Page 28

Thomas came to slowly at first, his thoughts groggy and disjointed. And then, with a horrible pop of awareness, he sat upright. His head punished him for it immediately, pain jackhammering through the back of his skull. He took silent stock of his surroundings. The room he was in was as formal as it was dusty, the estate-green walls mildewing in wide black blooms.

The ceiling was coffered wood, rotted clean through in places. To his left, a vast bookshelf spanned an entire length of wall, waterlogged tomes tumbling from shelves gone bowed. To his right was a window, boarded over, its velvet drapery hanging partway off the rod. Directly in front of him sat an asymmetrical chaise, the upholstery faded to a moldering yellow. In the chaise sat Philip Farrow, wrists and ankles bound and sweating profusely.

“Good God,” he snapped, impatient. “It’s about time you came to.”

Thomas tried to poke at his scalp and found himself similarly bound, his wrists strapped to a spindled armchair, his ankles bound to a set of rotting claw feet. He craned his neck around and tried to find an exit. A door sat just over his shoulder, yawning like a mouth into a wide, water-damaged hall. There was no one out there. The house was swallowed up in a terrible silence.

“Where’s Vivienne?” he demanded.

“Elsewhere,” came Philip’s terse reply. “Get us out of here, Walsh.”

Thomas peered down at his wrists. “I’m not sure what it is you expect me to do.”

Philip swore. “Do you have any idea—any at all—what’s going on here?”

“I have some,” Thomas admitted. “I know you’ve been forcing Vivienne to take out your competition. I know Isaac Shaw is a living witness, and that as soon as he recovers, you’re done for.”

“I’m done already,” blustered Philip. “Do you think either of us are making it out of here alive?”

Silence rose up between them, cold and resolute.

“Have you ever seen fishermen chum the water for sharks?” Philip asked. “They take a bucket of slick and dump it into the sea. Wait for the sharks to sniff it out.”

Thomas said nothing.

“That’s us,” Philip said. “That’s why we’re here. He’s got something in that basement—Christian does—and you and I are what’s going to draw it out. Mark my words, Walsh—I’ve watched that man in a courtroom for years. I know when there’s about to be blood in the water.”

Out in the hallway, a door cracked open. There was a shout—the sound of running footsteps. A figure stumbled into the parlor, clutching at the door frame. Thomas recognized the wide, wild eyes of Adrian Faber immediately. The last time Thomas had seen him, he’d been barricading them in the church. The boy stared up at him from beneath a wild flop of hair, gesturing to his throat. Sinking to his knees, he fell to retching violently.

“Oh, for the love of God,” spat out Philip. “Get up .”

“There’s spiders,” Adrian croaked. “Spiders in my throat. In my—my lungs. I can’t—I can’t breathe.”

An unseen door slammed shut. There came the kicking, scrabbling sound of someone being dragged. Another door squealed open on rusted hinges and then fell closed. Thomas was certain—as certain as he’d ever been of anything—that he’d just heard Vivienne. He didn’t bother calling after her. Instead, he began to struggle in earnest against his bindings.

Philip watched Adrian claw at his throat. “She couldn’t have said more than one word to you,” he bit out irritably. “Get up. Up. Untie us.”

Adrian rolled flat onto his back, eyes shut, scratching at his skin. Thomas skewed a sideways glance at him as he breathed in several garbled breaths. Finally, his arms fell slack. He opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling.

“Hey,” called Thomas. Adrian’s eyes rolled slowly toward where Thomas sat bound in his chair. “You good?”

Adrian gave an unconvincing nod.

“Listen closely,” Thomas said, “because I’m only going to say this once. With or without your help, I’m going to get out of this chair. And then I’m going to tear this place to the fucking studs. You can either be left behind, or you can help me out.”

Adrian sat up straighter, still breathing hard. He seemed to be seriously considering Thomas’s offer when his body was racked with a series of bone-rattling coughs. He doubled over, heaving violently into his hands. When he finally sat back, something black and decidedly eight-legged writhed in his palm. He yelped, flinging it, and scrabbled backward. The eight-legged thing scuttled darkly away, moving under the bookcase.

“What the hell was that?” asked Thomas.

“I don’t know,” Philip said. “Her abilities have never manifested into something tangible. It’s always been hallucinatory.”

Not in the church , Thomas thought, but didn’t say. He thought of looking down into the box and seeing his own eyes staring back up at him.

“The House was built on a supernatural locus,” Adrian gasped out, dragging himself bodily toward the chair. “It’s like catching sunlight in a magnifying glass. Everything is … concentrated.” He gagged once, violently. “I’ll untie you. But you have to swear you’ll get me out of here alive.”

“If I make it, you make it,” Thomas promised.

With one last hiccup, Adrian set to loosening the knot on Thomas’s wrist. On the chaise, Philip beamed at Thomas.

“I knew you’d come through,” he said. “I never doubted. I’ve always known a good investment when I see one.”

Thomas ignored him. His focus was on Adrian. “Tell me what’s going on here.”

