by Kat Ellis
“It’s what Dad said, right before he died,” I mutter, feeling like I’m in a chokehold.
“Funny that, isn’t it?” She grins.
“Carolyn, that’s enough,” Uncle Ty warns. He’s moved to stand next to her, and she shoots him a look I’ve never seen before—one that’s pure resentment. Uncle Ty seems not to notice.
I stare at them. Uncle Ty and Carolyn. My guardians. The two people who I thought were my last family in the world—they’re monsters.
Carolyn pouts. “But I gave her a much higher dose tonight. I want to see if it’s working. Who knows? Maybe we can even get her to jump off the bridge herself.”
What. The. Fuck. “A higher dose . . . ?”
But then I remember what Carla said on my birthday—the reasons someone sane might hallucinate.
“You’ve been poisoning me?”
Carolyn laughs, sounding delighted. “Well, drugging you, technically. Little teensy microdoses of PCP—until now. Tell me, how does it feel? Like you need to peel off your own skin?”
“Come on, Carolyn . . .” Uncle Ty says. He almost sounds embarrassed.
Guilty?
“Uncle Ty, you aren’t really gonna let her hurt me, are you?” I try, an invisible hand squeezing my heart. I never, ever imagined saying anything like this to him. Or to Carolyn.
But he doesn’t do anything. Doesn’t stop her moving closer to me. Just lowers his gaze so it doesn’t meet mine.
“I wonder if the PCP was what made your dad claw out his own eyes?” Carolyn muses, as if I haven’t spoken.
I feel like I’ve just been sucker-punched. “You drugged them too? Mom and Dad?”
“Only your dad, actually. He was supposed to be driving. So the crash really was just a happy accident in the end.”
I slap her. My hand connects so hard, it feels like my scars are tearing.
“You little—” Carolyn screams, and for a moment I have no clue what’s going on. Then I hear the growling.
Pilot launches himself at Carolyn, his powerful jaws clamping around her calf. I take out the pepper spray from my coat pocket and blast Uncle Ty with it. He curses.
I don’t wait to see what happens. I run back in the house, slamming the French doors behind me and locking them.
Call the cops.
My phone is on the desk in Lucille’s study.
I hurry back through the kitchen, stubbing my toe on the corner of the counter in the dark. But my eyes are adjusting, and I can see well enough by the time I’m in the hallway to move quickly now.
Then I stop at the sound of glass smashing. I plaster my back to the wall and try to peer around the dark silhouette of the gallery staircase. The frosted window next to the front door is gone, and there’s an arm reaching through, opening the front-door locks.
“Hurry up, Ty. She probably has her phone in there.”
“My goddamn face is on fire!” he snaps.
I shrink back under the curved staircase. If they come in and turn on the lights, they’ll see me right away. I need to get out of here. Back out through the kitchen?
Before I can move, the front door opens.
“I’ll start setting up down here. You go find her, then we can finish this,” Carolyn hisses. Uncle Ty doesn’t even argue, just heads straight for the staircase I’m hiding under.
But he doesn’t turn on the lights. And then I realize why the camera feed glitched earlier—they’ve tampered with the power somehow, maybe flipped a breaker switch.
Uncle Ty climbs the stairs two at a time, thumping right over where I’m crouched in the dark. I hear Carolyn rattling around inside Lucille’s office. What is she doing?
Making sure there’s no security footage?
I can’t wait around here to find out. I pad quietly back through the kitchen and unlock the door. But the moment I open it I’m shoved back against the kitchen counter, a hand at my throat.
It releases me immediately.
“God, Ava, I’m sorry,” Dominic whispers. “Are you okay? I thought you were one of them—”
“I’m fine,” I tell him. “But we need to get out of here. Did you hear them in the yard? It’s Uncle Ty and Carolyn—they did all of this, just for money.”
Dominic nods. “I heard most of it, I think.”
“What did Ty do to you? Are you okay?”
