Authors: C.N. Crawford
“You wish to return home to Boston,” sad Asmodeus. “My scrying stone told me.”
Thomas nodded. “Very impressive. And you have a lot of… grand things in here.”
He beamed. “I was at the top of my scrying class in Sortellian College.”
Thomas cleared his throat. “I’m afraid there’s been a change of plans.” He pulled off his silver watch, dropping it onto the table with a clank. “What sort of plague-healing spell can I get for this silver?”
Jack unlocked the door to his apartment in Salem, eyeing the sofa with longing. It had been his retreat from Boston. Now, it would be his new home.
He liked his hometown, and the spacious, wooden-floored apartment would be perfect for a respite
.
He needed some time to restore himself after the Tatter forces had driven him out of Maremount.
He pulled off his gray peacoat, hanging it on a wooden rack. If he could ever bring Fiona in for a visit, she’d be impressed by the skylights that bathed the room in ivory morning light. At night, they could lie on the floor and look at the starry sky with hot cups of tea, wrapped in a downy blanket.
He ran his fingers through his dark hair and set his keys down on the countertop.
What is she doing now, anyway?
Her whole school had burned down. Scrying had shown him that she was in a mansion somewhere with her peasant friend, but he couldn’t tell where it was. Papillon, his moth familiar, was looking into it.
He walked over to a window overlooking the old burying ground and rested his hand on the rough granite wall. Of course, what really made the apartment perfect was that it came with enough reminders of death to keep him on task. The
memento mori
were his sword of Damocles, preventing him from becoming bloated with luxury. If something rendered him incapable of completing his Great Work, death was inevitable—for him, Fiona, and everyone else.
He caught a brief glimpse of his own reflection in the windowpane. This building had once been the old Salem jail, and his apartment overlooked a crooked-stoned cemetery. The graves jutted out of the ground at odd angles like hags’ teeth.
He could even see the spot where, during the witch trials, Sheriff Corwin had slowly pressed Giles Corey to death under the weight of stones. It had taken several crisp September days to finish the task, just as the leaves were starting to turn orange. The old man’s eyes had bulged, and his tongue had lolled out of his mouth. The sheriff had poked it back in with his cane.
Giles had been a stubborn old bastard. If he’d falsely confessed to witchcraft, it would have been over a lot quicker. It wasn’t a great loss to the world, anyway. The man had beaten one of his servants to death and condemned his own wife as a witch.
Jack turned back to his living room. Apart from the lone granite wall, a remnant of the old jail, each wall was covered from ceiling to floor with oak bookshelves. There were old grimoires, poetry books, a first edition of
Paradise Lost
, and his guilty pleasure—Gothic romances. And of course, now he had the most important book of all: the Voynich manuscript. It would be the key to completing his work. For all his time torturing people in Maremount, they had been able to tell him remarkably little about the Relic of Genesis. He knew only that the Purgators had possessed the relic at one point, as had the philosophers of Maremount. But after the creation of the magical realm, the Throcknells had sent the relic back to where it came from. Wherever that was.
That was where the Voynich manuscript came in. It would tell him of the relic’s history.
He glided over to the bar, nestled between bookshelves, and pulled out a wineglass, still thinking of Giles Corey’s bulging eyes. It was odd that he remembered his early days so well. He couldn’t remember a thing about the 1950s, but he’d probably spent most of it around here, skulking around cemeteries with a martini. He walked over to his dusky green sofa and threw himself down, leaning back into the cushions to stretch his muscles.
After being chased from Maremount, he’d decided to assume a false name—Cooper Smith. At this point, he had no way of knowing how much the Purgators knew about him. They hadn’t been much of a threat in the past century or two, but they seemed to be regaining strength.
So for now, he was Cooper, chipper and modern. He’d say things like
Nice to meet ya, I’m Cooper. Nice weather, huh? How about the Sox?
He’d wanted a contemporary name, and everyone these days was named after a medieval tradesman. He rubbed his sore biceps. Might as well be a barrelmonger. He hadn’t yet met anyone named Basketmaker, but it was only a matter of time. He reached for the bottle of Bierzo on his coffee table and uncorked it. He poured himself a small glass of red wine, inhaling its earthy aroma.
As he leaned back to sip it, he closed his eyes. His left calf muscle spasmed painfully. The flesh-eating wasn’t working as it should anymore, even after he’d devoured Elsa. He set down his glass and reached into his shirt pocket, pulling out a golden pocketwatch and inspecting its surface. He was well overdue for a tune-up. A haunted and skeletal man decorated its front—a reminder of what would happen should the mechanism fail. He examined the tiny cogs through a small window on the back, but he really didn’t know what to look for. It was time to pay the Earl a visit. He suspected the old watchmaker had set it to slow down every few decades just to get more gold out of him.
A flickering motion caught his attention, and he looked up to see his death’s-head moth, Papillon, dancing in the spring air outside his window. He sprang up and ran to the window, unlatching it and swinging it inward. Papillon fluttered around his head, whispering into his ear in her high little voice.
As he listened, he began to understand that some of his plans had entirely backfired. Not only had his Harvesters strung Fiona up on the Tricephalus, but that filthy Tatter boy had saved her. This would only bring her closer to Tobias.
Jack would rip those Harvesters to shreds if they weren’t dead already. He closed the window with a scowl. Papillon still hadn’t found her, but Jack would pay her a visit soon enough.
Fiona’s footsteps echoed off the high, arched ceiling on the second floor. As she walked to her new bedroom, she ran her finger along the dark wooden wainscoting.
Painted a deep maroon, the top half of the walls were hung with oil paintings: wolves, an iron castle in a forest, a forlorn Roman soldier. Antlers hung between the golden frames.
