Chapter 58
Fifty-Eight
Sorcha
Ididn’t sleep a moment that night. It seemed like days had passed in the dark and cold of our room before Ansel shook my shoulder and told me to get dressed.
Eight of the cult members waited at our door, three men and five women, including the well-dressed socialite who’d had blood coming out her ears at breakfast. I hadn’t gotten their names and few offered anything up.
Benign chatter ran rampant. But actual information was egregiously hard to come by.
They led us down through the darkened house, using one paltry candle to see by.
Ansel disappeared with the men via a different route.
Eventually, we stopped in a small room in the cellar, whitewashed like everywhere else.
I could feel the magic residue down here, unprotected by the lead lining the ceiling above my head.
My ears were ringing already. My stomach churned.
One of the women unfastened my robe, then pulled off my shift and replaced it with a thin, black cotton dress with no structure and no sleeves.
Another of the women unbound my hair, letting the thick gold curls tumble down my back.
Then the last of the women, the oldest—who seemed to be George’s right hand—dipped her fingers into a bowl of something red and viscous.
The smell hit me first—iron and rot. It was pig’s blood.
The woman traced sigils on my bare arms, chest, face.
I fought down a shudder. Eventually the woman moved on, repeating the process on her companions.
Then on herself. And when she was finished, she opened the door and led me through a maze of darkened cellar corridors and to a massive, circular black stone room.
The walls and floor seemed to devour light, in spite of the dozens of candles placed in sconces along the curving walls.
Six pig carcasses hung from the ceiling.
Cultic eye and spiral symbols were branded into their guts.
I fought back bile in my throat.
And there in the center was a white-and-brown heifer—feet tied, blood flowing from cuts dappling her skin, lowing desperately in pain.
A few moments later Ansel, George, and four other men appeared at the doorway—clad in matching black, skin painted with runes and sigils like the women’s.
“Just follow your neighbor,” the young woman to my right instructed, “and read from this.”
She pressed yet another pamphlet into my hands. I flipped through it, expecting Latin.
But it wasn’t.
I froze.
This was Elvish. Or some butchery of it.
I’d heard about old Elven occultism before. I’d heart that some of the most extreme traditionalists believed the Abrahamic faiths were an attack on the “old gods”—just Elves with unusual power who’d gotten full of themselves and gained a following. But that had died out millennia ago? Hadn’t it?
I realized that I was about to find out.
I mumbled along. Not daring to say the words fully out loud. While the grammar and spelling were abysmal, I could still tell it was a summoning ritual. And I’d play along for safety’s sake. But I wasn’t going to actively participate. Not if I could help it.
I followed the woman in front of me, walked in the designated patterns.
But the nausea was getting worse. And after a quarter hour I felt my whole body was buzzing. Blood began to drip from my nose.
I shot Ansel a worried glance. But his eyes were fixed on the blank space between the two rows of pig carcasses, where a portal was soon to appear.
Blood flowed from the ears of the young woman in front of me. I watched in horror as the man to my left seemed to spontaneously lose use of his hands, the skin going red and waxy like frostbite.
Then George stopped, right in front of the screaming heifer.
The ringing in my ears was so bad I could barely hear her cries anymore.
He slit the animal’s throat. I bit back a scream of my own as I felt the jolt of panic and agony through my magic.
Tears escaped from my eyes unbidden. I didn’t dare draw attention by reaching up to wipe them away.
Then George gathered the animal’s lifeblood into a saucer.
And started distributing it to the participants.
I couldn’t bring myself to open my mouth as George stood in front of me, hands red and glistening. I could still feel the echoes of the heifer’s death throes in my own body.
The woman beside me said something soothing, blood still flowing from her own ears. She forced my mouth open. And George stuck bloodied fingers inside. Then stroked down my throat to get me to swallow.
I managed.
Then immediately vomited blood directly onto George’s chest. The room froze, went silent.
“You’ve rejected the offering,” George murmured, genuine shock on his face.
My head swam. I saw Ansel break formation and rush over to me. But the moment he lay a hand on my shoulder the man to my left gripped Ansel’s wrist so hard I could hear something snap.
“Do not interfere with her unbelief,” the man hissed in Ansel’s ear.
“I’ll interfere where I bloody well please,” Ansel snapped, shoving the other man off.
I saw George’s look of disbelief slowly turn to rage. The ringing in my ears worsened. I could feel more of my own blood leaking from my nose.
Retching again, I gagged red-streaked bile onto the floor in front of me.
Then that same blood-tinged stone rose abruptly to meet me as I pitched forward. And everything went black.