Beside the article, pages slightly overlapping, was a similar news story from a few years back, about the tragic death of another young woman: Catherine Teale—a freshman as well. Why was Ellsbeth interested inthatparticular tragedy? Was she hoping it would help her understand what had motivated Bertie to take her own life?
Those two were only the tip of the iceberg. Over a dozen similar stories were laid out on the table—some news articles, some merely obituaries. Many were suicides, along with several accidents: alcohol poisoning, drug overdose, a drowning, a car crash, at least one girl who had gone missing and never been found.
Ellsbeth had placed them chronologically into a timeline, with dates circled, charting a grisly pattern: the death of a young woman at Newlyn, usually a student, every four years, in the spring semester, with nearly mathematical precision. Going back decades…almost acentury.
Rawlins’s blood curdled. The coincidence was impossible to ignore. He gathered up the papers, keeping them in order, and put them in a shopping bag, then turned his attention to Ellsbeth’s desk.
At the center: a building permit with blueprints for a massive house. He googled the address on the top left of the form, which brought up a street-view image of the building’s façade, and he instantly recognized the massive wooden door with a wolf’s head knocker. It was down the street from where Ellsbeth lived.
What was she doing with drawings of the Banestooth house? He studied the blueprints and saw, in the margin, underlined and circled in Ellsbeth’s starkly neat handwriting:No basement.
Rawlins puzzled over what possible significance that might have as he scrutinized the plans further, noting thick ink lines where Ellsbeth had made measurements on top of the architectural drawings, calculating distances using a key in the corner. She had found the farthest point from a corner of the house to its geographic center.
It was a radius, and he knew instantly what it was for: a ritual circle. One that circumscribed the entirety of the house. One that could be used to enact a large-scale magical effect upon the inhabitants therein.To what end, he could not guess, but he was certain it was connected to the string of deaths she had uncovered.
She was planning something big. Something dangerous. But he had no idea if she had already completed her plan…or, it seemed more likely, if she had gone there, and tried, and never gotten the chance.
Rawlins’s throat constricted, as he was consumed by fear so acute that he felt like the blood was draining from his entire body.
He was not one to pray for anything, yet he found himself suddenly, desperately pleading with the universe. That the woman he still loved was still alive. He would do anything to keep her safe—even if it meant walking down into the underworld and bringing her back himself.
Ellsbeth
A piece of her skull had been removed, and it was being used to scoop out the exposed part of her brain. That was the only possible explanation for the searing pain in the back of her head. The pain pulsed with every heartbeat. The inside of her eyelids flashed with a hot, fleshy red color, but her eyes remained shut.
She knew she wasn’t home, but for a moment, some confused part of Ellsbeth believed that she was still asleep in Rawlins’s bed. She was cold because they had sweated through his crisp percale sheets in the night, but if she reached over, she would find his warm arms and be able to wriggle herself close against him, pressing as much of her body against his as was physically possible, a perfect tessellation of their skin. She kept her eyes closed. Any second, she would feel his breath in her hair. His hand would wind under her waist and pull her toward him. He would murmurMy Ellsbethin her ear and the two of them would fall back asleep until the sun through the curtains put up too big of a fight and he would make coffee in the French press and the pain in her head would be gone.
“She needs to be awake.”
Ellsbeth moaned. It was a man’s voice but it wasn’t Rawlins’s. “She will be.”
Gradually, the physical world came into focus around Ellsbeth the way blood returns to a numbed limb. She was sitting in a chair, but she couldn’t move her wrists or ankles.Writ magic,came the irrationalthought, a nagging voice insisting that she shouldn’t have let Rawlins do writ magic on her so late at night because it still hadn’t worn off. But no. It wasn’t writ magic: She was in cuffs and tied to the chair with rough rope. A thin cotton rag was gagging her—it pressed her tongue deep into the back of her mouth and pulled at the dry corners of her lips.
Ellsbeth blinked her eyes open. The light caused the pain in the back of her head to sear white-hot and she cried out, the sound almost entirely disappearing into the fabric of the gag.
She wasn’t in Rawlins’s bed. She was back at Banestooth, in the columned basement.
And she was at the center of the Fibonacci spiral of their mosaic ritual circle.
A figure lowered his head until their faces were even, but she couldn’t make out the face beneath his hood; his features remained in shadow, his silhouette backlit by torchlight. He held something in front of her face. A phone.Herphone. It lit up with recognition, its sensors perceptive enough even with a gag in her mouth, and clicked open.
“Did she call anyone for help?” asked a man somewhere behind Ellsbeth.
“No,” said the figure in front of her. “One vague text, but nothing we need to worry about.” He scrolled through the blurry photos she had taken of the Banestooth basement that morning and deleted them one by one. “There we go.” Ellsbeth’s eyes adjusted to the torchlight and glimpsed blond hair under the hood. His voice was familiar but she couldn’t quite placeit.
“I admit, Maxwell,” said a second voice behind Ellsbeth, “I didn’t expect you to be of service to Banestooth quite so quickly.”
“Yes,” said the blond man in front of her. “Where did you find her? And how are you sure you weren’t seen?”
“It was an invisibility ritual,” said a third voice.Maxwell Keene.“She had performed an invisibility ritual so she could snoop around this place. I thought I heard her. And then I saw the footprints in the frost outside. She wasn’t paying any attention. I managed to get a hand around her throat and—”
“Why?Why was she snooping around in the first place?”
“You killed her sister,” Maxwell said. He spoke fast, eager to please.“Last year. And she found proof, too. I followed her at the library and saw what she was doing. She was looking into you right in the open. Roberta Storer, that was her sister. It’s her last name, too. Obviously.”
At the sound of Bertie’s name, Ellsbeth came to life, struggling against her bindings.
Maybe the salt circle was still holding. She needed to say the trigger word and she could get out of here. But the gag kept her tongue stubbornly in place. She could barely breathe. A few boys chuckled at her effort: The room was full of people wearing cloaks and hoods, surrounding her in a circle.
