The House Saphir by Marissa Meyer - 43

Mallory screamed as she fell.

But it was barely a blink, not even enough time to know what was happening, before fabric wrapped around her wrist and yanked her to a stop with such force she thought her shoulder might have dislocated.

She, Fitcher, and Constantino had fallen straight through the floor of Armand’s bedroom suite, and then through the floor of the game room directly beneath it, and now they were dangling like fish on a line over the kitchen on the ground floor.

The curtains of Armand’s four-poster bed had stopped their fall, whipping out faster than the tentacles of the lou carcolh to grab each of them in midair.

Mallory’s thoughts were still spinning when the fabric released them and they crashed to the stone below. Pain reverberated up Mallory’s leg and she dropped to one knee. Every bone felt like it had been pounded on with a hammer.

A cacophony of groans and snapping wood roared through the walls as the curtains snaked back up to the bedroom and the floorboards over their heads pieced themselves back together, though wood remained splintered and iron nails jutted through the beams.

It felt as though the house was about to collapse on top of them.

“Everyone all right?” asked Fitcher, voice strained as he checked himself for injuries.

“No!” Constantino bellowed. “I most certainly am not.” He rolled off the table he’d landed on with a grunt. His whole body was trembling. “What in the name of Velos just happened?” He spun on Mallory. “You could have told us that he can control the house .”

“I did!” she shouted. But then hesitated. “Didn’t I? Look—I didn’t know he could do that. ”

The bolts holding a hanging rack of copper pots to the ceiling gave way, sending lids and pans crashing to the floor. More blue fire erupted from the bread oven, spewing out of its cavernous mouth.

She kicked at the door that led to the servants’ halls, surprised when it swung easily open, crashing into the wall. “Come on!”

They rushed past the coal store and the scullery, the butler’s pantry, the larder, the cupbearer’s room, while the walls shook and sconces flickered with that same eerie blue flame. It felt like the walls themselves were being torn apart, stone by stone.

As they passed the stairs that led down to the cellar a new sound breached the noise.

Screams.

Mallory froze. She whipped around, staring into the black depths of the stairwell.

A trap. It had to be a trap.

Or … the wives.

Where the ring goes, the spirit goes.

Fitcher shouted her name, gripping her arm. “How do we get out of here?”

She shook herself free. “The rings. I think they’re down there.”

“Not an option,” said Constantino. “I’ve been in my fair share of wine cellars, and they are almost always a dead end. If we go down there, there’ll be no way back out.”

The screams grew louder. Pleading. Panicked. Tortured.

At the far end of the hall, an earsplitting crack. A thunderous roar. A wall imploded—plaster and mortar and limestone blocks caving inward. The devastation rolled toward them, the wall collapsing in massive chunks, a wave of destruction. Dust clogged the air.

They twisted around in time to see the kitchen door slam shut—and catch fire. The wood flared greenish blue. A surge of heat filled the corridor.

“On second thought,” said Constantino, “I never turn down a chance to see a good wine cellar.”

They rushed down the steps, descending into the deepest part of the house. The glow emanating from above cast the oak door in shades of blue and silver.

Mallory’s lungs felt crushed in a vise as she reached the bottom step and placed her hand to the solid wood. The door pulsed like a living thing, steady and warm. A beating heart. As if it were happy that she had come back. No, not happy. Eager.

She licked her lips. Tasted the briny, metallic stench of blood on the air.

The door was locked. The air sizzled like the inside of an oven, and Mallory fumbled for the ring of keys, trying to separate the one with the ornate bow molded into heavy brass. It slipped into the lock. The mechanism inside took hold.

The screams beyond the door grew louder, but above the shouts—the telltale click.

She yanked the key from the lock and pushed the cellar door open. They crowded into the blackness beyond. Fitcher slammed the door shut in their wake, so loud it startled Mallory into dropping the key. They were suddenly blocked off from the heat of the flames, and Mallory distantly wondered if they’d just entered their own grave.

But the air in the cellar was blissfully cool and strangely quiet. Here there were no collapsing walls. No crumbling stones. No flames. Even the screams had stopped.

Instead of noise, this room was filled with a stench that invaded Mallory’s nose and caught in her throat. Thick and cloying and metallic.

Mallory dropped to her hands and knees to search for the key. The floor was wet. She gasped and sat back on her heels, feeling her skirts. There must be a leak in one of the wine barrels.

Lights flickered on overhead. Two burning oil lamps hung in the center of the room, illuminating teetering racks of oak barrels, their edges stained red.

Not with wine.

There was blood everywhere. Oozing from the corked holes, splattered across the stone floor.

Mallory snatched up the key. The metal was sticky with blood, and she tried to rub it off on her skirt, but no matter how she scrubbed, it did not come clean.

Constantino placed a hand on her shoulder. “Bellissima,” he whispered, “look.”

She hobbled to her feet, her breaths coming in desperate spasms.

The cellar door itself was bleeding. Thick crimson drops cascaded through the crack around the doorjamb, coating the wood, spreading a sticky puddle across the floor, mingling with the splatters in the room.

Words began to appear in the blood, as if written by an invisible finger, their letters sharp and distinct.

B E B OL D

B E B O L D

B UT N O T T O O BOL D

Even as the words were scrawled, the blood continued to fall, slowly devouring the message to make space for more writing to appear.

LEST Y O U R B L O OD

SHA L L R U N CO L D

No sooner had they been completed than the words were swallowed by the cascading blood.

“I think the mean ghost is threatening us,” Constantino whispered.

Fitcher dragged a finger through the blood on the door. “It is only a powerful illusion,” he said, holding up his finger to smell it. The face he made suggested to Mallory that he wasn’t convinced by his own theory.

