Roan glances between the two. “Your brother?”
“My half brother by my mother, Daphne Maurier. He was taken from us by his father when he was a small child—stolen. Taken far away so we could not find him. I will admit that it took some dark Conjuring to locate him. I regret nothing, for I found him.”
Rapley shakes his head, but says nothing.
Cage nods once. “It is true. You are he.”
“Impossible,” Rapley scoffs. “I have no brother.”
“How do you know?” Emma snaps. “Were you not brought to this mountain as a small child by Dr. Maudley?”
“I was… I was taken from a good place,” Rapley says, glancing at Roan. “I was delivered here when I was a boy of eight, but not by Maudley. I only met Maudley three years ago. I know nothing of my mother,” Rapley adds, turning back to Cage. “The place I was taken from was not a place with a mother and a brother.”
“Then you were stowed away somewhere else, first. My father searched London high and low for you in the name of our mother.”
“I know nothing of that.”
“She was a beautiful, kind woman. She fell in love too quickly, and was tempted away by another. She died when you were young. Out of guilt, I think.”
“Are you saying I am a bastard son of the woman who is your mother?”
Cage looks grim. “Yes.”
Rapley rubs at his mouth. “Who is my father, then?”
“You know who he is,” Cage says. “You know.”
“No, I don’t,” Rapley snaps. “Speak plain if you wish to speak at all!”
“Fostos! Fostos is your father, brother. He tempted my mother and you came of the union. And by his foul Conjuring, by the laying out of those bedeviled symbols, you were conceived in the foulest, darkest manner—and so you are Unclosed. Cursed.” Cage pauses. “Do you know what you are, brother?”
Rapley’s voice is barely audible. “Yes.”
“How are the Unclosed made?” Roan asks, leaning forward. A horrible pulsing runs through her body. She does not want to hear this… yet she must.
“I don’t know precisely,” Cage says, hesitating. “Only that… Fostos uses the forbidden tongue and his own seed to do it.”
“His own seed…” She swallows, a sick feeling rising within her.
Cage looks at her pointedly. “Yes.”
She gets to her feet. “No.”
“Yes,” Emma says, leaning forward. “It is so for Seamus and myself as well.”
Rapley stares at her. “It cannot be…”
“Half siblings,” Cage confirms. “All.”
Roan closes her eyes, and the world turns more than dark. Every hope she has newly acquired: shattered. All the color, gone.
“To what end?” Rapley says. “For a mere experiment?”
“The Crucisvigil believe that Fostos breeds the Unclosed as a means to extract human souls. To barter them to the Devil for more time on his contract.”
“Or to bargain to get his own soul back,” Emma adds, helpfully.
Had not Roan’s own father… the man who pretended to be her father… said as much? But… why? Why raise a child that was cursed and not his own? Had her father been there during the cursed coupling between her mother and Fostos?
Cage nods. “The Unclosed are linked to whatever comes after this life. They must have access to knowledge Fostos wants. Or their souls must be easily obtained, through that doorway.” He pauses. “We do not know the mechanics of it all. For that, we need Fostos himself, and I doubt he would offer up his secrets.”
There is a long silence.
“But there is worse,” Cage adds softly. “For you, Roan.”
She almost does not need to hear it.
His words seem to bend and warp, to fade and boom so that they are not a steady stream, as words tend to be, but trickles and tickles, music and discord, and they come to her in a sort of cavern, void of meaning. She has to piece them together before she can understand.
…wondered why you…
special
…a darkness
more than Unclosed…
Satani
Devil
Lucifer
You are more than cursed
Potential for good, but…
born of evil
Lucifer
in
the
body
of
man
inside Fostos
dark ritual
daughter.
All his words boom and bind together until she can hear nothing but noise.
The air rushes out of her lungs and everything shrinks, until at last, only the meaningful words remain.
Daughter
of
evil.
Daughter
of
Satan.
I am the daughter of Lucifer.
She longs, more than anything, to return to her room and write her father a letter, and beg him to contradict Cage. But all his warnings, his strange looks… it all made sense.
And she thought he had never loved her, but maybe… maybe he had, despite knowing. And that was why he had armed her with exactly what she needed to defeat this evil. To defeat Fostos.
“Kill me,” she says suddenly, the fog in her brain sweeping away like the mists after a storm, because it is too much. Being this… thing that she is. She is defiled, she is cursed, she is unnatural.
She is dangerous.
Cage’s lips part. “What?”
She turns her eyes on him. “I cannot live knowing this,” she says urgently. “Kill me. It’s what you wanted. Do it! Do it, now.”
Rapley takes her hands roughly in his own. “I won’t allow it! We don’t know anything for sure. We don’t know whether this is true or—or just another trick.”
Roan shakes her head. “I know it’s true. I feel it. It explains… everything.” She turns her eyes on Cage once more, pleading. “Since I arrived here, I have seen him. I have seen the likeness of a ram out on the mountain. I have heard the hoofbeats of an animal. Horse, mule, ram… Nothing lives out there except… Him. My… my father. The Devil.” She swallows heavily. “I hear him,” she whispers. “In my mind sometimes. Tempting me to do great and terrible things…”
Cage shakes his head. “You may be born of evil, but you were born of a woman too. Woman, beloved of God. You have a choice. You can choose to fight the darkness within.”
