“It worked,” Ellsbeth muttered to herself. She looked at Rawlins. “Mass obscuration…a trigger word…a borax salt circle. I didn’t know if it would work.”
“I knew it would,” Rawlins said. “It was a ritual you wrote.”
Relief flooded through her body then like the antidote to a poison. Rawlins approached and untied her wrists from her ankles. “I don’t know where your clothes are,” he said apologetically. “Here.” He pulled his jacket off and wrapped it around her shoulders.
Ellsbeth scrambled to her feet on unsteady limbs still twinging with pain from the contortion they had her in. “I don’t care about my clothes. All I care about now isthem.These fucking killers. How many girls do you think they’ve murdered over the years? How many Berties?” She turned to one of the slack-jawed boys in a cloak. “Do you remember her?Do you remember Roberta Storer?”
She found Curt’s face among the group, and the realization spread through her body like she had swallowed ice water. “Did you know my sister?Did you kill her? You dated her, didn’t you? Tell me the truth.”
“Yes,” came his reply, half gurgled and dreamy.
“You killed her,” Ellsbeth choked.
“Yes,” he said again, every muscle in his face slack.
She felt frantic then, electricity flooding her system. Her muscles felt strange and alive, making erratic, jerking motions. She whipped her head around the room, looking at the blank, doughy faces of the boys of Banestooth.
“Lift your knives up,” Ellsbeth said, and fifteen boys and Paul Gallway obeyed with disconcertingly puppetlike movements.
And that was when she saw him. Maxwell. His eyes were still alert and active, and fixed on Ellsbeth. He had backed out of the circle, hiding himself partially behind one of the columns. The obscuration trigger word hadn’t worked on him. He must have been outside the salt circle when she cast the ritual. “Don’t come near me,” she said. “I can make them hurt you.”
Max lifted both of his hands, a defensive, apologetic gesture, but he stayed silent. He finally looked away from Ellsbeth and over to Rawlins.
“How could you do this, Max?” Rawlins said. Ellsbeth had never heard his voice like that before, quiet and vulnerable. Heartbroken.
Maxwell glanced over at Ellsbeth, eyebrows raised, as if asking for her permission to speak. She shrugged, and Max took a step closer to his father. “I deserved a life, too,” Max said softly. “I deserved a future.”
Ellsbeth’s eyes kept coming back to the blank faces of the Banestooth members under their robes. There had been no remorse or hesitation when they had been gathered around her. They had been ready to kill her, make her feel pain and fear, to make their own lives easier. As she stared, she saw one of them flutter his arm under a robe. It was a jerky, tight motion, a half-clenched fist coming to life.
“Ellsbeth,” Rawlins said. “Potency is diminished by the number of targets. The obscuration isn’t going to last long.”
“Tick-tock,” said Maxwell quietly.
Rawlins took a step toward Ellsbeth. “You need to—do something. We should call—”
Ellsbeth’s mind flipped through the options fast as a carousel photo reel. “Do we have proof? If we call the police, they’ll know I did illegal magic.”
“Butthey’rethe ones doing illegal magic,” Rawlins said. “I’m a witness, I can tell the police—”
“They’re protected,” Ellsbeth said. “ByFortunatis.Who knows if they evenwouldget in trouble. Maybe the power of the ritual from last spring means they’d just get a slap on the wrist. And then they all go on to their good jobs and good lives. And wives, and kids, and houses and—” She was crying then. Hot, furious tears. The rage was the only thing inside her. She saw flashes of Bertie’s body mangled in her bathtub. And then she saw the faces of the men in the hallway, the distinguished alumni grinning proudly from their gilded frames, celebrated and successful. Ellsbeth wondered how often they had nightmares of girls crying in darkened basements, of blood and knives. Maybe never. Maybe they convinced themselves that it never happened at all, happily allowing themselves to forget.
The boys beneath their robes began to wriggle slowly. Gallway’s face was slowly contorting behind his mask. “Ellsbeth,” Rawlins said, panic creeping into his voice. “Do something quickly.”
“What can she do?” Max said, taking a step forward. His face was gaunt and gray. “No matter what she does, everyone is going to find out your little girlfriend was doing illegal magic. Another disastrous protégée for the brilliant Professor Thaddeus Rawlins.” His fingers twitched and he coughed, the sound of it echoing in the cavernous room. “And the worst part is, nothing’s going to happen to Banestooth. She’s right. They’re all covered under theFortunatis.What’ll happen? A slap on the wrists before they go on to their shining futures. I’m already fucked, it doesn’t make a difference what happens to me.” Cold panic crept into his cracking voice. “But at least it’s some comfort to know thatshe’sfucked, too, now. How does it feel, Dad? To know that you’ve ruined both of our lives?”
The color had gone from Rawlins’s face. His unblinking eyes darted from Maxwell to Ellsbeth and back. “Ellsbeth,” Rawlins said finally, in a low guttural voice that frightened her. “You can run. You should go. I can—”
The Banestooth boys were stirring in earnest now.
“The obscuration will last another minute,” Ellsbeth said. “They’re still in my control.”
“There’s nothing you can do,” Rawlins said.
“Yes there is.” Ellsbeth looked around the room. “Raise your knives,” she said to the boys of Banestooth. The boys of privilege and potential. America’s finest, its future. Its unrepentant monsters who murdered girls without a second thought to ensure their own lives would be blissfully free of friction or concern. “And stab yourselves in the heart.”
Rawlins
“And then what happened?”
