Chapter III
III
When men first found fire, they prayed to it.
They stared into it, night after night, until it spoke to them.
These men listened and they learned until they could see the filaments that bound the world together.
Strands of life hung in the air like strings tying matter to itself, and if men pulled hard enough against these connections, they could wield them.
They bent, they plucked, they toyed and twisted just to see what would happen if they snapped.
And then, long before men’s mouths could mold the shape of words to name them, they broke them.
Pulling energy apart, forcing it together, created chaos out of perfect order.
A harmony untouched across time immemorial suddenly unraveled.
Disorder spread like a sickness, and with it came the beasts.
Beings unseen by the eyes of men began to hunt them in the dark.
The nascent species barely survived the onslaught.
Those who did learned better than to mess with the fabric of reality.
They crafted mythologies to explain the chaos and rejected the practices that had borne it.
They huddled around fires and ignored the voices when they came.
“You know you don’t have to do this,” Henry told his sister. Vic rolled her eyes and kept driving.
They had been on the road for two days. Vic and Henry got along well by sibling standards, but the thirty-hour drive between Austin and upstate New York was testing their limits.
Vic was sick of Henry’s irrational optimism about the Order.
He couldn’t stop himself from speculating aloud about every little detail that awaited him—the food, the training schedule, the other recruits.
Vic, with less humor each time, asked every hour on the hour whether he would prefer to turn around and drive anywhere else.
“We could go west,” she said. “I know you’ve always wanted to see the Pacific. We could go do that instead.”
“Can it, Vic.”
“You know it snows in New York, right? Big icy sheets of it. We’re not going to New York City. This is upstate. Basically Canada. Whole lakes freeze over, and you have to scrape ice off your car if you want to go anywhere.”
Henry sighed, deep and beleaguered. Vic considered suggesting he abandon his pursuit of witchcraft for the theater. “Vic, please.”
“They have a regional delicacy called a garbage plate. A garbage plate, Henry.”
Five hundred miles ago, he might have laughed at that. By the time they hit Pennsylvania, Vic suspected he was ready to throttle her.
Once Henry convinced himself Meredith had told him he’d be safe at the castle, to him it was a done deal.
If their mother said it, well, her word was gospel.
Henry had tried to persuade his sister to stay home, though half-heartedly.
He settled on forcing Vic to promise that she would only drive him—once they got there, he insisted, she would turn around and leave.
Vic suspected he secretly appreciated her decision to tag along. Whether he was scared of making the journey alone or apprehensive about leaving his closest confidante half a continent behind, he didn’t say. But Vic sensed her presence was a comfort to him.
“Vic, you are literally driving me insane.” Henry set his head against the window and closed his eyes.
An annoying comfort perhaps, but a comfort all the same.
“I’m trying to prepare you for your future.”
“I want to die,” Henry moaned.
“You just might. Who knows what these people get up to in the wilderness? Maybe it’s a human trafficking ring. Or a sex cult.”
“It’s not a sex cult.” Henry sighed without opening his eyes. “We’ve been over this.”
“As far as I can tell, the sex cult evidence is inconclusive.”
“Mom said I’d be safe at the castle,” Henry said. Case closed. Mom said the castle was safe, and he trusted Mom.
Where Henry got this trust, Vic had no idea.
Their mother had, as far as Vic was concerned, thrown him into the deep end just as much as Vic.
They both shared the consequences of their mother’s secrets.
But Henry viewed Meredith through a lens of optimism and good intentions. Vic was unfamiliar with the concepts.
An unnamed weight pressed against Vic’s chest as she watched the trees fly by through the windshield and the reality of her situation settled upon her. She was driving her brother across the country to a castle where strangers would try to teach him witchcraft, and they were almost there.
In the dead of January, the landscape in the Northeast was impossibly bleak.
A somber sky hovered close overhead, pressing Vic to the ground like a hand against her neck.
Trees held empty branches heavenward, and cast-aside remnants of days-old snow littered the shoulder of the highway, smeared with dirt and compacted into clotted mounds of ice.
Gone was the kudzu-covered South, where winter rarely knocked.
Vic had entered a colder, meaner place. The sun began its descent too early, and darkness engulfed them before the dashboard clock read five p.m.
They followed the instructions Nathaniel had left, which Henry had copied by hand so Vic could read them. When they peeled off the highway, they thrust forward into a kind of darkness unknown to city dwellers. Twin beams cut a thin path ahead of them, and the rest of the world fell into blackness.
