The moment she passed through the foyer into the main house, the air became several degrees cooler. Dust particles hung suspended in the kaleidoscope-colored light coming through the stained glass.
Beyond the foyer was a long hallway of closed doors. The walls were lined on either side first with portraits and then, the fartherEllsbeth walked, with photographs. Each had a small plaque beneath it. Most of the faces and names were unfamiliar. Ellsbeth passedThomas Newcastle III, Secretary of State,andJonathan R. Marrow-Tick, Chief of Surgery at Massachusetts General,before spotting a tasteful black-and-white photo of a movie star also known for his Shakespeare performances on Broadway and for dating pop stars.
It was a hall of distinguished alumni, and the men of Banestooth were even more distinguished than Ellsbeth had previously understood. In addition to the movie star, there were several billionaires whose names she recognized from buildings on campus, more congressmen than she could count, two Supreme Court judges, a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, Olympians, a famous violinist, and a newspaper magnate. Their dark eyes gazed impassively from their ornate frames, amused and sure. It was almost dizzying, the sheer volume of success of the men who walked these very hardwood floors, which she was, at the present moment, hoping didn’t creak.
Was this the secret of success? Joining a fraternity at an elite college filled with rich boys who pulled one another up like a human ladder? The farther Ellsbeth walked down the hallway, the more disgusted and dejected she became. The gentle smiles on the faces became mocking.Do your best,they all seemed to say.The system has been rigged the entire time.
She was distracted when a door behind her opened. A tall boy with a towel around his waist exited, whistling quietly to himself. Ellsbeth pressed herself against the wall, and the boy passed so close that the breeze of his stride caused the hair on her arms to stand on edge. She gave a small, involuntary hiccup of fear, and the redhead turned slightly, but mercifully, he continued on his way to the shower without taking half a step to his left.
Every other door Ellsbeth passed in the hallway remained closed. Behind some, Ellsbeth could hear the low sounds of ordinary morning routines—gentle snoring, drawers opening, a television on low, someone singing a country song quietly to himself.
There was a staircase at the end of the hallway, with a plush runner and a gleaming wooden banister burnished the glossy walnut of an Upper East Side woman’s hair. But it only wentup.
It took her fifteen anxious minutes of listening at doors and winding through the deceptively large house before she found it: a staircase behind a thin wooden door not fitted quite right against its frame, a door with cracked and peeling paint. The door was so inconspicuous that Ellsbeth had almost walked past it. Thirty minutes left, she thought. If that.
This staircase was narrow and modest. It led down into darkness. She held her breath, prayed for stairs less creaky than they looked, and started down.
When she gently closed the door behind her, the darkness became all-encompassing. Ellsbeth kept her steps small and hesitant; if she fell and crashed down the stairs, half the house would come to investigate.
After what seemed like a century, her left foot landed on concrete. She could feel the chill even through her shoe. Ellsbeth contemplated the danger in attempting to turn on the lights—the light might seep under the doorframe, and someone on his way to breakfast might know that something was amiss. So instead of flipping the switch she found by groping blindly at the wall, Ellsbeth pulled out her phone and thumbed on its flashlight.
She gasped.
Banestooth’s basement was a cross between a gothic cathedral and a Roman pantheon. The floor wasn’t concrete; it was black and smooth as marble, reflecting the light of her phone like a still pond. Pillars surrounded a mosaic ritual circle on the floor, inlaid with depictions of the constellations, with each node marked with a white stone that seemed to glow in the reflected light from Ellsbeth’s phone. A Fibonacci spiral swirled out from the center of the room.
They were doing rituals here—and, if the size of the ritual circle was any indication, incredibly powerful ones. Ellsbeth took a picture, and then another, and then another, trying to capture the room from every angle, despite the fact that the lack of light left the images blurry and nondescript. Only when she reached the far side of the room did she realize that that entire wall was a bookshelf. She held her phone up to try to read the titles. They were arcane mechanicals books, with titles promising dark magic and blood rituals.Magickal Influence upon Cognition and Behavior. Arcanus Rictus.The entire collection of books by Rudolf Wentz. Diviner’s Touch.There were banned titles and booksthat were thought to have been lost for centuries. Titles that Rawlins had recommended she study, that she hadn’t been able to find in any public university library. Ellsbeth ran her fingers along the spines. Most books were bound in leather; one was bound in something that looked hauntingly like human skin. The farther Ellsbeth walked, the older the books became, until the labels were so faded and peeled she could barely read them.
This was it. This was the proof she needed that Banestooth was, if nothing else, engaging in unauthorized magic. And probably far worse. Could she take one of the books out of the house without being noticed? She was vaguely aware of the possibility of magical security, but there was also the problem with her invisibility ritual: She couldn’t remember whether picking up a book and hiding it, say, under her shirt would also render it invisible or whether she would be attempting to parade a floating leather tome down the street for anyone to see. She closed her eyes to try to picture the correct paragraph of CalliopeD. Arthur’s text on the functionality of invisibility in contact with tertiary objects. That was when she heard it: footsteps.
There were voices at the top of the stairs. Just as Ellsbeth heard the creak of the door opening, she remembered to extinguish her phone’s flashlight. There would be no way to get out now. She prayed her invisibility was still holding strong and ducked behind a pillar as the footsteps made their way down the stairs. She tried to quickly calculate how much more time she had in her invisibility. Twenty minutes. Probably less.
The lights flicked on, and Ellsbeth blinked. The room was even more dazzling when lit, light reflecting off the marble and making the mosaics dance with color. Ellsbeth was so distracted admiring the room that she almost didn’t recognize the two figures who had made their way into the ritual circle: Professor Gallway and a boy with dark, stringy hair and a hunched posture. When the boy turned, Ellsbeth saw the eyes so familiar it made her breath catch in her chest.
It was Maxwell Keene.
“—thank you for making an exception for me,” Maxwell said, his voice strangely reedy.
His neck extended forward from his body like a kitten being held by the skin of its nape.
“There are certain perks to being the Magister,” Gallway replied evenly. “And given the…seriousness of what you’re alleging, it seemed…prudent to allow you toborrowour copy ofArcanus Rictus.”
“I’m notalleginganything. Don’t play dumb with me, Gallway. We both know what sort of thing happens here—there’s no use now playing coy.”
“I’m not sure what you’re implying.”
“Of course you are.”
“Enlighten me, then,” Gallway said. “What do youthinkyou know?”
Maxwell took a deep breath, and a flush extended up his cheeks. “The ritual.”
“A ritual,” Gallway repeated.
“Notaritual,” Max said. “Theritual.Fortunatis Favori.”
“A legend.” Gallway’s nostrils flared. “A story to tell naughty children before bed. You’re smarter than to believe in something like that, Maxwell.”
“It’s not a legend,” Max said. “I know it’s not. It’s the ritual that’s turned the mediocre boys of Banestooth Club into masters of the universe for the last two centuries. Luck and charm, foresight and talent. A ritual forsuccess.Nearly impossible, incredibly dangerous. A ritual that requires…you know.”
