After dropping Pamela Dawes at her apartment, Alex drove to Daniel Arlington’s family home, Black Elm, to return the Mercedes. Seeing lights on in the kitchen and tower, Alex hoped Darlington might have returned. She searched the warmly lit but empty house, moving room to room and finally to Darlington’s round, monk-like bedroom, only to find it unchanged and vacant. Comforted briefly by Cosmo the cat, Alex wept and slept in Darlington’s bed, dreaming of him promising, “I will serve you ’til the end of days,” and awakening to cold winter sun and the ache of his absence.

In the morning, Alex wrote her incident report from Black Elm’s sunroom, detailing Tara Hutchins’s cause and time of death and the Grays’ odd behavior at the Skull and Bones prognostication. She included information gleaned from the coroner and Detective Abel Turner, noting Tripp Helmuth’s name and Turner’s belief that Tripp was uninvolved. In her “Findings,” Alex concluded that Lance Gressang likely killed Tara while under powerful hallucinogens and stated there was no evidence of society involvement, then sent the report to Dean Sandow and Dawes.

Leaving Black Elm, Alex stopped at a mini-mart on Elm for junk food. While reaching into a cooler, she felt a caress on her hand and was confronted by a figure in a Yale sweatshirt whose cheek released an insect. He grabbed her, smashed her head into the glass case, and revealed himself as something beyond a typical Gray: his glasslike skin showed veins and bone, and he reeked of the Veil. Alex’s death-ward words failed to deter him, and the shop owners—unable to see him—believed Alex was vandalizing their store.

Fleeing into the street, Alex was tackled and choked by the creature, who then blew red dust into her face, causing explosive internal pain. As sirens approached, the Bridegroom’s Gray appeared and battled the attacker midair, slamming through a streetlight and building. Seizing the chance, Alex ran for the Hutch, desperate to get behind Lethe’s wards as pain burst through her chest and her skin crawled.

Alex reached the Hutch’s hidden door, which admitted her as an EMT closed in outside. Bleeding and nauseated, she crawled up the stairs, coughing black bile alive with beetles. On the verge of collapse, she managed to text Dawes “SOS. 911.” Dawes arrived, dragged her inside, and demanded details. Alex described a translucent Gray who used red smoke; Dawes identified it as a gluma—a husk raised as a messenger for Book and Snake—and the dust as corpse beetles that would eat her from the inside out.

Dawes forced a burning antidote down Alex’s throat, warning it would blister but could be healed. As the medicine seared through her, Alex realized the attack meant someone believed she was getting close by visiting the morgue. Though she had already filed a report that downplayed society involvement, she concluded that Tara’s death was connected to the Houses. Smiling through the pain, Alex understood the implication of the assassination attempt: “They tried to kill me,” and therefore she would strike back.