“What could you know of it?” Roan snaps. “Your father is a mortal man, not Fostos. Not the Great Deceiver. You don’t know what it is to be Unclosed!”
“I do. Though I was not born from this Conjuring of Fostos, am not of his terrible seed… my father, Damon, was.” He glances at Rapley. “I am your brother. And I am your nephew. And all this pain, this unnatural evil, this terrible contamination of natural law… it is all due to one man. Fostos.” Cage looks at Roan. “He must be stopped. Fight your darkness, and I shall fight mine.”
Emma leans forward on her elbows. “We all must fight the darkness. And if we stay together, work together, then we can—” Her voice breaks, and she swallows. “We can find Seamus.”
Roan wipes her mouth, then nods. “We will find Seamus, and Dr. Maudley too,” she says, voice hardening like steel. “For I wish to know his part in this too, and why he brought us here. They’ll be wherever Fostos is. Get Andrew, he can help us search. And we will destroy Fostos.”
Emma’s face falls.
“What? What is it?”
“Andrew… he… he was taken. Shortly after you left. He’s missing too.”
Roan fills them all in on what they found in the catacombs, and as she expected, they are as horrified as she had been to learn of the peepholes.
“He’s been watchin’,” Emma says. “All along.”
Roan nods. “The Blue Room was the worst.”
“I undressed in there!” Emma cries, cheeks flushing.
Much to Roan’s and Rapley’s surprise, Cage takes Emma
’s hand and gives it a squeeze. Her cheeks flush even deeper, and Roan raises her brows. It seems that she and Rapley have not been the only ones to find love in the darkness.
Her stomach turns when she thinks of it.
They are half siblings… for the Devil had been in the body of Fostos at her conception… did that not make it so?
Such evil. Such cruelty.
And yet she loves him more than ever.
Wrong. Cruel, and wrong…
They have not touched since they learned the truth, but it cannot undo what has already been done. They can barely look at each other. Yet… Roan feels herself stirring for him, even now.
Cage, meanwhile, teaches them all what he knows of the Conjures themselves, and of their perilous gifts.
“The Crucisvigil have been documenting the Conjures. Ever since Fostos began… breeding.”
Jenny has not said much since they arrived, but she watches them with wide eyes in her pale face. This, Roan knows, is the thing she feared most. Who knows what she is thinking or feeling.
And though Emma has grown stronger with the knowledge of what they face, and a grim determination has hardened her eyes, Jenny has fallen apart.
“This one,” Cage says, pointing to a symbol that Roan knows, “depicts Soother.”
“The Unclosed with the Soother gift can calm, heal, and manipulate. Those drawn to the Soother Conjure get what they want without stirring even a ripple of suspicion. They can pull thoughts from minds, money from hands, and memories from children and leave their victims soothed as babes. They can make someone forget a hate, or remember one that had never been there.
“This one depicts Sighter. The Sighter can see what others cannot. The departed. Spirits, energies, demonic elements.”
“That’s me,” Rapley says simply. “Sighter. But there is more. A kind of shield. A way to keep darkness away. To keep the ghosts from… hurting.”
Roan frowns. “They… try to hurt you?”
His lips thin. It is enough of an answer.
“This one,” Cage says, pointing to another symbol, “depicts Breaker. The darkest of the Conjures.”
Roan knows the symbol well. It had been cut into the cellar walls by the man she had thought was her father, and she also saw it in the West Wing when she had gone searching for Maudley. It was inked into the skin below her hairline, at the base of her skull, done painfully with needles and ink by that same man when she was a mere seven years old. “If we want to stand a chance,” Roan says abruptly, “we need to learn to use our Conjures. Properly.”
Emma squares her shoulders and looks at Roan. “Teach me.”
She is the only one to notice. The rest sleep on.
A small, slate-gray snake slinking over the floor. It is tiny. No longer than the length of her hand, and no thicker than her smallest finger. She watches it absentmindedly, the sadness inside so strong that it pulls down the edges of her mouth as though they were attached directly to the weight in her heart by invisible string.
She is thinking about Rapley.
She is thinking about good.
And evil.
About right.
And wrong.
Another snake, a darker gray, slithers past the Red Room door.
No other room seemed fitting to sleep in. They searched the entire house. Again. They even broke into the West Wing—nothing. Nothing but a deep surety that Roan has, in fact, been brought to this house before, as a little girl, by her father. The man she had thought was her father. The man who had lied to her. But no sign of Seamus, nor of Maudley, nor of Andrew.
She closes her eyes. “Rapley…” His name is a whisper. A prayer. A plea.
She opens her eyes, and a third snake slides over the floor. A balmy green.
She blinks and sits up straighter, then pushes herself from the chair. It rocks behind her, rapping the wall.
Tap, tap, tap.
