the squat in Van Nuys, tangled up in her own web of calamity, she might have made that deal. She would have let him put that pretty yoke around her neck, because what else was there to hold her in the living world but Hellie and some naive hope for a better future?

Now Alex had made the mistake of pulling herself out of the muck, of beginning to build a life she liked, that felt worth something, and for the first time in her twenty-one years, she had too much to lose. If you managed to crash a party like Yale, you didn’t just see yourself out when they didn’t find your name on the guest list. You made the bouncer drag you into the street.

“Fair enough,” Alex said, because she wasn’t sure what else to say.

“So do you believe in good and evil?” There was a desperate edge to Mercy’s voice, and Alex didn’t want to know if it was regret or zealotry.

“I think magic is like anything else,” she said carefully. “It isn’t good or bad; it just is. Somebody pushes you off a roof, you could say gravity killed you, but why not look for the person who did the pushing?”

“Spells don’t kill people, people do?”

“Sure.”

“No, Alex.” Mercy’s voice dropped. “You killed that man. And I helped you do it.”

“He hurt a lot of people before I hurt him.”

“I heard … I heard him scream. I heard the last sound he made on this earth.”

Mercy turned on her heel and shoved into the tide of students. Alex knew she should follow, but what was the point? Mercy had a conscience. Violence still disturbed her. That was normal, natural, the way humanity stayed human. She was the kind of person the world needed if the drumbeat of civilization was going to carry on, if cities were going to continue to rise, and people were going to refrain from stabbing each other when the line for coffee got too long.

Maybe Alex couldn’t fix the break between them, but she could make sure Mercy didn’t go looking for tea and sympathy and discover more pain at the bottom of her cup.

It wasn’t hard to find the woman in the hospital gown. The Gray was tracking Professor Girard, who was deep in conversation with two students.

What Alex was doing was dangerous and it would not be gentle, but she couldn’t afford to be kind. There just wasn’t time, and if she simply spoke to this Gray, she risked other Grays knowing she could hear them. The living were full of enough grief and grievance to keep her occupied. She didn’t need to become a sounding board for the dead.

She waited until they were walking behind the vast brutalist slab of Becton Hall and slipped up behind the woman in her hospital gown.

“Sorry,” she whispered, “but I think you know a thing or two about the Slutty Professor.” She thrust out her hand, felt the woman’s spirit struggle, heard the beeping of a hospital monitor, tasted good red wine. Alex didn’t let go until she had the answers she needed.

11

Darlington spent his Wednesday morning reworking the wiring for the old sound system at Il Bastone. It just didn’t want to stay fixed, but there was a limit to how much time he could spend in the library coming up with new queries for the Albemarle Book to try to crack the pilgrims’ nicknames and excavating every detail from Kittscher’s Lethe Days Diary. At noon he put his tools aside, turned the electricity back on, and patted the breaker box.