Words began to appear in the blood, as if written by an invisible finger, their letters sharp and distinct.
BE BOLD
BE BOLD
BUT NOTTOOBOLD
Even as the words were scrawled, the blood continued to fall, slowly devouring the message to make space for more writing to appear.
LEST YOURBLOOD
SHALL RUN COLD
No sooner had they been completed than the words were swallowed by the cascading blood.
“I think the mean ghost is threatening us,” Constantino whispered.
Fitcher dragged a finger through the blood on the door. “It is only a powerful illusion,” he said, holding up his finger to smell it. The face he made suggested to Mallory that he wasn’t convinced by his own theory.
She peered down the towering rows of barrels, where the cellar disappeared into shadows. This cellar was a cave, but sometimes caves led to other caves. Sometimes there was light at the far end of a tunnel. Maybe they were not trapped.
Tucking away the bloody key, she took the knife from her boot and cut away a strip of fabric from the hem of her ruined skirt. She grabbed a bottle from a nearby case, yanked out the cork, and dumped out half the wine onto the blood-slicked floor, ignoring Constantino’s whine of dismay. She tucked the strip of cloth into the bottle, letting the top hang out like a wick.
Once the wine in the bottle had climbed up to the top of the fabric, Mallory prayed to whichever god had dominion over fire and held the bottle up to the crackling blue flame from one of the lamps. The fabric caught—burning as pale as moonlight.
Fitcher raised an eyebrow. “I would not have thought wine would contain enough alcohol for a makeshift lantern.”
“Fortified wine,” Mallory explained. “Ruby Comorre is wine mixed with brandy.”
“A beverage after my own heart,” said Constantino. He went to grab a second, unopened bottle, but hesitated at Fitcher’s stern expression.
They started through the cellar. The blood seemed to be a living thing, following in their footsteps. Occasionally a cork would loosen on one of the barrels and more blood would gush forth.
The cave had a gentle downward slope, and Mallory sensed that they were burrowing ever deeper into the earth beneath the estate. Farther away from fresh air and the outside world. Farther away from Armand. Farther away from Anaïs.
Her heart clenched. What if all this was a distraction—a way for Le Bleu to drag Mallory away from her sister? What if Anaïs was his target now? Her blood would do just as well to fulfill the required sacrifice…
Mallory had to get out of here.
Ahead, the light caught on a wall, and Mallory worried they’d reached a dead end until she saw it was a doorway. A gate of heavy wrought iron stood open, framed by two brass sconces, each one shaped like the skeletal bones of a hand holding a lantern aloft.
Mallory lit the sconces. The light, though dim, revealed a room smaller than the inside of the stagecoach. Rough walls hewn from stone. A solid iron door opposite to her, crossed with studded iron bands.
A body dangled in each of the room’s four corners. Triphine, Lucienne, Béatrice, and Julie—the holes in their chests gaping open, heads lolled forward. Their arms were raised overhead, their wrists tied with rope and secured to metal hooks that hung from the ceiling. The words carved into their skin glistened red.Echtrausandgreischt.
Trustandbetrayal.
Mallory told herself it wasn’t really them. These forms were solid—not the wispy, barely corporeal figures of spirits. And while their bodies may have been preserved by magic, she knew they were also buried in the cemetery. She’d seen Julie laid to rest that very morning.
Fitcher was right. This was an illusion, intended to terrify them out of their senses.
Well, applause to Bastien, because it was working.
A series of footprints made crisscrossing tracks back and forth around a pentagon-shaped table in the center of the room, its top inlaid with a woven pattern of ebony and pearl. A scabbard lay across it, holding a familiar slim-bladed sword.
At four of the table’s five points, a wedding ring had been placed in a small porcelain dish.
Mallory had nearly forgotten their entire mission, their purpose for coming back into this house in the first place. They needed the rings to complete the ritual, to end the spell and return Bastien back into the arms of death.