She follows the green snake in the wake of the two grays, and sees now that there are more—dozens of them—slinking over the floor toward the kitchen. She dares not breathe.
Seamus…
They slither through the kitchen and down the stairs to the cellar door. She grabs a lit candle from the wall sconce and follows them down, careful not to tread on them.
They are congregated against a back wall of the cellar, which has been painted in a complex Romanesque fresco. She walks over and places her hand against the stone—and freezes.
She runs.
Back up the short staircase out of the cellar, through the kitchen, and to the entrance hall.
“Rapley!” she yells. “Emma, Cage! Come quickly!”
When they are gathered before the painting, standing amongst churning snakes, Roan points.
“It’s a trompe l’oeil. An illusion.” When they all look confused, she adds, “A false wall.”
She knocks on the wall, and a hollow echo replies. “Wood,” Rapley murmurs.
Roan nods. “It’s been painted to look like artwork on a stone wall.”
Cage smiles slowly. “Let’s break it down, shall we?”
It is flimsy wood, and a few good kicks drive a hole in it deep enough to climb through. The men go first, and Roan and Emma pass through flaming torches and candlesticks in firm holders and then climb through as well.
A small corridor leads to a short flight of stairs going down, and then opens up into a grand room. They all raise their lights high, and no one says a thing.
The room in which they stand is a replica of the entrance hall. The tapestries, the grand staircase, the floor and the chandelier—all of it, identical.
Except inverted.
Every detail replicated…
Upside down.
Chapter 38
AN ITCH
“My God,” Cage whispers, crossing himself. “What is this place?”
“The unclean one is upside down of God,” Rapley murmurs. “So I have a pretty good idea.”
They are a silent company as they walk on what feels like the ceiling of the entrance hall, except for the brief moment when Emma touches the chandelier beside her, hanging upward, and it tinkles softly.
She looks at Roan. “But how?”
Roan has no answer, but she squares her shoulders and walks on, past the inverted paintings and crosses, past the strangely burning wall sconces and over to the stairs.
“We have to go up—I mean, down. Look at the snakes.”
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Cage mutters, looking back.
“Leave, if you want,” Roan tells him, “but I am going on. Seamus needs us.”
“You can’t really believe he’s still alive after all this time?”
“I do. I believe it and I will prove it. Go back, if you must, coward.”
Cage sneers and grabs her arm, his face close to her own. Rapley steps nearer, fists clenched.
“Speak not, little witch, for I have seen more than you can imagine. You think you know the dangers we may encounter, but you are a child in the face of such horrors.”
Roan pulls her arm free. “Why do men think they may grab at a woman when they choose? Is my body yours to command? No. So molest me not!” And she spits at his feet before venturing forward alone.
Rapley cannot hide his smile when he turns to follow her. Emma, for her part, pauses beside Cage and looks after her friends.
“She is correct,” Emma says mildly, “in that regard.” Then she looks up at Cage and smiles, patting his arm. “You are too forceful, and so come off as a little ridiculous. Can you not stay calm and not behave as a—what did you call it? ‘Hysterical female’?”
She departs with her own grin, leaving the giant man looking for all the world like a sulking pup. At last, he too follows on.
A shudder runs down Roan’s spine, and she hates that it is not all revulsion. Some small part is… delight. How inventive. How crafty. How peculiar.
The room they now stand in would have been the upside-down attic, had the pattern of the
last two floors continued. But it didn’t. No, this room is something else entirely. Part workroom, part surgeon’s house, and part dungeon. None of them speak—can speak—for the stench rises like a noxious acid and they gag where they stand.
Every inch of the crude stone walls is covered. Scripts, diagrams, pages torn from books—mostly, it seems, medical—and… flesh. Roan approaches one of the macabre models, only to discover that it is a human heart, cut open and spread wide, then nailed into the stone as if for admiration or study. She has never seen a human heart outside a book before, and wonders that such a gruesome aspect should contain all human emotion.
More parts. Lungs, intestines, what appears to be a spinal column and a rib cage. More diagrams. Some blood.
Rapley is inspecting the jars, his lips curled. Most contain liquids he would not dare guess at. But others… others contain brains of various sizes. He wants to believe they are goat, sheep, or pig brains, but senses deep within that he is looking at men, women, and children. He lifts one of the bottles. An eyeball rolls to peer at him and he scrambles back, placing the thing quickly down.
How old they are, he can only guess at.
“We must leave,” Emma breathes. She flaps her hands and shakes her head, her voice rising to an almost-shriek. “We must leave!”
Roan hurries over. “Emma, what is it? What’s wrong?”
“We have to leave. Now.”
“But we haven’t found Seamus yet—”
“The snakes have vanished,” Rapley says, looking around. “Do you see them?”
“Please,” Emma whispers, grabbing Roan’s hand. Her grip is crushing. “We must go. Now!”
“Tell us why!”
“The rips… the tears… they are everywhere. We must not touch them!” And she jerks to the left with a shriek as though burned and rushes from the room without them.
“Curses,” Roan says, wiping her mouth. “What now? Do we continue on?”
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