“Hit me with something. I’ve got a lump on the back of my head, and a killer headache, but I think I’ll live.”
Suddenly light floods in from the hallway, silhouetting a figure just outside. I grab Dominic’s arm and pull him down next to me, shimmying back until we’re pressed into the recess next to the cellar door.
“Ty!” Carolyn’s voice carries through from somewhere nearby. “What are you doing? We need to keep the lights off!”
“Well, how the hell am I supposed to find her in the dark? I can barely see as it is!” Uncle Ty steps farther into the kitchen. I jump when a gust of wind makes the French doors swing shut, barely stifling a gasp. He crosses over to them, peering out at the empty backyard. Probably checking there are no footprints leading away from the house. He must decide I’m still in here, because he locks them, pockets the key, then heads out into the hall.
What do we do? Run for it?
Hide?
I don’t know.
Then I feel Dominic tugging at my sleeve. I turn to find him crawling silently through the open cellar door. I follow, and push the door shut. The cellar is totally black. There are no windows, and I barely avoid tumbling down the steep stairs in the dark.
Immediately, the scent of old apples hits me—the fermented fruit of Thorn’s Blood Apple Sour. There are hundreds of bottles of it down here, though it’s too dark to make out a thing. But I know they’re there, just like I know the trapdoor leading to the pit is over in the far corner. In the pitch-blackness, it’s easy to picture a witch’s gnarled hand reaching up from it, trying to lure me closer with a curled finger . . .
I feel for Dominic’s hand. We wait, listening to Uncle Ty moving around on the other side of the door. I hear his footsteps. Quick, sharp breaths. A strange tearing sound. It goes on for some time, and then he seems to move away. I’m about to inch open the door when I hear Ty and Carolyn speaking again. They sound much fainter with the cellar door between us.
“Look, if she called the cops, we’ll just have to play the delusional card,” Ty says. “She can’t have gotten out—all the windows and doors are locked, and it’s all set up down here.”
“Just go check upstairs one more time,” Carolyn orders, sounding more pissed than I’ve ever heard her. “We need to make sure she’s actually in here before we leave.”
They’re leaving?
I let out a quiet breath. We just need to wait for them to go, and then we can get out of here and call the cops without worrying about flying crowbars.
Dominic squeezes my hand, and I squeeze back.
“Fine,” Ty says. “I’ll check again. Meet me out back, okay? And watch out for that damn dog. I only stunned it.”
My heart is thumping so loudly, I’m surprised the sound doesn’t carry through the door.
Uncle Ty hurries away again, then there’s silence for a minute.
“Can you smell something?” Dominic whispers next to my ear. I’m about to shake my head when I catch it above the scent of sour apples—something strong and chemical. Before I can say anything, lighter footsteps pass by the cellar door. There are more clicking, scraping sounds, then an odd sort of whoosh.
Light flickers in through the cracks around the door, and in it I see Dominic staring at me, wide-eyed. Fire, he mouths.
I pull open the door, but immediately shut it again. A carpet of flames has consumed the entire kitchen floor.
“Shit! How are we gonna get out?” I say, my voice cracking in fear.
“No,” I say. “Only the trapdoor to the pit, and that doesn’t help us.”
“The pit?”
“An old cold-storage room below the cellar.”
Smoke has started to pour in around the door now. By silent agreement, we retreat down the cellar steps. I snuck down these same stairs plenty of times over the last couple years to take one of the least-noticeable bottles from the racks of wine and liquor. I know every creaky board, every uneven stair.
It quickly becomes too dark to see again, so Dominic takes out his phone. In the light it gives, I see the cellar already filling with smoke.
“We’ll die from smoke inhalation if we don’t get out of here,” I say, and immediately begin coughing. “We need to call for help.”
“I called the cops while I was outside,” Dominic says, coughing too. “They’re coming, but the fresh snow on the roads will probably hold them up.”
We drop down onto our hands and knees, trying to breathe the clearer air under the smoke. I can already feel the effects of it making me sluggish.
