Chapter 9
The first time Ezra set eyes on Lord Blackwood’s estate he was six years old.
His legs were still shaky from several days at sea—and the constant chill he would come to associate with England.
Even on summer days, this countryside couldn’t hold a candle to Egypt’s heat, so the boy shivered in the back seat of Thomas Ellington’s automobile, trying to soak in all the green he was seeing.
Yet the awe he felt about the lawns was nothing compared to Thornhill itself.
To call it a house felt a slight. Thornhill possessed at least ten turrets, crowned with gold flags that served as weather vanes.
A peerless blue sky highlighted the building’s many windows.
Ezra felt dizzy trying to count these. He felt even dizzier when he was ushered inside.
Thornhill’s rooms were so grand and its rules so minute—Ezra had struggled to keep up with which fork to use.
Or to distinguish the difference between a drawing room and a sitting room.
The paintings were always moving around, partly because Lady Blackwood attended art auctions in London.
Other times green-eyed ancestors winked at Ezra, as if trying to let him in on a little secret.
He’d tried his best to ignore this. The same way Thomas Ellington’s wife tried her best to ignore him.
The unwelcome bastard son.
Many things had changed over the past two decades.
Yet Thornhill still did not look eager to receive Ezra, or anyone for that matter.
Its lawns were no longer laid out in well-trimmed lines.
Sheep wandered the grounds, picking at ragged weeds.
There was no shepherd in sight, nor were there fences to keep the animals from ambling in front of the automobile.
It took Ezra several minutes to navigate the gravel drive, but no footman opened the door in greeting.
He paused a moment, remembering Lord Blackwood’s last words to him.
Stay away from Thornhill. You’re not safe, Ezra.
“Damn right, I’m not safe…” His hands throttled the steering wheel.
There was no shine surrounding them, but Ezra could feel his anger, not just as an emotion but as a force.
Coiled at the base of his belly like a cobra.
It only grew tighter as he watched the house.
The curtain to George’s old room was drawn shut.
So much had been lost.
So much had been taken.
“This is a terrible idea,” Celia chimed in from the Hispano Suiza’s passenger seat.
She’d tried to stop Ezra at first, spouting out all the reasons not to steal the keys to Vincent’s car and go speeding through the quiet morning countryside.
“We just escaped the Order and now you want to knock down the front door of a known member? What if he alerts the other magicians? I don’t think we’ll be fortunate enough to escape twice in one day. ”
“Lord Blackwood kept me a secret for twenty-five years,” he answered through gritted teeth. “Even from myself.”
And there didn’t seem to be a need to knock down Thornhill’s front door.
The towering entrance, flanked on either side by iron wyverns, was already ajar.
As Ezra entered the front hall, he was greeted by suits of armor that had grown a thin skin of dust. There were cobwebs on the chandeliers.
Ashes choked the fireplaces. No one had been tending to them for ages…
Comments about moldy chairs and the state of the place made far more sense now…
Thornhill was in ruins. Glorious ruins, still, but ruins nonetheless.
Miss Havisham would certainly feel at home here, but Ezra struggled to see how anyone else could.
No wonder Biz had fled to London, spent her nights dancing with other Bright Young Things…
I deserve this.
But did Ezra?
He gritted his teeth even harder and walked toward the dining room, where he discovered a bewildered sheep wandering around the table. The animal skittered away at the sight of him, leaving a terrified trail of poop in its wake.
“Oh, Biz…” Celia circled the table, pausing by a plate of half-eaten toast. This morning’s paper splayed beside it like a shot fowl.
“She’s damned good at saving face, that girl.
Better than I was. I had no idea the Ellingtons were in this sort of trouble.
” Her eyes drifted over the headlines. From where Ezra was standing, he could see nothing about a break-in at the British Museum.
“That would explain the engagement, I guess. I never thought Mr. Cain would be her final choice. Nor she his.”
No. Ezra felt a burn in his chest rising to the back of his throat. Choices were a luxury, and it seemed that—somehow—Lord Blackwood was running out of money. Why else would the groundskeepers be replaced with feral herds of sheep?
“How?” He thought Thomas Ellington always had full pockets—never considered twice about pulling out banknotes or peppermints or the odd ankh. “They had so much…”
“We did too.” Celia’s answer was rough but soft. “There’s a reason Hugo and Everett act the way they do… There’s always something to lose, and if you don’t take everything you can, you’ll fall behind. The Order isn’t a charity.”
“I was never in danger of believing so,” Ezra said. He looked around at the paper, the toast, the sheep shit ground deep into the Persian carpet. “You think the Order did this?”
“I think that gold pyramid of yours wasn’t enough to keep Thomas Ellington in the Apex’s good graces—”
Just then, there was a rustling in the hall. Complete with a sheep’s irascible bleat. “Shoo! Get out of here before I turn you into a sweater—Oh, Christ!” His old guardian halted in the doorway, wearing an expression that made Ezra believe in ghosts.
They stared at each other.
The grandfather clock on the mantel did not tick.
No one had wound the timepiece in ages—and Ezra heard the silence, saw it deep in Thomas Ellington’s face.
Eight years. More than that had worn on the man.
