Rawlins
The first knock brought no immediate response; he tried the door, in case it might be unlocked, but no such luck.
His plan was half formed and probably foolish.
All he knew was that he needed to get inside immediately.
If his worst fears were correct, Ellsbeth was here and in danger.
If he was wrong—well, he might embarrass himself, ruffle some feathers, and piss off Ellsbeth when she found out what he had undertaken.
But he would be more than happy to find himself cleaning up that mess.
He had considered calling the police, insisting this was a matter of grave danger, but that seemed unlikely to work; Ellsbeth’s evidence was limited and circumstantial, certainly not sufficient to summon a door-busting assault.
He had to do this alone, with only one weapon available to him—the ball of compounding clay, charged with the power of obscuration and wrapped in a handkerchief.
He had put it into his pocket intending to use it on Ellsbeth, if he needed to, and now it was the only thing that might help him save her.
“Percy, you good?” someone called out from deeper in the house.
“Tell him everything is fine,” Rawlins said quickly and quietly.
“Everything’s fine!” Percy shouted back, his tone hollowed by the effect of the obscuration.
There was a moment of silence, followed by a door closing that reverberated through the foyer, and Rawlins stepped inside.
He’d never been inside the Banestooth house before, more on principle than anything else, and quickly adjusted to the grand scale of the entry hall.
The place appeared to be deserted, or close to it, though he knew it was home to twenty or more of the club’s members.
“Tell me where everyone is right now,” Rawlins said.
“They’re down in the basement.”
“Tell me what they’re doing,” he hissed.
“The ritual,” Percy said vacantly. “Fortunatis.”
The words struck Rawlins like a physical blow, and he was silent for a moment as it all came together.
The Fortunatis Favori ritual was a legend; its practice had been banned for centuries, but most modern scholars doubted it was ever real, considering it more likely to be a fabrication invoked at various historical moments to paint the study of arcane mechanicals in an extreme light—either positively or negatively, depending on how and why it was mentioned.
To Rawlins, it had always seemed far-fetched—the notion that one person’s good fortune in life could be taken and passed along by the consumption of their blood.
But since he had learned, only an hour earlier, of a quadrennial murder spree targeting Newlyn women, the notion of a ritual requiring human sacrifice seemed all too plausible. And now…Ellsbeth was missing.
“Take me to the basement,” he told Percy. “Now.”
The young man nodded dumbly and led the way.
Rawlins’s heart pounded as he followed Percy down a hallway, their steps echoing on the wood floor. The house felt eerily quiet, but as they progressed deeper inside, he could faintly make out voices, coming from somewhere he could not place, like whispers melting out of the walls.
They reached a door in the middle of a hall. Percy knocked on it twice sharply, waited a beat, and knocked once more, then said into the wood, “It’s Percy.”
Rawlins heard a lock turning, then the door opening, revealing a massively thickset undergraduate standing sentry on the other side of the door. He peered out at Percy and Rawlins, his eyes narrowing.
Past him, Rawlins could faintly make out a stairwell plunging into darkness, with the flickering glow of candlelight visible down below—and for a moment, the voices became clearer, chanting Latin in unison.
But they fell silent as the door opened above and they all realized their ritual had been interrupted.
“Percy. The fuck are you doing?” said the sentry.
“Taking him to the basement,” Percy said flatly.
The sentry’s eyes narrowed on Rawlins, and Rawlins attempted to seize his chance at surprise. He reached out for the sentry’s bare hand, hoping to press the compounding clay into his flesh, to use obscuration to claim at least one more target. But the sentry jerked his hand back. “Don’t touch me.”
Then he went on the offensive and grabbed Rawlins by the front of the shirt, forcing him backward, out of the doorframe, aiming to pin him against the opposite wall.
Rawlins stepped back, grappling with him; the sentry was stronger, but Rawlins was able to twist out of his grasp, slipping past the young man’s momentum, and attempting to rush down the stairs.
But his kamikaze plan backfired disastrously when the sentry recovered quicker than anticipated.
As soon as Rawlins began running down the steps, he felt a boot between his shoulder blades as he was kicked from behind.
He launched forward, and the world became a tumbling whirlwind of darkness and pain as he somersaulted down the steps.
On the way down his lip split open, his head cracked on wood, his right wrist rolled hard, his ribs audibly cracked. He came to a rest belly-down, on marble so cold it felt like relief from the fiery pain that was already blazing everywhere in his body.
He opened his eyes—or rather, his left eye, finding his right one already swelling shut—and his vision swam, struggling to focus, as he blinked away the blood that streamed down from his scalp.
He opened his mouth, feeling a tooth that had loosened on the bottom, and spat blood onto the floor as he pushed himself up to his hands and knees.
Robed figures swarmed around him, their silhouettes ominously dark in the flickering glow of the candlelight, faces difficult to make out beneath hoods that left their faces in shadow.