In the light of Dominic’s phone, I take in the familiar space around us. It looks exactly the same as the day I left—the tall racks housing hundreds and hundreds of vintage bottles standing in rows, filling almost the entire space. There’s even one of Grandpa’s reaching ladders sitting over in the corner, giving the cellar the appearance of a library. A library of liquor. I remember Uncle Ty saying the buyer had negotiated to include the liquor collection; he’d seemed gutted to be handing over all that booze. Good, I think now. Except I realize it’s not good at all—it’s pretty fucking terrible.
“When the fire gets through that door, this whole room will go up.” I try not to imagine the feel of the flames swallowing us, the blistering agony of dying that way.
“If the pit was used for cold storage, it might give us some protection,” Dominic says. I can tell he’s trying hard not to sound scared. “At least for a while.”
I nod, then lead the way, still keeping low, coughing into my elbow as my eyes stream. When I reach the far corner, I feel around on the floor for the outline of the trapdoor.
There—got it.
I pull the ring and heave it open. A cold, decayed breath rushes up from the pit. It takes every bit of my willpower not to cower away from it. Dominic shines his phone’s flashlight down.
The light is weak against the darkness of the pit. Still, I make out the familiar circular stone walls, the ancient metal rungs leading down from the hatch, the damp earth lining the base. I do not want to go down there. My fingers dig into the edge of the hole, but then my hand slips, and I jerk forward, about to plunge headfirst into the pit.
Dominic grabs my shoulder, hauling me back.
“Thanks,” I say, and in that moment I see the stark contrast between him—a boy I would’ve sworn a few weeks ago was my mortal enemy—and Uncle Ty, who’s my sole remaining blood relative. In this exact same spot, one of them pushed me into danger, and the other pulled me back from it.
When Ford shoved me aside so I almost got hit by an out-of-control car, I knew then that when it came down to it, he just didn’t care about me. Why didn’t I realize the same thing about Uncle Ty? Why didn’t I see him for who he is, not just for what I wanted him to be?
“Can you do this?” Dominic asks, probably watching me go through several shades of freaked out.
“We have to,” I tell him. The pit is where my ancestors are said to have thrown Sadie. The room she disappeared from without a trace. Of course, I don’t believe that—I know they must have murdered her and hidden her body somewhere.
A scar handed down from one generation to the next.
The thought passes through my mind like a shiver.
Maybe that’s what it really means to be a Bloody Thorn.
The light catches the underside of the hatch, where a witch mark is carved deep into the wood. The only one I’ve ever seen inside the manor. It’s another kind of scar: a mark to stop evil getting into the house. Or maybe from getting out.
I feel the pit yawning below me.
And I know we have no choice.
THIRTY-SIX
Dominic pulls the hatch closed above us just as a loud crack of splintering wood comes from the top of the cellar stairs. Either someone is trying to get in or, more likely, the door is about to give way. When it does, the fire will rush down into a cellar full of liquor.
I adjust my grip on the metal rungs, palms sweaty despite the cold.
Okay, okay. We just have to wait. Wait, and hope the cops and the fire department arrive in time to save us. Just wait, and stay alive.
The burning in my muscles from leaning on the ladder at such an awkward angle isn’t helping. I take a deep breath and start to climb down. It’s only ten feet or so, and maybe eight feet across the circular space. At the bottom, the floor is a crusted layer of mud that reaches up the stone walls to around head level.
I shudder, not from cold exactly, but a sense that I was never meant to be down here—that I’ve broken some unspoken rule simply by setting foot in this place. Dominic shines his flashlight up again. From here, I can barely make out the witch mark on the trapdoor. It’s as though the pit swallows light.
Who carved that mark, though? Was it Sadie? Or someone else, making sure what was done to Sadie was never forgotten, that it would scar the manor forever?
Just how many servants did my ancestors throw down here?