Bloodstain seemed an odd color choice for walls. If it hadn’t been for the light streaming through the large bay windows, it might have looked like the corridor of a wealthy Victorian serial killer. Though for all she knew, that could very well be an integral part of the Ranulfs’ family history.
As she drew closer to one of the closed doors, she heard muffled voices through the oak. She pressed her ear to the door, holding her breath. The clipped cadence sounded like Mrs. Ranulf, speaking to her daughter in hushed tones.
“
Mom
.” Munroe’s voice pierced the wood. She was obviously less concerned with discretion than her mother. “The doors are locked. Relax.”
“Just make sure no one goes in,” Mrs. Ranulf snapped.
Fiona bit her lip.
Goes in where?
Creaking floorboards hastened her toward her own room. She scuttled down the hall, pushing into her own bedroom just as Mrs. Ranulf left Munroe’s.
Fiona pulled the door shut behind her and surveyed the large bedroom she’d been assigned to share with Mariana. Mariana had chosen a four-poster bed in the center of the room, and she lay flat on her back, her arms outstretched.
A threadbare rug with a twisting floral pattern covered most of the floorboards, and the ticking of a ship’s bell clock on the dresser echoed off the high ceiling. The room smelled of mothballs and rose perfume. Green, floral wallpaper covered the walls. There was a grandmotherly feel to the space, but at least it wasn’t as creepy as the hallway.
Mariana stared at the ceiling. “Of all the things to throw down about, you chose to pick a fight over the legitimacy of IQ tests?”
Fiona crossed to her own bed. She’d chosen a smaller one nestled into an alcove. “The IQ test I took said I had poor impulse control. That part was accurate.”
Mariana sat up. “Why were you tested?”
“I thought everyone was.”
Mariana licked her thumb, trying to clean off some of the ink on her arm but leaving a thick, black smudge. “Nope. Just the freaks.”
Fiona fanned herself, cooling off her neck. Dust motes floated in the light streaming from a window over her bed. Through its panes, warped with age, she could see four boxy gardens surrounded by hedges. And within the hedges grew a riot of brightly colored wildflowers.
In the center of the four gardens stood a statue of a woman bound in chains. She appealed to the heavens for mercy, marble arms suspended in the air. An unusual lawn ornament and an unruly landscape for an American senator, but Munroe had said her father was never here. If Mrs. Ranulf was an aging beauty queen, she was definitely an eccentric one.
A hundred yards away, on the other side of the gardens, flowed the James River. Fiona frowned.
Of course they’d live near the James.
It was named for the Purgator King who’d made a hobby of torturing witches in Scotland. In fact, much of the landscape around here seemed to be named for the witch-hunting kings, James and Charles. They weren’t far from where the Jamestown fort had once stood, a colony settled even before Plymouth. Something had gone terribly wrong there, but she couldn’t remember what.
If she pressed her face against the glass and looked far to the right, she could see a lone willow on the river’s banks, surrounded by untamed woods of ash and magnolia. She pressed her face against the cool pane in the other direction. A hedge labyrinth stood between the house and the river, and more magnolias lined the river’s banks.
Mariana rose from her bed and began cramming clothes into a drawer. “The Ranulf mansion is kind of perfect. Apart from the Ranulfs. And apart from the fact that we’re only here because half our schoolmates burned in a fire.”
Fiona winced. “You do have a way with words.” She turned to her friend. “Well, I’m glad we’re alive, but I never thought we’d end up beholden to Munroe. What was that argument you had freshman year?”
“She tried to recruit me for her abstinence club.”
“What happened?”
“I told her I’d rather die of syphilis.”
Fiona smiled. “Nice.”
“Then she told everyone I got syphilis off that homeless guy who sells finger paintings in the Common.” Mariana jammed her T-shirts into the dresser before peering in the large mirror hanging above it, rearranging her black hair.
“Imagine the fight that would have gone down if you’d known magic then. Munroe would have come at you with her blood magic.” Fiona stood and approached to the dresser. “Do you think they’re a cult? I just overheard Mrs. Ranulf saying that something is off limits, and she sounded really urgent. And Tobias said they drink the blood of a god named Blodrial. I don’t even want to know where they get the blood from.”
“Thomas would probably know.” Mariana pulled out her black eyeliner. “If he doesn’t find his way out of Maremount, we’re gonna have to go after him somehow.”
“How will we know if he makes it out? They took our phones.”
“Maybe they thought we’d use them to arrange defilement meetings.”
“Oh, don’t be crass!” Fiona’s hand flew to her chest in mock horror. “I have my secretary schedule my defilement appointments.”
“You’re a fallen woman, Fiona. That can only end in death.” Mariana traced black swirls under her eyes. “Then again, everything ends with death.”
Fiona gazed at her roommate’s reflection. “Mariana, did you notice anything weird about Tobias when he got on the bus?”
“He’s a crow shifter from a Puritan-witch universe. He’s bound to be a little weird.”
“Yeah, but he seemed different. Like he’s almost a different person.” How could she explain that the way he held his shoulders had changed? It would make it sound like she’d been paying too much attention.
“It
was
weird that he was chatting to Munroe like they were buddies. But it makes sense for him to act weird. He just saw his girlfriend murdered. By your boyfriend.”
“Jack is
not
my boyfriend,” she snapped.
“
Sorry.
Ex-boyfriend.” Finishing her liner, Mariana blinked in the mirror.
“Just the thought of Jack fills me with rage.” Fiona stared at the frizzy mass of honey-brown curls that emanated from her head. There was something depressing about an undersized and faded princess T-shirt. “I’m not convinced the Ranulfs are much better, though.”