He heard various voices, murmuring with surprise as they approached, puzzled by his disastrously violent entrance.
The voices were unfamiliar, except for one that spoke from directly in front of him: “You just couldn’t stay away. ”
It belonged to his son.
As Rawlins painfully tilted his head upward, he saw that Max was gripping a curved knife, which gleamed in the flickering torchlight.
And beyond him—at the center of a ritual circle, surrounded by burning incense and glowing metal ingots—was an even more disturbing sight, one far more painful than any of the injuries Rawlins had just sustained.
Ellsbeth. Stripped to her underwear, hands and feet bound, with a gag taped over her mouth—in a pose of such helplessness that his insides convulsed with disgust. The most awful detail of all was the look in her eyes, where he saw the all-consuming fear of someone who knew they were about to die.
“How perfect,” said another voice, vaguely familiar—this one belonging to a man in a white mask wearing the only red robe in the room, marking him as the ostensible leader. “The secret affair was just revealed, and the aggrieved lover comes crashing in moments later to try to save her.”
“Gallway…” Rawlins said, making the connection in his mind.
“It’s quite fortunate,” Gallway said. “We were wondering how much she might have told you about her suspicions. And now we don’t need to worry.”
Rawlins’s mind raced, attempting to calculate a way through this. Pleading for mercy was pointless. He needed leverage; power was the only language they would understand.
“I have evidence,” Rawlins said, trying to sound confident.
“An email that will go out tonight, if I don’t cancel it.
Laying out your connection to murders going back years.
” He looked around, trying to see if this was working.
“But if you just let her go, I’ll delete it.
All of it. She won’t say anything, and you can have me instead. ”
There was silence for a moment, then Gallway chuckled. “What do you think, Max? Did your old professor have the foresight to prepare an elaborate unsent email before rushing over here?”
“He never thought much of anyone else’s intelligence,” said Max. “But I never imagined he’d take me for that stupid.”
Rawlins swallowed hard, his throat dry, mind reaching for any other stratagem. “Sorry, Tad,” Gallway said. “Whatever you know—and whatever secrets you two kept—will be buried right here in this room.”
Gallway gestured proudly to their surroundings, and Rawlins looked around, taking in the grandiosity of the Banestooth Club’s secret ritual chamber. No basement indeed, he thought, remembering the words Ellsbeth had written beside the architectural drawings…
And with the recollection of her note came another image: the measurements she had made on the blueprints. The radius she had drawn. For a ritual circle of her own.
He wasn’t sure what the ritual was that she had planned—or if she had gotten a chance to enact it.
He looked at Ellsbeth again. Her painfully restrained body looked helpless, yes, and there was terror in her eyes—but that was not all.
A ferocity was there, too. She had not given up. And he wouldn’t, either.
“Would you like to do the honors, Max?” said Gallway.
Rawlins thought that he saw a moment’s hesitation in his son, but Max hid it quickly behind bravado. “My pleasure.” He advanced on Rawlins, knife flashing in the candlelight.
Rawlins pushed himself up to his knees, holding out his hands. “Max, wait…”
But his son was undeterred, hand tightening on his weapon. “You deserve this.”
“I know I do, but…it’s better if it’s slower.” Rawlins looked at Gallway. “Isn’t that right? The ritual works more effectively if you draw it out. Make it hurt. Make her suffer, emotionally.”
Gallway nodded, puzzled by this response. “It’s true. Which is why it’s fortunate that you showed up. So she can watch you die.”
“Let me ask her something first,” Rawlins pleaded. “I just want to ask one question.”
Max darkened. “You’re about to die…and the only thing you want…is to ask her a question?”
Rawlins nodded. Bitter rage clouded Max’s features, and he pulled the weapon back, readying to slash it across his father’s throat, and Rawlins quickly spoke again: “Are you really that scared to hear what I’ll say?
” Max hesitated, and Rawlins pressed him further.
“You know the ritual works better if you make it last…but you’re so wounded, so afraid… you can’t bring yourself to do it.”
Max lowered the weapon, his pride wounded, and spat the words, “Fine. Ask your question.”
Rawlins looked at Ellsbeth, locking his gaze onto her across the room. “I just need to know…was it real?”
Max smirked. “That’s it? The last seconds of your life…and you want to know if your little girlfriend really loved you?”
“That’s all,” Rawlins said. “You need her to be in pain for the ritual, right? Suffering? Well, let her tell me if she loves me or not…and let her say goodbye.”
Ellsbeth moaned through the gag. Max looked her way, hatred burning in his eyes. “Let’s hear it, then.”
One of the Initiates ripped the tape off Ellsbeth’s mouth and pulled out the gag. She spat on the floor, working her tongue, and Rawlins could have sworn that he saw the faintest hint of a smile tug at her lips before a single ragged word spilled from her mouth:
“Licorice.”