“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 itlooklike 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. “Youdohave a plan, right?”
“Sure.” Thomas stuffed his fingers in his mouth and let out a sharp whistle. “Hey!”
