Chapter 25
The moment the door closed, Nin pushed himself off me with such urgency, we both nearly fell onto the floor of the carriage. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I didn’t mean to…”
“It’s fine, fine,” I said quickly, swallowing hard. The danger was over, but my heart hadn’t gotten the message and was still speeding like a freight train.
Maybe Nin’s was too, because it took him three tries to turn the handle on the carriage door. It finally flew open with a bang. But his boot heel caught on my skirts, and when he kicked and untangled himself, he practically fell out of the coach backward.
“Oh!” I exclaimed, struggling with my skirts. “So sorry!”
“My fault,” he murmured, looking as disoriented as I felt.
I blew out a breath and descended from the carriage as he brushed off his trousers.
When our eyes met, his were filled with uncertainty. “I shouldn’t have—” he started to say.
“It’s fine.”
“Wasn’t proper. I—”
“It was necessary. We couldn’t let him find us.”
“Right,” he agreed, nodding rapidly.
“It’s fine,” I repeated. “Think nothing of it.”
“Okay.”
An anxious silence stretched between us. I tried to think of something to say. “Um, so… Was that the language of the Nightlands? In the carriage, when…”
“Oh, yes. I mean, no,” he said, shaking his head. “It was a prayer of protection in my mother’s tongue.”
Oh. “Do the other gods hear your prayers?”
“Before I became trapped, they did. I fear the aegis blocks anything from getting in or out, even prayers. But I keep trying anyway.”
I liked that we had this in common. “I talk to my mother all the time, even if she can’t hear me.”
He nodded, and we gave each other anxious smiles.
“Anyway…,” I said.
“Yes, anyway…,” he repeated. “I’m glad Hoffmann is gone, but that was too close.”
“I thought you said you’d be monitoring the servants while we’re out here?”
His eyes closed briefly as he sighed. “I was doing that, but that servant is sometimes hard to track, especially when I’m distracted. It’s my fault. I apologize.”
“No need for apology. I’m just…” I blew out a breath and put my hands on my hips. “I guess I’m just wondering why, um, when we were hiding from Hoffmann at the woodpile? I could sort of see everyone in the house? All the souls? But not today, when…” We were lying together like lovers.
He nodded quickly, understanding. “That night, I wanted to show you what I see, my inner vision.”
“Oh?”
“I didn’t know if it would work. I just tried it.”
“Oh, okay,” I said, feeling sheepish but not really understanding why. I definitely wasn’t going to ask him to “show” me his inner vision again.
You felt his body against yours.
I definitely couldn’t think about that now, not while Nin was looking into my face.
Maybe it was best that I stopped thinking about him, period, and just concentrated on getting out of the carriage house before Mr. Hoffmann returned.
I was pretty sure they kept the petty cash in his room in that safe I’d seen when I was in there.
So it would take him a good while to get it and bring it to the front of the house.
“This mission was a bust,” I told him.
“You learned the truth about the coachman,” he pointed out.
“Yes, but there’s no ballroom here, and it’s the only place I hadn’t explored. It’s…”
Huh.
“What is it?” Nin said, squinting.
“This might be a long shot, but what about that outhouse structure, near the greenhouse? With the stairs going down?”
His brow furrowed. “I confess that I don’t always understand humans and their customs, but why would a ballroom entrance be in a garden?”
“Why would any entrance to the house be in the garden?”
“Fair point.”
“You haven’t been down there?”
He blinked. “I haven’t, but I’m not sure why. You might be onto something, Molly. Warding magic sometimes steers people away from the area that the spell is trying to protect.”
That was all I needed to know. “I want to see what’s down there. Maybe even Charles’s ghost?”
He nodded. “We should explore it. But I don’t know if that’s wise today, now that the servant’s suspicions have been raised.”
“Well, even if he rushes to get back here, it will likely take ten minutes, and by then I could be all the way in the back garden.” I gave him a smile and a shrug.
He chuckled lightly. “Fine, but we’ll need to make it quick. I can’t stroll around the house in full view of the windows, not after he almost caught us. You walk to the garden as fast as you can, and I’ll meet you there.”
I started to ask how, but he disappeared between the blinks of my eyes.
It only took me a few minutes to close the carriage house door and hike around the manor to the garden.
A strong wind scattered swirls of gold and orange leaves around my boots as I strode.
The greenhouse came into view, and the little outhouse building, but I didn’t see Nin right away and became nervous that Hoffmann had caught him, or the master had woken.
But the door to the outhouse was already standing open, and when I cautiously approached, Nin’s torso popped out from the doorway.