She peered down the towering rows of barrels, where the cellar disappeared into shadows. This cellar was a cave, but sometimes caves led to other caves. Sometimes there was light at the far end of a tunnel. Maybe they were not trapped.

Tucking away the bloody key, she took the knife from her boot and cut away a strip of fabric from the hem of her ruined skirt. She grabbed a bottle from a nearby case, yanked out the cork, and dumped out half the wine onto the blood-slicked floor, ignoring Constantino’s whine of dismay. She tucked the strip of cloth into the bottle, letting the top hang out like a wick.

Once the wine in the bottle had climbed up to the top of the fabric, Mallory prayed to whichever god had dominion over fire and held the bottle up to the crackling blue flame from one of the lamps. The fabric caught—burning as pale as moonlight.

Fitcher raised an eyebrow. “I would not have thought wine would contain enough alcohol for a makeshift lantern.”

“Fortified wine,” Mallory explained. “Ruby Comorre is wine mixed with brandy.”

“A beverage after my own heart,” said Constantino. He went to grab a second, unopened bottle, but hesitated at Fitcher’s stern expression.

They started through the cellar. The blood seemed to be a living thing, following in their footsteps. Occasionally a cork would loosen on one of the barrels and more blood would gush forth.

The cave had a gentle downward slope, and Mallory sensed that they were burrowing ever deeper into the earth beneath the estate. Farther away from fresh air and the outside world. Farther away from Armand. Farther away from Anaïs.

Her heart clenched. What if all this was a distraction—a way for Le Bleu to drag Mallory away from her sister? What if Anaïs was his target now? Her blood would do just as well to fulfill the required sacrifice …

Mallory had to get out of here.

Ahead, the light caught on a wall, and Mallory worried they’d reached a dead end until she saw it was a doorway. A gate of heavy wrought iron stood open, framed by two brass sconces, each one shaped like the skeletal bones of a hand holding a lantern aloft.

Mallory lit the sconces. The light, though dim, revealed a room smaller than the inside of the stagecoach. Rough walls hewn from stone. A solid iron door opposite to her, crossed with studded iron bands.

A body dangled in each of the room’s four corners. Triphine, Lucienne, Béatrice, and Julie—the holes in their chests gaping open, heads lolled forward. Their arms were raised overhead, their wrists tied with rope and secured to metal hooks that hung from the ceiling. The words carved into their skin glistened red. Echtraus and greischt.

Trust and betrayal .

Mallory told herself it wasn’t really them. These forms were solid—not the wispy, barely corporeal figures of spirits. And while their bodies may have been preserved by magic, she knew they were also buried in the cemetery. She’d seen Julie laid to rest that very morning.

Fitcher was right. This was an illusion, intended to terrify them out of their senses.

Well, applause to Bastien, because it was working.

A series of footprints made crisscrossing tracks back and forth around a pentagon-shaped table in the center of the room, its top inlaid with a woven pattern of ebony and pearl. A scabbard lay across it, holding a familiar slim-bladed sword.

At four of the table’s five points, a wedding ring had been placed in a small porcelain dish.

Mallory had nearly forgotten their entire mission, their purpose for coming back into this house in the first place. They needed the rings to complete the ritual, to end the spell and return Bastien back into the arms of death.

She knew it could be a trap. She knew it could be an illusion.

But she set down her makeshift lantern and drove forward anyway. As her fingers seized the first ring, the scream of grating iron echoed through the chamber, so shrill that Mallory ducked, pressing her hands to her ears.

Fitcher and Constantino cried out. The gate had come alive and bent around them, trapping them against the stone walls. Mallory threw herself at the bars, yanking and pulling. She had visions of the gate squeezing her companions, crushing their bones, bars cutting into flesh—but the gate had solidified once more.

“It’s all right,” said Fitcher. “He needs to kill you, not us.”

“That isn’t a comfort.”

“Mal … lory…”

Mallory spun around, heart in her throat.

Julie’s eyes were open. Her skin was ashen. A drop of blood clung to one side of her mouth.

“Help…”

“Great gods,” Mallory whispered, horrified at the pain etched onto the girl’s features. Gripping her knife, she made quick work of cutting the ropes that bound Julie’s wrists to the hook, ready to catch her body when she collapsed.

But when Julie fell—her body slipped right through Mallory, landing on the stone floor. Her form no longer that of a living person, but once again with the vague haziness of a ghost.

The other wives remained motionless, suspended in time.

The shadows at the edges of the room began to shift, drawing inward. Mallory knelt beside Julie, who was crooning in pain, wishing she could do something to comfort the girl, but she couldn’t even lay a hand upon her shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, overcome with sudden, maddening guilt. This was her fault. “I’m so sorry.”

The shadows converged into an inky figure that rose into a slender column, slowly taking form. Mallory was not surprised when Monsieur Le Bleu stood before her again, though she noted that he was more unkempt than before. His blue-tinted beard had grown wiry and long, his hair unruly, deep wrinkles carving themselves into the planes of his once-handsome face.

Mallory stood to face him.

“Oh, fabulous,” Constantino muttered. “He’s back again, isn’t he?”

“Do you still think to plot against me?” Bastien said. “Or have you begun to realize how futile that would be?”

Mallory drew on every ounce of courage as she faced him. “What are you going to do?” She scoffed. “You might be able to crush me under rubble or incinerate me with your creepy sorcerer fire, but if you want a proper sacrifice, you need to drive that sword through my heart. And you can’t do that. Not without Armand.”

“Oh, I don’t have to kill you, Mallory Fontaine.” His grin widened. “You are going to do that for me.”