Page 41

T he inside of the shed smelled damp and oily.

Shutting the door behind them, they couldn’t see well and didn’t want to risk a witch light in case Morcant spotted it from a window, but they could hear faint squeaking from Valenti.

Ambrose fumbled in the dark, his hands falling upon the cool metal of a spade, clay plant pots—

He touched the metal grating of a cage, and a squeak of alarm followed.

“I think I have him.”

“Good. Let me just—” Emery took a pinch of powder from his tithe belt and tossed it into the air, but nothing happened.

The warm spark of his magic fizzled out like a weak flame doused in rain.

“Shit. Something’s preventing me from using magic.

Some sort of ward? Maybe that’s why I couldn’t unlock the door.

Clearly it allows Morcant and Hellebore to cast spells, but no one else. ”

“Will it extend past his land?”

“We need to get away from here anyway. Once past the property line, I’ll try again, but …”

Ambrose understood. They had to sneak past the house. While invisible, it shouldn’t be an issue unless Morcant had any traps or detection charms around it.

“We could climb over the fence,” Ambrose said.

“ You could. I’ll break my neck. It’s eight feet tall. Not all of us are built like a brick shithouse.”

Ambrose assumed from the tenor of Emery’s voice he should take that as a compliment. “You don’t have any tithes for a spell?”

“That could make me leap great distances or fall from great heights? No, I forgot to pack my magical parkour kit.”

Valenti squeaked more despairingly.

Ambrose didn’t know what parkour was, but it hardly mattered. “The alternative is going through the house.”

Emery let out a low groan, looking at the fence. “I know. I’ll just say goodbye to my ankles, shall I? Here. Could you give me a boost?”

They set Valenti’s cage on the grass. Ambrose got down on one knee in at Emery’s feet. Emery looked down at him, a pinch of worry in his brow, but Ambrose felt a stirring of something else.

On his knees, with Emery’s belt at eye level, he was very glad for the cold camouflaging the color to his cheeks.

Emery put his foot into Ambrose’s laced hands and a steadying grip on Ambrose’s shoulder.

Ambrose stood, hefting him the remaining few feet to the top of the fence, but he let out a pained yelp when he touched the edge and recoiled.

Balance lost, his free foot nearly kicked Ambrose in the chest. Ambrose still managed to catch him around the waist so that his fall was less a crash than a gentle tumble.

“There’s—I think the fence has a spell trap.” Emery opened his clenched fists to reveal a red weal across the flat of his palms, and Ambrose was seized by the ridiculous urge to punch the offending fence, which would only lead to more injured hands, but none of his urges lately were sensible.

Unfaithful cur. This foolish infatuation will be the death of us both.

Ambrose released Emery, taking a few distancing steps back. “Could a flesh or blood tithe get us through?”

“It’s a trap rather than a ward. I don’t know what spell Morcant used and can’t craft one to undo it.”

“Then how do we escape?”

The entire back garden was fenced in, and the house itself was part of a terrace with no means to sneak to the front without going through the house itself.

“It seems naive to hope Morcant’s home isn’t more heavily warded than the fence,” Ambrose reasoned.

“Yes, but—” Emery reached into his tithe belt and produced a vial of something rusty red. The same one he’d produced to get Ambrose through the mausoleum wards during that first guild meeting. “ Those sorts of wards I can break through.”

Ambrose didn’t like it, but they had no other option. “Stay close.”

Emery picked up Valenti’s cage. “No squeaking.”

Valenti squeaked once in confirmation, and they made their way toward the back door, which was accessed through a glass house filled with plants too delicate for the seasonal cold.

The glass house wasn’t warded, but as they got closer to the back door, the damp air shivered with the aura of magic, like a sign proclaiming “No Trespassers.” The door itself had two panes of stained glass offering a bleak view inside, but aside from the distant glow of light in another room, they couldn’t make out Morcant or Hellebore.

Emery uncorked the vial. The blood inside had nearly dried to nothing. He had to, flinching in disgust, insert his pinky finger and try to scrape the remainder with his nail. He smudged some on the door and the forbidding aura of the ward converted into something more welcoming.

They had to hope that stealth and invisibility would be enough to get them through unnoticed.

The door clicked open quietly under Emery’s cautious hand. He peeked through the crack before opening it fully upon a dark kitchen.

Ambrose expected something macabre—animals hung to dry over the sink instead of herbs, eyeballs in preserve jars, the lair of a villain.

