CHAPTER 14 #2
The girls stood apart, huddled by the fireplace in fox ears and tails.
Emma was relieved to see they were wearing gowns and heels, just as she was.
Julia was a cloud of crimson in a satin halter dress; her only possible concession to practicality a tightly pinned crown of braids.
She beckoned Emma to join them. Venetia, beside her, was almost vibrating with fury, her hands clenched against the black mesh of her jumpsuit.
The girls had been pushed to the sidelines, Emma realized.
They had a terrible view: the Turnbulls’ backs blocked the table.
For once, Emma was grateful to be tall. If she stood on tiptoe, she could see Jasper and the bowl.
“What is this?” Emma whispered.
“They’re doing some sort of ceremony first,” Elizabeth Lim whispered back. “The one they didn’t do at the annual dinner.”
“I’ve not seen it before,” Antonia Viacelli added. “We were too soused at the end of last year’s annual dinner to take it in. I was asleep with my head in a soup tureen.”
“The punch,” said Elizabeth. They all pulled a face.
“So we’re supposed to stand in a corner, like good little girls, until they’re done?
” Venetia Kent’s eyes gleamed dangerously.
“We’re supposed to be the most powerful generation of women the University has ever seen.
And look at us, waiting all nice and proper until we’re wanted. We can’t even see.”
“Don’t,” said Julia, pulling Venetia back. “It’ll only make a scene.”
“Is that a bad thing?” Emma said, surprising herself.
Venetia flashed her something that was almost a smile.
“It’s starting,” Julia said, with a quelling stare for both of them.
The hush was unnerving. Jasper held the parchment before him, ran a finger over the spidery writing.
His voice shook as he intoned the first lines.
Then it grew in power, until someone else might have been speaking through him, it sounded so unlike Jasper.
Snatches of words winged around the room.
Brotherhood. Sacrifice. The Turnbulls watched every movement of his lips, eyes glazed in the candlelight. Then the speech dropped into Latin.
Emma knew only as much Latin as she’d been able to pick up from species names over the years. The words rolled over her. The air in the room was heavier, somehow. She licked sweat from her upper lip.
There. Sanguis. She knew that one. It meant blood. And mortis, like rigor mortis. Death.
Piers glanced back at the group by the fire with a horrible smile.
Emma bit back her revulsion and looked past him, to where Richard stood at Jasper’s elbow.
He lifted the jug and let the red liquid splash into the bowl.
The veins in the glass-stone glowed scarlet.
The spicy, sullen scent of wine rose in the air.
The Turnbulls roared a chant, harsh and rhythmic. There was something ancient about the sound, something raw. As though centuries of civilization had fallen away, leaving only the hunger of a pack.
Jasper slid the knife under the seal of an envelope. The paper inside was covered on both sides with typed text. Illuminated for a brief moment in the candle’s glow, it looked like a list.
Jasper let it fall into the wine. Patches of scarlet bloomed across the paper. It struggled to stay afloat, then plunged down into the depths of the bowl.
Richard handed Jasper a stone jar, edges softened with the wear of centuries. Jasper tilted it until a single red drop fell into the bowl at each compass point. The Turnbulls had been repeating the same phrase, over and over. Now their chant rose to a higher pitch.
The knife flashed. Jasper had plunged it into the bowl. He stirred the wine. Fragments of paper spun and dissolved. The liquid had taken on a dark, viscous look.
Jasper lifted a battered silver cup and dipped it to the bowl. He drank deeply. Wine ran over his fingers, dark as blood. He pulled his lips from the cup, dripping red, panting. The room thrilled to his voice.
“Gentlemen. By our flesh, by the bones of our fathers, and the spirit of the chosen: The Society of Turnbulls lives on.”
“The Society of Turnbulls lives on,” the room thundered back. Each Turnbull dipped the cup and drank.
When the last one had drunk, Venetia broke from Julia’s hold and charged forward.
But there was nothing left in the bowl. Nothing but a few specks of wine sediment, like dried blood.
Emma knew she was imagining it, but the veins in the glass-stone walls of the bowl seemed fatter now. Almost as though it had been fed.
Afterward, they brought out the champagne. Someone had hurried the bowl away. It was a good thought, because in the mess that followed, of wine and large male forms being flung around the room, Emma doubted it would have survived intact.
“No, but really, the thing about fox hunting,” Emma heard someone say behind her, “is the adrenaline high. More than paragliding or other extreme sports, which I do a lot of.”
