Rawlins
“Hi, Maggie,” he said as he opened the door, indicating for her to step inside ahead of him. He dropped his bag on the desk and took a seat.
Lennox remained standing. Her gaze was stony as she closed the door. “What did you tell him?” she said.
“Max won’t come out and say it, but he’s been…insinuating things.”
Lennox laughed bitterly, sinking into the chair and staring through the floor with a haunted look in her eyes. “Honestly…it’s a nightmare. I feel horrible for thinking it, but…it was easier before he got out. Not just for me, I think…for him.”
Rawlins’s insides twisted with guilt. If his intervention hadn’t made things better, what had it all been for? “I’m sure it just takes time to readjust. For everyone.”
Lennox shook her head. “I don’t know…When he’s home, he barely comes out of his room.
Like a teenager, he won’t let me in there.
Won’t come sit with us for meals, just takes his plate off the table and goes upstairs.
Ben and I sit there and I try not to cry.
And then Max will come down and leave sometimes for ten, twelve hours at a time, without telling me where he’s going.
And if I ask, he absolutely explodes. He was always an angry kid, but there’s something else there now… hatred.”
“He’s traumatized,” Rawlins said. “I tried to talk to him, but—”
“Did you tell him?” Lennox interrupted, and when Rawlins hesitated, she turned away, seething. “How could you? Without talking to me first?”
“He deserves to know the truth,” Rawlins said, attempting to keep his tone even.
“He deserved to know a long time ago.” Rawlins expected a sharp retort, but Lennox’s eyes glistened, her unflappable stoicism failing her.
She looked weakened, like she had borne a heavy burden for years and was finally starting to buckle under its weight.
Rawlins was struck with an impulse to console her, but before he could find the words, her vulnerability vanished, replaced with cold fury.
“You always thought you knew best,” she spat at him.
“You thought I was a bad mother. But I wasn’t.
There’s just…a darkness in him. And now…
” She shook her head and stood up, heading for the door but pausing at the threshold.
“I don’t know how you thought this would go.
But I promise you, it’s going to end badly. ”
Then she was gone, and a knot of dread settled into the pit of Rawlins’s stomach.
That evening, when he returned to his home, Rawlins considered telling Ellsbeth about his conversation with Lennox, but ultimately he decided to keep it to himself. There was nothing to do for now. Best to give the matter some time, let Max calm down, and try to enjoy the present.
The moments Rawlins shared with Ellsbeth felt both mundane and precious.
The domesticity of their routine did nothing to dampen their erotic enthusiasm.
Rawlins knew that the excitement he felt every time he caught a glimpse of her exposed skin could not survive indefinitely, but so far his lust had not abated—primarily because their imaginations kept yielding novel possibilities.
Their sex life was playful; he was able to confess to her fantasies that might have seemed too embarrassing to admit to himself.
And dabbling with writ magic opened up new horizons entirely; he bound her body in a delicious variety of ways, in every room of the house (and once, both painfully and pleasurably, on the stairs).
One night, she brought up the possibility of taking their experimentation to the next level. “Do you ever think obscuration could be…I dunno, kinda sexy?”
He looked at her, a mixture of curiosity and nervousness twisting his stomach. “How do you mean?”
“It’s such an incredible power,” she said. “The thought of somebody using it…especially on me…it’s hot. And for me, the idea of submitting to that level of control, over my mind…” She trailed off, clearly turned on by the prospect.
Rawlins had to admit, he was intrigued by the possibility; the taboo around the practice had softened slightly in his mind, no doubt both from secretly trying it out on his own, as well as from trying so many things already with Ellsbeth.
But he couldn’t tell how serious she was about actually doing it.
“It’s definitely…an interesting fantasy,” he said, noncommittal.
“Oh come on,” she said teasingly, sliding closer. “Are you telling me that you don’t like the thought of having some control over my mind?”
He cocked his head, playing the possibilities through in his mind. “Not if you were…unconscious in any way.”
“No—I wouldn’t want that, either,” she said. “I’d want to feel it all. And remember the whole thing. But there are lots of possibilities. I read an account in one of the books…maybe the Sayoto? About a ritual for implanting trigger words in the subject’s mind. I bet that would be possible.”
Rawlins nodded absently. “I recall something like that. Never substantiated, though, was it?”
