“Okay…I’m Percy,” the young man said, then shook his head, declining the handshake as though wary of a solicitor. “Sorry, we’re not having any guests right now. Private event.” Percy started to close the door. Rawlins could see his chances slipping away. He wedged his foot in the gap, stopping it. “Hey!” the boy said. “What’re you—”
Rawlins’s hand shot through the narrow opening and grabbed the boy by the arm, pressing the compounding clay against bare skin—and immediately, Percy fell silent, his demeanor changed. He looked at Rawlins’s hand on his arm, dazed, and stopped his efforts to slam shut the door.
“Percy, you good?” someone called out from deeper in the house.
“Tell him everything is fine,” Rawlins said quickly and quietly.
“Everything’s fine!” Percy shouted back, his tone hollowed by the effect of the obscuration.
There was a moment of silence, followed by a door closing that reverberated through the foyer, and Rawlins stepped inside. He’d never been inside the Banestooth house before, more on principle than anything else, and quickly adjusted to the grand scale of the entry hall. The place appeared to be deserted, or close to it, though he knew it was home to twenty or more of the club’s members.
“Tell me where everyone is right now,” Rawlins said.
“They’re down in the basement.”
“Tell me what they’redoing,” he hissed.
“The ritual,” Percy said vacantly. “Fortunatis.”
The words struck Rawlins like a physical blow, and he was silent for a moment as it all came together. TheFortunatis Favoriritual was a legend; its practice had been banned for centuries, but most modern scholars doubted it waseverreal, considering it more likely to be afabrication invoked at various historical moments to paint the study of arcane mechanicals in an extreme light—either positively or negatively, depending on how and why it was mentioned.
To Rawlins, it had always seemed far-fetched—the notion that one person’s good fortune in life could be taken and passed along by the consumption of their blood. But since he had learned, only an hour earlier, of a quadrennial murder spree targeting Newlyn women, the notion of a ritual requiring human sacrifice seemed all too plausible. And now…Ellsbeth was missing.
“Take me to the basement,” he told Percy. “Now.”
The young man nodded dumbly and led the way.
Rawlins’s heart pounded as he followed Percy down a hallway, their steps echoing on the wood floor. The house felt eerily quiet, but as they progressed deeper inside, he could faintly make out voices, coming from somewhere he could not place, like whispers melting out of the walls.
They reached a door in the middle of a hall. Percy knocked on it twice sharply, waited a beat, and knocked once more, then said into the wood, “It’s Percy.”
Rawlins heard a lock turning, then the door opening, revealing a massively thickset undergraduate standing sentry on the other side of the door. He peered out at Percy and Rawlins, his eyes narrowing.
Past him, Rawlins could faintly make out a stairwell plunging into darkness, with the flickering glow of candlelight visible down below—and for a moment, the voices became clearer, chanting Latin in unison. But they fell silent as the door opened above and they all realized their ritual had been interrupted.
“Percy. The fuck are you doing?” said the sentry.
“Taking him to the basement,” Percy said flatly.
The sentry’s eyes narrowed on Rawlins, and Rawlins attempted to seize his chance at surprise. He reached out for the sentry’s bare hand, hoping to press the compounding clay into his flesh, to use obscuration to claim at least one more target. But the sentry jerked his hand back. “Don’t touch me.”
Then he went on the offensive and grabbed Rawlins by the front of the shirt, forcing him backward, out of the doorframe, aiming to pinhim against the opposite wall. Rawlins stepped back, grappling with him; the sentry was stronger, but Rawlins was able to twist out of his grasp, slipping past the young man’s momentum, and attempting to rush down the stairs.
But his kamikaze plan backfired disastrously when the sentry recovered quicker than anticipated. As soon as Rawlins began running down the steps, he felt a boot between his shoulder blades as he was kicked from behind. He launched forward, and the world became a tumbling whirlwind of darkness and pain as he somersaulted down the steps.
On the way down his lip split open, his head cracked on wood, his right wrist rolled hard, his ribs audibly cracked. He came to a rest belly-down, on marble so cold it felt like relief from the fiery pain that was already blazing everywhere in his body.
He opened his eyes—or rather, his left eye, finding his right one already swelling shut—and his vision swam, struggling to focus, as he blinked away the blood that streamed down from his scalp. He opened his mouth, feeling a tooth that had loosened on the bottom, and spat blood onto the floor as he pushed himself up to his hands and knees.
Robed figures swarmed around him, their silhouettes ominously dark in the flickering glow of the candlelight, faces difficult to make out beneath hoods that left their faces in shadow. He heard various voices, murmuring with surprise as they approached, puzzled by his disastrously violent entrance. The voices were unfamiliar, except for one that spoke from directly in front of him: “You just couldn’t stay away.”
It belonged to his son.
As Rawlins painfully tilted his head upward, he saw that Max was gripping a curved knife, which gleamed in the flickering torchlight.
And beyond him—at the center of a ritual circle, surrounded by burning incense and glowing metal ingots—was an even more disturbing sight, one far more painful than any of the injuries Rawlins had just sustained.
Ellsbeth. Stripped to her underwear, hands and feet bound, with a gag taped over her mouth—in a pose of such helplessness that his insides convulsed with disgust. The most awful detail of all was the lookin her eyes, where he saw the all-consuming fear of someone who knew they were about to die.