It looked like an ordinary kitchen, complete with tea-stained mugs left in the sink and a bowl of fruit bearing overly freckly bananas. It was quaintly suburban, nothing like the mausoleum and dark fashions with which Morcant styled himself.

The door from the kitchen led down a hall with unlit sconces on the walls. Ambrose could see the rail of a stairway and the front door. It was a straight shot from here to get out, except sounds came from an adjoining room, and candlelight bathed the floor in a gold halo.

There was nothing for it but to try. Though the spell covered the sound of their passage, they still stepped lightly.

The candlelight came from an archway into a sitting room.

Stylistically, it matched Ambrose’s expectations better, with walls painted a green so dark it was nearly black.

Curios, many of them taxidermized, stared out from bookshelves.

Gold fixtures on the furniture caught the light like gleaming eyes.

Morcant lounged in an armchair by the unlit fireplace with a book in his lap.

They couldn’t escape while he was within sight of the front door opening. Ambrose wondered if they might have to venture upstairs and go out through a window when Morcant abruptly shouted, “Hellebore!”

A thump from above them, then stomping on the staircase. She stopped there, glaring over the railing at her father. “What?”

“I’ve been considering, perhaps you were correct about Professor Valenti.”

In the cage Emery held, the rat went very still.

“It’s a long time to wait for the next initiation rite, and a waste of magic and resources keeping him contained. Perhaps it’s best to dispose of him quickly.”

Hellebore stiffened. “That wouldn’t be my first suggestion.”

Morcant rolled his eyes. “We can’t free him.”

She remained silent.

“I’d have thought you’d gotten over this squeamishness by now,” Morcant said. “But you find new ways to disappoint me.”

“That’s easy for you to say, when you aren’t the one getting your hands bloody.”

Morcant’s expression flashed, and in the candlelight the wine-aged handsomeness of his face transformed into something fermented and rotten. “What did you say?”

Flinching, Hellebore said, “What do you want me to do?”

Morcant eventually subsided into his chair, appeased for now. But as he slid back into a relaxed posture, his eyes swept over the spot Emery and Ambrose stood. The anticipation of being seen made Ambrose’s skin crawl, but Morcant had gone back to his book.

He said, “I don’t want you to do anything yet. When the time comes, you’ll make a spell jar of him like the rest.”

“But the second half of the ritual?”

“Can wait.”

Ambrose and Emery exchanged looks. The second half of the ritual—when Morcant took the new initiates into the tomb.

Ambrose had completely forgotten about it, too fixated on the more suspicious part where they sacrificed humans transfigured into rats.

What really went on behind that corpse door in the crypt?

Hellebore, though she dressed in dark clothes and held a candle of family resemblance to her father, looked out of place standing in the stairwell, at a loss for words.

Eventually she said, “I’m heading back to my dormitory soon. Is that all?”

“I’ll call on you when you’re needed.”

She retreated up the stairs. Emery and Ambrose waited in the silence, unsure whether to make a break for the door or wait until Morcant left.

Before they came to a decision, Morcant rose from his chair, went to the bookshelf, and tugged on something behind a mummified hand on a plinth.

The bookshelf swung inward, revealing a secret staircase leading below the house. Morcant disappeared down it.

Whatever lay down those steps, he wanted it kept safe. It was the most logical place to keep anything secret or dangerous, like the spell making him immortal. Or the grimoire.

Ambrose’s temptation to follow was tempered by the very real danger of getting caught or trapped down there. It would be better to investigate only if they needed to, and only when Morcant wasn’t present.

Just as he met Emery’s eye and gave a quiet shake of his head, Morcant reappeared. He’d donned a traveling cloak for the rain. Turning his back to them, he touched that spot on the shelf behind the mummified hand, and the bookcase slid shut once more.

Then he turned and walked toward them.

Emery started to take several steps back, and Ambrose put his arm around his back to stop him from colliding with a side table.

They held their breath as Morcant swept past them, coming close enough that the hem of his cloak brushed past their shins.

He took his keys from a hook by the door and left, locking it behind him.

In the ensuing silence, Emery let out his breath and cast Ambrose another questioning look.

Morcant’s lair was theirs to explore. For how long, they didn’t know, but it was the best opportunity they could hope for.

Ambrose nodded.

They crept to the shelf. It took some cautious pawing before they found the hidden switch on the back. The shelf slid aside. Wooden steps descended steeply into darkness, with only a faint glow of green witch light at the bottom to guide them.

Before they lost their nerve, they followed it down.