“It definitely leads underground,” he called out.
I glanced back at the manor, but the garden’s ornamental trees and sculptural shrubbery helped block the view. Thank goodness. When I caught up to Nin, he gestured for me to follow behind him.
“It’s pitch black,” I complained.
“I can see in the dark.”
“But I can’t,” I said in frustration. “I should’ve brought my lantern.”
When I paused to consider how long it would take for me to fetch it from the manor, Nin picked up a matchbox that sat on a ledge along the inner wall of the outhouse, struck a match, and held it to a simple, rusted lantern that hung from a hook on the wall. Dancing light filled the small space.
“Better?” he asked, smiling at me as he handed me the rusted lantern.
“It will do, thank you,” I said, grateful for the light, and we began our descent.
Unlike the stairway that led into the crypt, this one was crude and unadorned. The walls were rough-hewn rock, as if the passageway had been dug out. No gas lines flowing down here, and therefore no gas lamps. Nothing much of anything, really, except the dust that our boots kicked up.
Until we came to a landing at the bottom of the steps.
A wide stone hallway had been burrowed out, and along both walls, doors had been set into the rock. Well-worn wheel tracks were etched into the floor, and they stopped at a parked wooden cart. “What is all this?” I asked.
“Food storage,” Nin murmured, cracking open the first door. He brushed away cobwebs and swung the door wider to allow me to hold the lantern inside and peer around. Barrels, wooden crates. Nin kneeled to rip a hole in a burlap bag. Grain poured onto the floor.
“There’s no proper cellar under the house,” I said. “Whoever built the house made the decision to put the crypt in the basement and their food storage out here. Seems inconvenient.”
“The greenhouse is out here,” Nin noted. “And there is a road at the edge of the garden that stops at the other end of it. Perhaps the farming tenants would bring wheat and other things through here.”
I stepped back into the underground corridor, and we opened the next door to find shelves upon shelves of glass jars. “Preserves. Cider,” Nin observed.
“We’ve never had cider,” I said. The master barely ate, and he definitely didn’t drink cider.
I rubbed away dust on a jar and found a date written on a small label: 1866.
“That’s seven years ago. The Voss parents must have had all this canned and put away, the couple who were killed on a trip to Europe. ”
“I was still in the Nightlands when they died. My sister Misfortune claimed their souls for my father.”
“Right. They had an accident, didn’t they? Hmm…” I made a mental note to reread the witch-hunter’s red book, still hidden under my mattress, and learn more about Nin’s siblings.
We continued exploring the corridor and found a room filled with building debris: scraps of wood, piles of old bricks. And in the next room, Nin’s head tilted in wonder.
Wine. Lots of it. Thousands of bottles, each one uniquely handblown, sat on dusty racks. Nin picked up a bottle and brushed away the dust. “I’ve never tasted Earth wine.”
“I’m no connoisseur, but I’m betting it’s not as good as god wine.”
Nin’s laugh was full of good cheer. “You never know. Not everything in my world is better than here.”
“I highly doubt that. Do you have jelly beans?”
He shook his head. “We do not. Nor do we have hot dogs.”
“A shame. They’re selling them out of carts on Coney Island. What else don’t you have?”
“We don’t have a Molly O’Rinn,” he said, glancing back at me with the hint of a smile.
My stomach fluttered as he set the wine bottle back on the rack. He was just teasing me, but I liked it nonetheless. Maybe a little too much. Don’t think of how his weight felt on you. “Come on, there’s one more room at the end of the hall.”
We closed the door of the wine room and walked to the last door. As we approached it, I held up my lantern. A red occult symbol had been painted in slashing strokes across the door.
“What is this?” I whispered.
“A magic spell to keep something contained. At least, I think that’s what it is,” he said, leaning closer to squint at details, measuring the risk of opening the door versus keeping it shut.
The symbol didn’t give me a slithering, queasy feeling like the one on the ceiling of the crypt. “Could it be old? The trap in the crypt has a certain…” I shook my head, unable to explain.
“You feel the structure of that trap,” Nin provided. “You don’t feel this one.”
“No.”
“I don’t either,” he admitted.
Perhaps the spell was no longer… active? I had no idea how ritual magic worked. But the longer we stood in front of it, the sillier I felt. There wasn’t a keyhole or lock on the door, just a handle.
“Hate to disappoint you, but I don’t think there’s a ballroom inside,” Nin said.
I smiled. “Probably not. But let’s check anyway…”
Pulse racing, I grabbed the dusty handle and pulled.