Clearly. No longer did he match the proud patriarch in the oil portrait.
His shoulders were hunched. Everything about him was grayer.
Faded. Unraveling was the word Biz had used, though now that Ezra was eye to eye with Lord Blackwood, he couldn’t tell which one of them the verb applied to.
Both were phantoms here.
Beholden to dead versions of themselves.
“No…” The man gasped, his gaze darted from side to side, searching the filthy room. “No! You cannot be here.” He grew even paler when he saw Celia’s bandaged hand and the old French locket hanging from her neck.
She scowled back at the lord, tucking the magical necklace into her dress.
“It was you. It was you! Thieves in the night!” Lord Blackwood’s voice had taken a mad tempo.
The man dropped the teacup he’d been holding and went to grab at the sides of his hair instead.
Far thinner and more silver than Ezra remembered.
“No. No. No! He knows.” Thomas Ellington shuddered and began rocking on his heels, smashing the sheep shit even deeper into the carpet. “He knows.”
Celia stared; her eyes narrowed. “Who knows?” she asked.
There was such a look of grief on Lord Blackwood’s face, thick as the dining room dust. Ezra was pierced with its injustice. Why should Thomas Ellington, of all people, get to feel that way, after everything he’d done?
“I know you murdered my mother.” Ezra fought to keep his voice calm, but this was a battle he was happy to lose. Anger bled through him and into the ruined room. “You killed her to find a treasure, and when you couldn’t open the pyramid relic, you brought me back to England with you…”
At this the old man started laughing—an unhinged noise that sounded like a machine gun. Every muscle in Ezra’s body seized. Some shadows did too, at the room’s edges, slithering out from underneath dusty drapes and the unswept ashes of the hearth.
“Murder? Ha! I dug her out of her grave! Ruined my damn life!” He kicked at the sheep shit and kept on cackling.
“Grave?” Ezra’s breath froze. If he could figure out where his mother’s body was buried, that might be something… “What grave?”
Abruptly, the laughter stopped. “Stay away from the fourth pyramid, boy. It will be your tomb too, if you aren’t careful.” The lord tugged at his hair again. This time, a large tuft came free from his temple. He didn’t seem to care. “A tomb for every single one of us! Dead, dead, dead!”
“He’s off his rocker,” Celia said softly. “Look at his eyes…”
They were, indeed, bloodshot. The man looked as if he hadn’t slept a wink since their London breakfast eight years before.
Dislodged hair started to drift to the floor like snow.
Pieces of Thomas Ellington were falling apart in front of Ezra and he hadn’t caused it, couldn’t stop it, and felt as out of place in this whole scene as he always had in this house.
In this life.
There was something else out there waiting for him.
Something more.
“The fourth pyramid…” he murmured, remembering the hieroglyphs on his mother’s hidden scroll. The fourth triangle had been the largest, set alongside the three that typically symbolized the pyramids of Giza. “That must be outside of Cairo.”
“NO!” Lord Blackwood snarled. “I told you to stay away! You aren’t safe!” The lord lurched forward, grabbing Ezra’s wrinkled shirt. He glared through a gap in the dusty curtains, where the shaggy green lawn gave way to a massive stump.
Two stone vases sat on the rotting wood.
Biz’s memorials…
All of the fight drained out of Ezra, in that moment. He turned back to his father—the man’s skin looked paper-thin. His veins were blue penmanship. His grip was far too weak to choke anyone.
“You aren’t safe,” the lord rasped again. “Holding the world on your shoulders and the dead in your heart—” He shook his head. His eyes looked slightly clearer than before, despite the absurdity of his words. “They belong in the Duat.”
There was no doubt about it: Thomas Ellington was mad. No British man, magician or not, would talk about the ancient Egyptian underworld as if it were real. They preferred heaven and hell. Clean dualities.
Black and white.
Good and evil.
Glory and ruin.
No in-between. Never in-between.
But here stood a rich lord in rags, beseeching his bastard son: “All that glitters is not gold. Don’t dig up the past.” His fists tightened. Even so, the twenty-four-karat signet ring hung loose on his pinky. “It was you. It was you and now he knows.”
“Who knows?” Ezra asked sharply.
“I don’t know,” the lord wailed. The smell of spoiled meat slapped Ezra in the face. When had he last brushed his teeth? Or changed his clothes, for that matter?
“Ezra,” Celia said. “I hate to restate the obvious, but this man is nuttier than a fruitcake. We should leave before he decides to—”
“FLY, YOU FOOLS!” Lord Blackwood shrieked so hard that spittle landed on Ezra’s cheeks. There was the same taste of terror that had been present at the London meal—only it, too, had gone rancid. “RUN! YOU’RE NOT SAFE!”
The old man shoved Ezra hard enough to send him stepping into another pile of sheep shit.
The rug was ruined… This whole house was.
It filled him with a great sadness, for though Thornhill was never home, Ezra had roots here.
He had a memorial with his name etched into the stone.
He stared back through the window at the pair of vases and the shiny stolen car sitting in the drive beyond.
Several sheep had gathered around the Hispano Suiza as well.
“GET OUT!” Thomas Ellington threw a fist. His signet ring met Ezra’s sternum, putting a dent where his heart should be.