Technically, a mass obscuration ritual was useless; she already knew that the second the group woke up, if they spoke to one another, it would be immediately obvious there was magic used. But it was still an impressive feat of mechanicals, and Ellsbeth spent the next hour writing and rewriting a formula just to prove to herself she could do it. Her moment of brilliance came when she realized that the ritual didn’t need to be transmitted by touch or through the air: It could be initiated with a trigger word. She and Rawlins had already figured out how to doit.
From that point, the work was fairly straightforward. She eyed the mostly full box of borax and realized she could contain the ritual within a salt circle. That way, if something went wrong, she could say the trigger word and obscurate everyone who had been in the house when she laid the salt out. Mass obscuration wouldn’t offer a safe lasting effect, but it would probably be enough to get her out of Banestooth if she needed an escape route.
She still had the printed blueprint of the house from the library; she used it to make the calculations for the radius of the circle.
When she finished, she typed up the entire ritual to send to Rawlins, but when she glanced back down at her phone and saw that he still hadn’t texted her, she deleted the email. It was a pathetic and obvious bid for affection, a dog begging for a treat. She would do this on her own. She didn’t need anything from him.
Rawlins
The sidewalks were perilously slick with ice as Rawlins walked down the hill to The Parlor. It was rare for him to go out to a bar, especially on a Friday night; he preferred the comfort of his own home, with his own well-stocked liquor cabinet and his own music. But his house felt haunted by Ellsbeth’s absence, and he found himself claustrophobically trapped with his thoughts of her.
The first week of the semester had been grueling. He usually enjoyed returning after the holiday break—the rush of energy from new students, new schedules, new possibilities, hurrying in from the cold. But he was anxious and continuously troubled by his thoughts of Ellsbeth, which had reached a fever pitch earlier that day.
He had been walking to his office to prepare for his freshman lecture when the front doors of the department building opened and two figures emerged: Ellsbeth and Curt Ladove. Rawlins froze in his tracks and watched them from fifty yards back; he even melted off to the side so as not to draw attention. He could not be sure at that distance if Ellsbeth wasflirting,but it was clear that she was watching Curt closely, hanging on every word. They turned right at the bottom of the stairs, going away from him, and wherever they were headed, they were clearly goingtogether.
Rawlins’s insides curled with anger. It was not only the jealous fear that Ellsbeth wasinvolvedwith Curt, though that now seemed bafflingly possible. He suddenly felt like he didn’t know her at all. She hadnever been particularly close with any of her cohort members—a distance that Rawlins understood, since she was smarter than all of them, yet also less worldly, less attuned to the politics of the academic world. But even among that group, she had professed a particular distaste for Curt, who was the epitome of everything she despised: smug, privileged, overconfident, unfairly rewarded by life. But watching their backs recede, he could tell from Ellsbeth’s posture that she was eagerly attuned to him. Had she only pretended to dislike him because she knew Rawlins did? And if he had been wrong about that, was his entire sense of her completely off base?
It only seemed to confirm his fears from the previous weekend. Ever since the night he found the compounding clay, he had pulled away from her—and while he told himself he was merely trying to get some needed perspective, he was also, he realized, testing her. Perhaps that wasn’t particularly fair, but if she truly cared about him, she would reach out, she would tell him that she was hurt by his distance. She would be willing to bevulnerable,as he had become so openly vulnerable to her.
But instead, she retreated in sync. She didn’t seek him out at school, she didn’t text him at night. Which might mean shewasguilty of using obscuration on him, and suspected he was onto her, and was keeping her distance to avoid his suspicion. Or it might mean that she had merely gotten what she wanted, the love of her professor and the power that came with it—and movedon.
He couldn’t square these possibilities with the Ellsbeth he had come to know. But he also couldn’t trust his own mind. The sense of deep familiarity he’d felt with her could be nothing but an obscuration-induced deception.
He considered confronting her, pulling her aside to ask, point-blank…what exactly?Do I think I’m in love with you because you manipulated me with magic?In a way, that was the most logical approach: to catch her off guard when he could see her reaction, before she had time to formulate a reply. But he couldn’t even trust himself. If shehadperformed obscuration on him, he might be compelled by whatever influence was acting inside his mind to believe whatever she said.
Rawlins pulled out his phone as he walked. It would be patentlystupid to come right out and ask over text if she had manipulated him with magic, but he considered sending something passive-aggressive and oblique like,Hope you’re having a nice time with Curt.But that wasn’t his style; even that evinced caring more than he was willing to show at this point. He reread their last exchange, days earlier, as he considered other possibilities for what he might say—but with his eyes focused on the phone’s bright light, he slipped on the ice and nearly lost his balance. He put his phone away before it cost him a broken bone.
He reached The Parlor and went inside, grateful for the warmth and the noise; even if the raucous undergrads surrounding the dartboards were obnoxious, he appreciated the distraction of their jovial din. He took a stool at the far end of the bar, ordered a beer and a whiskey neat, and took out one of the books he had brought. He had reading to do on obscuration. Not because he was trying to figure out how to use it this time, but because he needed to figure out if, and how, he had been so spectacularlyused.