“Really.” Venetia sounded excruciatingly bored. “Fox hunting.”
“Yeah,” the boy added impressively. “Because you could actually die.”
“Right, right, that’s it,” another voice boomed. “Hunting’s all about skill.”
“And the fox mostly gets away anyway,” added little Tabitha Mountbatten. “But they never put that in the stories.”
Emma turned away. Perhaps it was because she’d been avoiding drinking, the memory of the Turnbull punch too horrible to shake. But the rest of the party felt as though it was happening on the other side of a glass wall.
“Come on, mate.”
A few steps away, at the center of a pink-flushed group, Eddie Spencer was trying to shove Richard toward Antonia Viacelli, lolling by the fire. But Richard shook him off and fled for the far window, where Julia waited.
Eddie downed his glass. “Only trying to help. That man needs a girlfriend.”
Piers stumbled against Eddie, giggling. “Not him. He’s been sticking it into something secret.”
“Sly dog, who?”
Piers let his eyes snag on Julia. Queenly, radiant in crimson satin by the window.
Guy Cavendish whooped. “Oh, good lad. Best call the ambulance, lads. Seems our Rich has a spot of the yellow fever.”
The group screeched like macaques.
Yellow fever. Emma could have ripped out their eyeballs for daring to even look at Julia. Or their stupid, shrieking tongues. And all at once she realized: She was done here.
She looked around: at the boys with red coats and redder faces; the girls shrieking and slapping away errant hands.
The bottles knocked over and forgotten, slopping champagne onto the floor.
And she couldn’t remember what it had felt like to want all of this so badly.
It was empty. The money, the sheen. The jealous eyes following them from party to party.
None of it made the people here worth spending time with.
Jasper stumbled across the room.
“You are so gorgeous,” he whispered. Speckles of saliva sprayed her ear. He kissed the rim, a wet wash of tongue on her skin. “And you’re mine. Pretty, pretty Emma.”
Five minutes before, that kiss would have set Emma’s skin tingling. Now it was a blank.
Jasper leaned in again, but before Emma had decided whether she wanted to duck—and why would she do that, Emma scolded herself, what was wrong with her?—Piers clapped his hands.
“Right, you lot! These are the rules of the Opening Meet,” he announced.
Venetia rolled her eyes. “It’s a pub crawl.”
“Men-hunters!” Piers bellowed over her. “You are one team. Lady-foxes! The second. Between each pub, foxes, you must run. Hunters, you must chase them. That is the hunt. If a fox gets to the next location without being caught, she is safe. But if a hunter spots a fox, he may call all the other hunters to chase her. And then, watch out, foxes! Because the hunters only have to catch one fox to win the round. And”—he waggled his eyebrows—“the winning team gets bought drinks at the next pub.”
“What happens to the fox that gets caught?” ventured one of the girls.
His eyes glittered. “Why don’t you find out?”
A low laugh went around the room.
Emma’s hand itched in Jasper’s hold. She twitched it away. “Jasper, actually I—”
“Oh no.” He pinned her to him. “You can’t leave. Not now.”
Sweat-damp fingers ran down her spine. Wriggling away from him, Emma overbalanced.
“All right there?” Richard asked, with a steadying hand. She wasn’t sure what he saw in her face, but he sighed.
“Emma, I know Jasper’s very excited. But it’s really just a pub crawl. Don’t stay if you don’t want to. People usually lose track after the first stop. I mean, Hugo’s already passed out in the coatroom, so not everyone even makes it out. And you look tired already.”
“Thanks,” she said. “You know what? I really am.”
Impulsively, she leaned into Richard for a one-armed hug. He stiffened, and then a hammy hand closed around her shoulders.
But the group was gathering. The grip on her wrist was Jasper’s, towing her to the street outside.
“Hunters,” Piers bellowed. “It is time.”
In the hours they had been drinking, the streets had emptied. The tourists back to the train station, the market sellers driving home. The city was left quiet and cold.
“Next stop, the Swan,” cried Piers.
Piers had named a pub near the river. It was a clear run from the Turnbull Clubhouse if you took Scholar’s Road. But on an open path, the Turnbulls would outrun her. No, this required cunning. Emma sifted through side streets in her mind.
Piers raised his hand. “Foxes, on my signal.”
Emma tensed. Piers blew a long blast on a hunting horn.