Ellsbeth couldn’t be sure how much time had passed since the last time she had been in the Banestooth basement. Was it that morning, or had days gone by? Someone had taken off her shirt and jeans; she was wearing just a bra and underwear, the chill of the air prickling at the small hairs on her skin and causing her arms to goosepimple. If this headache would go away, she could think more clearly, she could come up with a way out of this.
“If I hadn’t come along, you all would’ve been waking up tomorrow morning to feds banging on your door. You owe me this ritual and more,” Maxwell said.
The soft voice behind her spoke again. “The fact that her sister committed suicide here will make a cover-up easy. Bereft, and suicidal herself.”
“And she was fucking her professor,” Maxwell said. “Rawlins.”
The blond figure lowered down again, his face inches from Ellsbeth’s. She could hear the smile in his voice even though his face remained in shadow. “Oh,really? Storer, you are just full of surprises. A torrid affair gone wrong—this reallyisa gift.”It was Curt.Curt was the blond man in front of her. Fucking Curt, and she forced herself to contort against her ropes, but they were too tight. The rope bit into her skin, and the gag in her mouth seemed to tighten of its own accord. “Easy, girl,” Curt said.
“I still don’t understand why we’re doing this,” someone else said from somewhere in the darkness. “The ritual isn’t going to do anything for us again. We already did it. And he isn’t even an Initiate.”
“We reward those who provide the club exceptional services. And that is exactly what’s been done here. We’ll perform the ritual again forMr. Maxwell Keene,” said the voice behind her, and Ellsbeth recognized it then: Paul Gallway. “A rare and deserved honor.”
“Poor lonely Rawlins,” Curt said. “Finally finds a student to fuck, and she has to die tragically.”
Max stiffened his neck, and Gallway came into Ellsbeth’s eyeline. He was wearing a white mask. “Your dagger,” he said, handing Max a blade. Max was the only one in the room not wearing a black cloak. “You secured her for us, so it only seems fair that when the time comes, you’ll be the first to make her bleed.”
At the sight of the knife, the fog around Ellsbeth’s head cleared in an instant. Bitter adrenaline pounded through her body, and Ellsbeth fought as hard as she could against the bindings.They’re going to kill me.The only way she would get out of here alive was if she could say the obscuration trigger word, and even then she wasn’t sure it would work. Still, it was ahope,the only one she had right now. She chewed and spat at the gag until drool rolled down her chin.
“Whoa, there.” A stranger approached then, a tall gangly boy with a voice Ellsbeth didn’t recognize. He put a piece of masking tape over her mouth, securing the gag in place.
“Will this work?” Maxwell asked, his voice low and steady. “Even though you just did the ritual last spring?”
“It won’t do anything for the rest of the Initiates,” Gallway said. “Doing the ritual multiple times doesn’t increase one’s luck or fortune. But it will work for you. And it will have the added benefit of getting rid of this one. It really is a pity. She was doing so well in my class.”
The tape partially covered Ellsbeth’s nostrils; it was becoming harder to breathe now.
Someone had done something to make the room warm and smoke-filled; Ellsbeth smelled incense. Myrrh.
Someone behind Ellsbeth jerked painfully at her cuffs, untying her from the chair and binding her wrists to her ankles. She was pushed onto the mosaic floor, contorted painfully. Movement whirled around her: arcane gold ingots being placed at even, precise distances. Her eyelids felt heavy. An unpleasant ache crawled its way around her neck, and the hard bone of her shoulder was grinding against the floor.
And then, at once, every cell of her body screamed in dizzying terror when she realized what was happening.
She was going to die.
She was going to die the way Bertie had died, scared and naked in a basement, flayed by knives with no one to tell the truth about what happened to her. Rawlins would believe that it was a suicide; that she was a sad and broken bird he couldn’t fix. Her parents would shrink even further into themselves in their grief. Ellsbeth’s entire life would become a perfunctory obituary in the student newspaper. They would probably say something awful.She lit up the room. She had so much promise.Would Rawlins mourn her? Or would a part of him be relieved that their affair had ended without any trouble for him?
“Ex infortunio, potenter benedic nobis.”
The voices around her began to chant, low enough that she felt the vibrations in her stomach. Her cheeks were wet; she had begun to cry.
“Ex infortunio, potenter benedic nobis.”
Maybe she could just close her eyes. Maybe at the moment the knives entered her body and life left her, she could will herself back to Rawlins’s bed, and let that be her final thought.
Rawlins
When Rawlins strode up to the door of the Banestooth house and reached out to take the wolf’s head knocker, his hand was shaking. An electric current of anxiety ran through his body and frayed his nerves.
The first knock brought no immediate response; he tried the door, in case it might be unlocked, but no such luck.
His plan was half formed and probably foolish. All he knew was that he needed to get inside immediately. If his worst fears were correct, Ellsbeth was here and in danger. If he was wrong—well, he might embarrass himself, ruffle some feathers, and piss off Ellsbeth when she found out what he had undertaken. But he would be more than happy to find himself cleaning up that mess.
He had considered calling the police, insisting this was a matter of grave danger, but that seemed unlikely to work; Ellsbeth’s evidence was limited and circumstantial, certainly not sufficient to summon a door-busting assault. He had to do this alone, with only one weapon available to him—the ball of compounding clay, charged with the power of obscuration and wrapped in a handkerchief. He had put it into his pocket intending to use it on Ellsbeth, if he needed to, and now it was the only thing that might help him save her.
Rawlins knocked again, then took a step back, eyeing the windows facing the street, wondering if there was another way inside. A metalgate to the side was too high to scale, but if it was unlocked he might be able to go around back. Before he could commit to that course of action, the door creaked open. An imposing young man, most likely an undergraduate member of the club, peered out the narrow gap, irritated. “Can I help you?”
“Good morning,” Rawlins said, palming the compounding clay in his pocket as he strode back toward the door. “I’m Professor Thaddeus Rawlins.” He extended his arm, offering a handshake.