“The reports are all anecdotal,” she said. “Some of them seem a little ridiculous. But others track, at least in terms of what I’d expect to be logical and effective.”
He squinted at her. “Are you seriously considering…?”
“I don’t see why not,” Ellsbeth said with a shrug, clearly trying to seem casual about it. “It’s not like it’s that much more illegal than writ magic. In for a penny.”
“But it is more dangerous,” Rawlins replied. “Meddling with someone’s mind, using untested mechanicals…I like your brain too much to take any chances with it.”
“I’d trust you,” she said. “And even more—I would trust us. If we designed the ritual together, I’m sure we’d see any potential pitfalls and avoid them.”
“We do work well together,” Rawlins agreed. “You’re sure about this?”
“I am,” Ellsbeth said. “It’s exciting. And with you involved, I’m confident it will be safe.”
Rawlins could not deny the primal thrill it gave him to be trusted by her, and he felt his defenses softening. He had gotten obscuration to work on his own, after all, with no apparent side effects, using the ritual Ellsbeth had designed.
“So…trigger words?” He cocked an eyebrow.
Ellsbeth beamed, seizing on his apparent agreement. “Yes, exactly,” she said. “The Sayoto ritual proposes that you can induce a stimulus response. An action, or a physical reaction, elicited by hearing the trigger. Which could be a spoken word or phrase, or even a specific sound.”
“Very Pavlovian,” Rawlins said. “But is that really obscuration? Aren’t you describing more of a…physical body effect? A reflex?”
“Classical conditioning happens in the brain,” Ellsbeth said.
“Definitely obscuration. I mean it’s not as deep as some other effects that might be possible, but I don’t want to be brainwashed.
I just want to give you a little conduit directly into my head.
” She took his hand and put his finger against her temple.
He weighed this, trying not to let on how much the possibility excited him. “Could be fun…but I haven’t had much difficulty getting you to do whatever I told you to, without any need for magic. Turns out, some people like being told what to do.”
“That’s true,” Ellsbeth said, smiling up at him. “But it could elicit an action. Or, you know…a very specific physical response.”
“Ahhhh.” Rawlins grinned and rolled on top of her, pinning her wrists down. “I like the way you think.”
Crafting the ritual was a project they undertook together, filling a few long afternoons in his study.
The ritual Ellsbeth had sent Rawlins weeks earlier served as a jumping-off point, providing a structure from which to build something new.
It was an intriguing intellectual puzzle—how to cause an involuntary physical response—and also slightly ridiculous; the whiteboard overflowed with theories and calculations, advanced work that looked deadly serious, when in fact they were crafting a method for magically inducing an orgasm.
They worked together as equals, Ellsbeth sitting at his desk with her laptop open while he pored over volumes.
Sometimes they laughed, then fell into silence for extended periods as they both churned over a problem in their minds, only to erupt into newfound excitement when they made a new flurry of progress.
“You have to read this!” Ellsbeth would exclaim every few hours, forcing the screen of her laptop toward him with a pertinent paragraph highlighted, and every time, he couldn’t help but smile at her unfiltered enthusiasm.
When they ran up against a challenge, they talked it out in tandem.
“We need to isolate the subject of the ritual so that only the target is affected by the trigger word,” Rawlins mused aloud.
“A metallic elemental would be good for the targeting. The tricky part is, all the metals have secondary effects, which could complicate the efficacy.”
Ellsbeth interrupted quickly, when he had only barely finished his sentence. “What about silver iodide? I feel like that would work.”
Rawlins was surprised by how fast the answer came to her, out of dozens of different possibilities.
It was a brilliant idea—not intuitive, but quite possibly perfect.
For a moment, he wondered if she had already thought this through, and was only pretending to figure it out now for his benefit.
Or was her knowledge of metallic elementals and their various effects so comprehensive that she could recall such a thing in an instant?
He tried to set aside his momentary suspicion and focus on the task at hand. “Yes…silver iodide might work…but it has a time-dilation effect,” Rawlins said. “It could extend or contract the duration.”
“It would work. And we could easily just factor the dilation effect into our calculations,” Ellsbeth said. “There are timetables about the effect of silver iodide on rituals. The math might get complicated, but we should still be able to calculate it predictably.”