Vic slowed to a near crawl, not trusting her worn tires on the slick pavement. Any concern Vic might have had about oncoming traffic on the single-lane road fled when she heard the crunch of ice beneath the tires. No one had driven this way in days.
Her hands wound around the steering wheel as her shoulders climbed toward her ears. Henry shifted in his seat, his eyes darting across the windshield as if expecting a castle to materialize on the side of the road. His knuckles turned white in his lap.
Out of nowhere, he shouted, “There! Right there, turn right!”
Vic followed where he pointed but saw nothing.
“Can you not see it?” Henry asked.
“I can’t see shit.”
“Pull over. We can trade places.”
Vic looked askance at the heaps of worn snow on the shoulder and opted to park in the middle of the lane. The brakes ground out a rumble as she wrenched to a stop on the ice.
Henry cracked open the passenger-side door and clambered out, reaching his arms overhead and stretching like a cat. Vic unclipped her seatbelt and climbed over the center console to take his seat.
“Seriously?” Henry asked, looking in from the driver’s side.
“I don’t fuck with the woods.”
“You’re a child.”
“What I am is not getting eaten by a forest monster.”
He shook his head, grabbed the wheel, and shifted into drive. The tires jumped and spluttered on the ice before the car lurched forward. When they reached the part of the forest Henry had pointed out, he veered off the road—directly into the trees.
Vic shouted and braced for the crash, but an instant before impact the trees disappeared. As she stared, a road appeared before her eyes, leading into the forest.
She supposed Henry had seen it the whole time.
That was magic, wasn’t it? Vic had witnessed it herself. One second a row of trees stood sentinel in front of the car—so tactile she could see the bark sloughing off—and the next, gone.
Asphalt gave way to stone, and the car rattled along, oblivious to Vic’s anxiety. About a half mile down the strange driveway, lights glittered out of the darkness like stars. Golden lanterns lined the path, and when the road curled, Vic heard her own sharp intake of breath.
A magnificent stone structure loomed at the end of the road.
A giant of rich gray stone, Avalon Castle crouched at the base of the forest, and Vic once again felt time collapsing around her.
A dozen spiked turrets stretched to the sky.
Hundreds of arched windows glowed bright in the black night.
She thought of cathedrals, of candlelight and horror stories.
Fear scrambled up Vic’s spine as she stared at the castle. It resembled less a building than a living thing. A great stone dragon, lying in wait.
“Holy shit,” Henry breathed.
The structure could have housed an entire university, a whole town. Vic wondered how many people lived within its walls, hiding in the mountains. Hundreds? Thousands?
Elaborately carved arches narrowed above a colossal wooden door. Even at a distance, Vic knew that door would dwarf her.
Henry pulled to a stop in front of the entrance, and Vic wanted to demand he turn around. Keep driving. Leave.
The materials Nathaniel had left said the Order was founded in the seventeenth century and that Avalon was completed in 1824. The castle had barely seen two centuries. So why did Vic feel as though she stared into the wizened face of history itself?
Vic jumped when Henry opened his door, his eyes never leaving the castle. Reaching over, Vic pulled the keys from the ignition and stowed them in her pocket. She took a deep breath, pushing her panic down until it quieted, and followed her brother into the night.
A frigid wind pierced the cheap material of her jacket. The thin faux leather was never intended for a real winter.
Vic had told Henry she would stop here. She’d sworn to take him just as far as the front door. Turn around and head back the way they’d come.
But Vic had also promised their mother she’d keep him safe, and the front door beckoned like a siren.
Vic threw a look at the black edge of the forest as she mounted the stone steps to the entrance.
Shadowed gaps among the trees could hold anything, and the longer she watched, the more she imagined movement right outside the limits of her vision.
Vic tore her eyes from the darkness before she could convince herself it stared back at her.
Henry shouldered the massive door inward, and Vic was struck by his confidence, like here was his birthright and he had come to claim it. In his eyes, she guessed maybe it was.
The door creaked open, and the entryway shone like a sun in the middle of the forest.
Vic crept in behind him. As soon as she crossed the threshold, the door swung shut with a thud so heavy Vic jumped.
A carved ceiling soared high overhead, buttressed by an ornate cascade of arches meeting at the top. The floor, walls, and ceiling were all stone, though a massive antique rug carpeted the floor. Staircases spiraled from either side of the hall, leading to a shared landing at the center.
A middle-aged man in a three-piece suit waited on the landing with his hands on the railing.
“Henry Wood,” he said with a smile. “Welcome to Avalon Castle.”