“The chairman wants to ascend,” said Adrian. “He thinks feeding Vivienne to the House will help him do it.”

“Elaborate.” Thomas scowled, wishing he’d go faster. “And hurry up.”

“It’s infinite knowledge,” said Adrian. “The ultimate power. And ultimate power requires the ultimate sacrifice. The chairman promised his firstborn son, and when he tried to go back on that promise, the House demanded his entire line.”

“But Vivienne’s still here,” said Thomas.

“Something interfered in her death.” Adrian coughed again, smearing the back of his hand against his mouth. Casting a wary glance down at his knuckles, he added, “Every time he tried to ascend, he was told the House still needed more from him. He didn’t know what it was. He founded the House of Hades to buy himself time. He told us if we tithed for long enough, we’d ascend.”

“What happens when someone ascends?” asked Thomas.

“I don’t know,” Adrian admitted. He’d gotten the first wrist free. He moved to Thomas’s ankle as Thomas set to work on the other. “All I know is that they go down in the basement. They don’t come out.”

“Those fools aren’t ascending,” said Philip. “They’re sacrifices.”

An ugly understanding burrowed into Thomas. “He’s feeding them to the House.”

There came the sudden sound of a door cracking open, its handle splitting rotten drywall. Sunlight veered sideways across the outer hall and then snapped back into darkness. Reed Connolly appeared, scowling down at them from beneath the lintel. He took a long, slow look around the parlor, his hands stuffed inside the pockets of his leather vest.

As though he’d run into Thomas outside a 7-Eleven, he asked, “What’s up, Walsh?”

“Not too much,” said Thomas mildly, still wrestling with the knot at his wrist.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“It looks like you’re sitting on your ass,” clipped Reed. “Where the hell is Vivienne?”

“Basement,” said Adrian, who’d spit out another spider.

Reed went deathly pale. “Shit.”

The last of the knot fell away. Blood rushed into the tips of Thomas’s fingers as he launched to his feet, rubbing feeling back into his wrists.

“Nicely done, Walsh,” said Philip. “Now hurry and untie me.”

Thomas ignored him. “I’m going down there,” he told Reed.

“That’s a real bad idea,” said Reed dryly. “I’ll come with you.”

They left Adrian in the parlor to watch over Philip, the latter bellowing Thomas’s name as he raced out the door and toward the cellar.

···

For a house as resplendent as this one must have once been, the basement was small and cramped. They emerged, first, into an old wine cellar—packed with redbrick and fractured mortar, the old wooden larder still stuffed with bottles gone opaque beneath decades of dust. The ceiling was bowed, and Thomas was forced to duck as they made their way deeper.

“Why are you here?” he asked Reed as they veered out of the stony embankment and onto packed dirt, where old wire fixtures ran overhead in knotted bundles. A thick, wet sock smell permeated the air. “You could have stayed in Connecticut. No one would have blamed you.”

“She’s my friend,” said Reed simply, and then flashed Thomas a cynical smile. “For all of her faults.”

An unassuming door—white as bone and rotted nearly all the way through—led to a cobwebbed sublevel. This deep down, the air was cold and wet. It tasted like a grave. Ducking low, they emerged into a wide, dark space. Thomas staggered to a stop, his vision graying slightly at the corners as he struggled to regulate his breathing.

It took him a few blinks to understand what he was looking at. They’d entered into a charnel house. The wall was stacked with sagging shelves of bleached white skulls. Human skulls, with hollow eyes and wide, toothy grins. None of them looked very old. Thomas wondered if they belonged to the failed ascensions, picked clean and placed onto the cellar’s earthen sepulchre like a trophy.

A few feet away, in the room’s shadowed crux, stood Vivienne. The shallow sublevel appeared to be flooded. A puddle of standing water stretched out in front of her in a flat, oily disk. From his vantage point by the door, it looked like she stood on the shores of hell itself, waiting for a boat. As though the dark went on forever without end, well beyond the mortal reaches of the human eye.

There was no natural light this far underground, and yet the surface seemed to catch it, anyway. The black water was cut with pale silver fractals that shimmered urgently, as though someone had stuffed the little pool full of fish. It was difficult to tell if the water was inches deep, or miles. Logic told him which was likely. Experience told him otherwise.

Christian Price stood a half step behind Vivienne, one hand on her shoulder.

“Think of it as a baptism,” Thomas heard him say, and his voice rang out as though they were standing in a cavernous space, and not a dripping root cellar. “The water will cleanse away that which plagues you. It’ll be just like being born anew.”

“So what’s the plan,” whispered Reed. He’d lifted a skull from the shallow charnel and was now poking a ringed finger in its orbital socket. “You do have a plan, right?”

“Sure.” Thomas stuffed his fingers in his mouth and let out a sharp whistle. “Hey!”

“I don’t know what I expected,” muttered Reed as Christian Price turned toward them. For a heartbeat, surprise played across his face. He quickly schooled his expression into that same formidable patience Thomas had encountered outside his house.

“I was just about to come and fetch you,” he said, smiling. “You’ve saved me a trip.”