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He truly doesn’t seem to remember. This could play to our advantage if we set it just right. So yes, let’s say he’s turned. Say he doesn’t remember anything about it. He has a vast well of power and Dean Shea thinks that Lyle’s in his thrall—but isn’t. Say we bind him to us instead.

It’s not using him. He’s basically begging us.

“I don’t know how to help you,” Lacie says as she spreads her palms. “What do you want me to say? Validate your version of events where Dean Shea somehow, I don’t know, colluded to cover up Therese’s killing? You hear how crazy that sounds, right?”

Lyle’s face reddens, but I interrupt him before he can say anything. “Well, actually, Lacie, don’t you know that there have been a lot of disappearances on Preston’s campus over the years? All from Classics.”

I can read her question from her face alone: What are you doing?

“Thank you.” Lyle raps the heel of his hand against the table again, the Div School basement swallowing the sound immediately. “You know what I’m seeing. You see it, too.”

“I almost didn’t come here because of it.” It’s a lie, but whatever. He’ll never know. A plan is forming in my mind, one that’ll clarify what Dean Shea’s objective is with the Rare Book Room and will entice Lyle over to our side should he truly not remember. Is it a gamble if he does remember and is trying to play us? Yes. But either way, we’ll know. “Frankly, I think you’re astute to mention it. How about this: do you think you can use your leverage with Shea to get us access to the Rare Book Room? Apparently, it’s booked solid and Lacie darling couldn’t get any research done.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Lyle rubs the back of his neck, and his palm comes away crusted with granules of burgundy scabbing. He winces, rubs his hand against his leg.

“Oh, nothing, really. I just figure anything could be hiding back there. Shea could have stored the exact information we need to figure out this particular sticky wicket in some stashed folder, and what better place to hide it, hm?”

Lyle’s brow knits. He looks at his hands. “I don’t think this’ll help.”

“Wouldn’t you want to turn over every stone?” I ask, gentle, probing. Come on, Lyle, take the goddamned bait. “What’s the worst-case scenario? There’s nothing in the RBR? At least let’s try it. For Therese and Laurel. And if you do find something, let me know immediately, and we can expose whatever the hell is going on in this place. Together.”

Lacie’s staring at me. I hope she’s picking up what I’m putting down right in fucking front of her, because this is a hell of a lot of work.

“Fine,” Lyle finally says, standing and brushing Div School dust from his pants. “For Therese and Laurel.”

TWENTY-ONEMarcella

On a Tuesday afternoon nearing a school break, one might expect the Classics department to be bustling with bright-eyed, panicked undergrads, exhausted grad students, and harried, coffee-guzzling professors. You might expect to hear the chatter of foreign languages mingling with dead ones, raucous conversation and debate about the legacy of Le Morte d’Arthur and Sir Thomas Malory’s tempestuous letters from imprisonment. You might even imagine conversations about the trading routes between Scandinavia and Italy, or verbal sparring over the role of certain Norse conquests in Iceland in the creation of literary traditions. Reverent chatter about Snorri Sturluson and his fabled reading at the Alþingi.

But Preston’s Classics department is something of an anomaly, I now understand. The halls of the building are hushed, muffled voices in closed-door classrooms warring with the low-level ticks and hums of radiator heating. My heels click on the black-and-white tile floor as I wind up the staircases past niches stuffed with busts of writers and Roman philosophers. Up and up to the third floor, where Dean Shea holds his faculty hours.

I could not have designed a more perfect place to discover the schedules of the other vættir haunting Preston.

I’ve worn an old favorite, slightly modified for wintertime: a black silk slip dress with a lace bodysuit underneath, high-collared, with only a whiff of the scandalous. This morning as I listened to Lacie get up and shower through the thin walls connecting our apartments, I made the conscious choice not to involve her in the next step. It’s enough that I have her buy-in … for now. I don’t know how best to deploy her doe-eyed softness yet, but I think by the end of today, I might. It’s possible I can even pick another of these bastards off.

Touching the ruby amulet pinned at my throat to tweak it back to true, I click up the final step. I can hear Evan laughing, a booming, unworried sound. I cannot tell quite yet if he’s a vættr; they don’t follow the rules of other undead. The trick of it is: vættir around other vættir, around death—they change. But put them in a room with human beings? No way to really tell, if they’re smart enough. You can go to any library and pick up any story about wights—how when they were unearthed from graves, their blood was still liquid, their hearts whole. In fact, it inspired a whole scare in France.

A story for another time.

Brushing a hand through my hair (left loose and spritzed with Le Labo) I knock the slightly ajar door with the edges of my knuckles. The uproar dies inside.

Evan is who answers, his smile flickering for the briefest of seconds.

“Marcie,” he says, his eyes pinching. “Good to see you.”

I bare my teeth at him. “Evie,” I reply, making up a silly diminutive on the spot just so he can see how it feels. “You, too. Is Dean Shea busy, or…”

His brow quirks, but before he can come up with a sharp response there’s a great throat clearing and old man–style hullabaloo.

“Ah, there she is.” Dean Shea stands from his desk. In his hand is a wood tobacco pipe, his cracking lips rimmed in yellow spit.

Fighting revulsion, I walk inside. Evan closes the door as I take in the lay of the land: Dr. Davies is here, as is Madame Kehane, Dean Shea’s acting secretary and Old and Middle High French specialist. Up close, she looks as though she might have been pickled at the end of the eighteenth century and left to rot in a bog. To her left and right are worried-looking students, all under the age of twenty-three … so none of my concern, for now. But at the front of the room, looking bored and bemused, is a pair of old men—both of whom I saw at the Winter Ball.

“You know,” Dean Shea says broadly to everyone and no one, “Marcella’s course has a waitlist already—massive, massive accomplishment for an assistant professor.”

I give him my widest smile. “I like to think I know what sells.”

“And what is that, exactly?” Evan asks, his arms crossed over his chest. “Sex?”