Bile rises in my throat at the thought, but I try and force the thought from my head. If I let myself think about that now, I’ll have a total meltdown.
Dominic climbs down the ladder, jumping the last few rungs to land next to me.
“The smoke has started to seep through the hatch,” he says. “We don’t have long. I’ll call 911 again, let them know where we are and see how long they’re going to be.”
I nod, not trusting my voice right now. Hugging myself, I circle the pit while Dominic dials.
Something crumbles beneath my boot, and I trip backward, nailing the wall with my elbow.
“Are you all right?” I nod as Dominic comes over and helps me up. “I can’t make a call from down here—no signal. But the cops must be on their way, so we just need to sit tight and . . .”
He notices I’m not listening. Because I’ve seen something in the wall where I just whacked my elbow—a hole.
“What is that?” Dominic shines his light on the spot. Where the caked-on mud has cracked away, it’s left behind a dark, elbow-sized recess. I angle my head, trying to see what’s inside.
Nothing. Just more blackness. It’s as though there’s only a dark void beyond the crusted layer of earth. Nothing for the light to snag on. I press against the edges of the hole, and it crumbles inward. Before long, the hole is the size of my head. After a few more seconds, I’ve revealed a circular hole in the wall of the pit, maybe two feet in diameter. It’s lined with bricks, not stone, as if it’s newer than the pit.
“What the hell . . . ?” My muttered words race away from us through the exposed tunnel. Is it a tunnel? Or some kind of pipe?
An image comes into my mind: the blueprint of the manor Dominic sent me. The drawing of the cellar, and that straight line running right through the exterior wall of the house. I thought it was for some kind of label, but I was wrong. I look around me again, at the shape of the pit, and the caked-on mud showing where there must at one time have been moisture. It’s bone dry now, but might this once have been filled with water—channeled in from the river, maybe? Like a well inside the house? And if this pipe fed the well, and is now dry, then maybe . . .
The newspaper article strongly implied that the story about Sadie vanishing from the cellar was a lie to cover up my ancestors murdering her. But what if she did disappear?
It sparks an idea. Not a
good idea, or one I particularly want to have. But an idea.
“I think this might be a way out,” I say. Again, the sound rushes away into the darkness.
Dominic doesn’t seem too happy about the idea, either, but he nods. “It’s worth checking out, right?”
It looks big enough to crawl in on my hands and knees, so I can always back out again if I come face-to-face with any dead-eyed ghosts.
You just had to think about Sadie, didn’t you?
Maybe I should focus on the much more likely possibility that I’m about to crawl into a confined space with a lot of rats, spiders, and snakes.
Better than choking to death, or waiting for the fire.
I stoop and pick up a chunk of the mud I elbowed loose, and throw it as far as I can down the pipe. It clatters along for a few feet, beyond the reach of Dominic’s flashlight. Nothing stirs at the intrusion. Still, I hesitate.
“I can go first,” he offers, “but I’m more likely to get wedged in than you are, and it’s better if at least one of us makes it out.”
“It’s not like I’d leave you here to die.”
He smirks. “I appreciate that. But you could go for help.”
“Okay.” I take a deep breath. “Let’s do this.”
My eyes blur as I look down the circular tunnel. It seems to be growing narrower and narrower. Of all the terrible, terrible ways I’ve considered I might die, being trapped in an underground water pipe has got to be right up there. The moment I think that, I imagine getting wedged into the tight space, not able to go forward or back, darkness all around me, and it suddenly starting to fill with water.
My breath comes quick and shallow. Yep, I’m full-on hyperventilating.
“Ava?”
I crouch down, tucking my head between my knees, and try to think calm thoughts. Logical thoughts. But they all seem to circle back to the fact that we’re trapped in a creepy-ass underground pit while the manor above us burns, and our only potential way out is through that hell-pipe.
“Are you all right? I heard Carolyn say something about drugging you earlier.”
I nod, because what else can I do? “Yeah, apparently she’s been lacing my coffee with something called PCP.”