Ellsbeth
A piece of her skull had been removed, and it was being used to scoop out the exposed part of her brain.
That was the only possible explanation for the searing pain in the back of her head.
The pain pulsed with every heartbeat. The inside of her eyelids flashed with a hot, fleshy red color, but her eyes remained shut.
“She needs to be awake.”
She wasn’t in Rawlins’s bed. She was back at Banestooth, in the columned basement.
And she was at the center of the Fibonacci spiral of their mosaic ritual circle.
A figure lowered his head until their faces were even, but she couldn’t make out the face beneath his hood; his features remained in shadow, his silhouette backlit by torchlight.
He held something in front of her face. A phone.
Her phone. It lit up with recognition, its sensors perceptive enough even with a gag in her mouth, and clicked open.
“Did she call anyone for help?” asked a man somewhere behind Ellsbeth.
“No,” said the figure in front of her. “One vague text, but nothing we need to worry about.” He scrolled through the blurry photos she had taken of the Banestooth basement that morning and deleted them one by one.
“There we go.” Ellsbeth’s eyes adjusted to the torchlight and glimpsed blond hair under the hood.
His voice was familiar but she couldn’t quite place it.
“I admit, Maxwell,” said a second voice behind Ellsbeth, “I didn’t expect you to be of service to Banestooth quite so quickly.”
“Yes,” said the blond man in front of her. “Where did you find her? And how are you sure you weren’t seen?”
“It was an invisibility ritual,” said a third voice.
Maxwell Keene. “She had performed an invisibility ritual so she could snoop around this place. I thought I heard her. And then I saw the footprints in the frost outside. She wasn’t paying any attention.
I managed to get a hand around her throat and—”
“Why? Why was she snooping around in the first place?”
“You killed her sister,” Maxwell said. He spoke fast, eager to please. “Last year. And she found proof, too. I followed her at the library and saw what she was doing. She was looking into you right in the open. Roberta Storer, that was her sister. It’s her last name, too. Obviously.”
At the sound of Bertie’s name, Ellsbeth came to life, struggling against her bindings.
Maybe the salt circle was still holding. She needed to say the trigger word and she could get out of here. But the gag kept her tongue stubbornly in place. She could barely breathe. A few boys chuckled at her effort: The room was full of people wearing cloaks and hoods, surrounding her in a circle.
Ellsbeth couldn’t be sure how much time had passed since the last time she had been in the Banestooth basement.
Was it that morning, or had days gone by?
Someone had taken off her shirt and jeans; she was wearing just a bra and underwear, the chill of the air prickling at the small hairs on her skin and causing her arms to goosepimple.
If this headache would go away, she could think more clearly, she could come up with a way out of this.
“If I hadn’t come along, you all would’ve been waking up tomorrow morning to feds banging on your door. You owe me this ritual and more,” Maxwell said.
The soft voice behind her spoke again. “The fact that her sister committed suicide here will make a cover-up easy. Bereft, and suicidal herself.”
“And she was fucking her professor,” Maxwell said. “Rawlins.”
The blond figure lowered down again, his face inches from Ellsbeth’s.
She could hear the smile in his voice even though his face remained in shadow.
“Oh, really? Storer, you are just full of surprises. A torrid affair gone wrong—this really is a gift.” It was Curt.
Curt was the blond man in front of her. Fucking Curt, and she forced herself to contort against her ropes, but they were too tight.
The rope bit into her skin, and the gag in her mouth seemed to tighten of its own accord. “Easy, girl,” Curt said.
“I still don’t understand why we’re doing this,” someone else said from somewhere in the darkness. “The ritual isn’t going to do anything for us again. We already did it. And he isn’t even an Initiate.”
“We reward those who provide the club exceptional services. And that is exactly what’s been done here. We’ll perform the ritual again for Mr. Maxwell Keene,” said the voice behind her, and Ellsbeth recognized it then: Paul Gallway. “A rare and deserved honor.”
“Poor lonely Rawlins,” Curt said. “Finally finds a student to fuck, and she has to die tragically.”
Max stiffened his neck, and Gallway came into Ellsbeth’s eyeline.
He was wearing a white mask. “Your dagger,” he said, handing Max a blade.
Max was the only one in the room not wearing a black cloak.
“You secured her for us, so it only seems fair that when the time comes, you’ll be the first to make her bleed. ”
At the sight of the knife, the fog around Ellsbeth’s head cleared in an instant.
Bitter adrenaline pounded through her body, and Ellsbeth fought as hard as she could against the bindings.
They’re going to kill me. The only way she would get out of here alive was if she could say the obscuration trigger word, and even then she wasn’t sure it would work.
Still, it was a hope, the only one she had right now.
She chewed and spat at the gag until drool rolled down her chin.
“Whoa, there.” A stranger approached then, a tall gangly boy with a voice Ellsbeth didn’t recognize. He put a piece of masking tape over her mouth, securing the gag in place.
“Will this work?” Maxwell asked, his voice low and steady. “Even though you just did the ritual last spring?”
“It won’t do anything for the rest of the Initiates,” Gallway said. “Doing the ritual multiple times doesn’t increase one’s luck or fortune. But it will work for you. And it will have the added benefit of getting rid of this one. It really is a pity. She was doing so well in my class.”
The tape partially covered Ellsbeth’s nostrils; it was becoming harder to breathe now.
Someone had done something to make the room warm and smoke-filled; Ellsbeth smelled incense. Myrrh.
Someone behind Ellsbeth jerked painfully at her cuffs, untying her from the chair and binding her wrists to her ankles.
She was pushed onto the mosaic floor, contorted painfully.
Movement whirled around her: arcane gold ingots being placed at even, precise distances.
Her eyelids felt heavy. An unpleasant ache crawled its way around her neck, and the hard bone of her shoulder was grinding against the floor.
And then, at once, every cell of her body screamed in dizzying terror when she realized what was happening.
She was going to die.
She was going to die the way Bertie had died, scared and naked in a basement, flayed by knives with no one to tell the truth about what happened to her.
Rawlins would believe that it was a suicide; that she was a sad and broken bird he couldn’t fix.
Her parents would shrink even further into themselves in their grief.
Ellsbeth’s entire life would become a perfunctory obituary in the student newspaper.
They would probably say something awful.
She lit up the room. She had so much promise.
Would Rawlins mourn her? Or would a part of him be relieved that their affair had ended without any trouble for him?
“Ex infortunio, potenter benedic nobis.”
The voices around her began to chant, low enough that she felt the vibrations in her stomach. Her cheeks were wet; she had begun to cry.
“Ex infortunio, potenter benedic nobis.”
Maybe she could just close her eyes. Maybe at the moment the knives entered her body and life left her, she could will herself back to Rawlins’s bed, and let that be her final thought.