Ellsbeth
There hadn’t been a party at Banestooth on Friday night, so Ellsbeth hoped that early Saturday morning would be quiet. She knew if she made her way to the house’s basement, she would findsomethingthere. She was sure of it. Societies like that had libraries with meticulous, self-congratulatory records. If they were involved in covering up girls’ deaths, there would be correspondence with the college. There would have been depositions, testimony—there would besomething.Otherwise, why all the secrecy?
And, as Ellsbeth had been preparing her trigger-word obscuration, another idea occurred to her: Maybe their secrecy was because they were doing arcane mechanicals outside of the Practicum. Maybe the basement of their house was their own ritual room. If she could prove that the club was doing unauthorized arcane mechanicals, she could force the college to investigate them in earnest.
Still, for all of her willingness to engage in illegal magic with Rawlins, as she applied the invisibility ritual to herself that morning in her apartment (stepping through the cherry-gummy-bear-scented distilled ether that she misted through a spray bottle), she admitted to herself that she wasscared.Her hands shook disconcertingly as she put the spray bottle back onto her desk. If she was caught, she would almost certainly be expelled. There would be no more graduate school, no more Newlyn. No degree. No bright or brilliant future. No more Rawlins.
And that was if Banestooth didn’t decide to do worse to her.
But something had happened to Bertie. Her little sister had come to college, and died alone and scared, and that thought was a shard of glass in Ellsbeth’s stomach every single day. She needed to do this. She needed to find out the truth, for Bertie.
And then there was another small nagging voice at the back of her head, a tiny thought that only made itself known in the brief seconds while Ellsbeth wasn’t working: Once this was all over, once she learned the truth about Bertie and she could put all of this in the past, she wouldn’t have to lie anymore. Wouldn’t have to use obscuration. She could step forward, away from the selfish, dishonest person she had been, like a snake shedding its papery skin, and become a new person. A person Rawlins might even be able to truly love.
Just as Ellsbeth suspected, atseven in the morning, Banestooth Club was entirely quiet. Birds chirped faintly on her walk down her street, their hearts not entirely in it. Thankfully, there had been no snow overnight—she wouldn’t leave footprints.
The house itself was a three-story, square brick building with a large porch, and a lawn so neatly trimmed it revealed their dues were significant enough to pay for an independent landscaper. Ellsbeth, already invisible, took a lap around the house, dropping handfuls of powder behind her from a loosely clenched fist at her side as she went. Performing the invisibility ritual early had been a precaution so no one would notice her slowly trawling around the house, but it turned out it was an unnecessary one. The shades on the windows were drawn, and she walked around the entire house without seeing a single soul.
The problem with an invisibility ritual was that nothingfeltany different to her. Her hands remained stubbornly visible in front of her face. And so, before Ellsbeth approached the house in earnest, she pulled her phone from her pocket and pressed the button to turn the screen into a forward-facing camera to double-check her work. Shewas gone. A vampire. The camera image showed the bare trees and plowed street behind her.
She would have approximately one hour of invisibility since sheinitiated the ritual back in her apartment, but the exact timing was affected by atmospheric pressure and temperature. It would be nearly impossible to calculate precisely how much time she’d get, so Ellsbeth wanted to plan conservatively; she figured she was down to about fifty minutes.
Ellsbeth lingered by the door, waiting for someone to leave the house. The door was heavy and formal, carved wood with a brass wolf’s head knocker in the dead center. After about twenty seconds, a boy wearing basketball shorts swung the door open and hopped down the stairs, passing Ellsbeth without a glance. She managed to slip in through the door before it closed behind him with athunk.
The foyer was astonishing; it was frankly no wonder this one room was all they needed in order to properly entertain. It was two stories tall, with an ornate stained-glass window high on the southern wall that Ellsbeth had never noticed from the outside. The ceiling was painted with scenes from Greek mythology: Hercules wearing the skin of the Nemean lion; golden apples growing in the Garden of the Hesperides; Argus Panoptes as a giant, and as a peacock. If it weren’t so beautifully done, Ellsbeth would have almost scoffed at their grandiosity—they thought of themselves as heroes out of mythology.
Every piece of furniture—straight-backed chairs, a tufted couch, a grand piano with ivory keys—looked as though it weighed a thousand pounds and had a provenance that could be traced back to theMayflower.Even a wooden door laid out horizontally for beer pong was oak and six inches thick, with carved grapevines along its sides.
But she wouldn’t find anything she needed on the main floor. She could hear the shuffle of footsteps from somewhere on a higher floor, farther back in the house, and low muffled voices. Bedrooms. As quietly as she could, Ellsbeth slunk through the house, walking gingerly—first her heel, then rounding the side of her foot, before putting her weight into the step. No matter how strong her invisibility ritual was, it wouldn’t do anything to mask her sound.
