Page 66 of The Last Heir to Blackwood Library

Ivy watched as Ralph headed for the stairs, fighting the urge to reach out and keep him with her in the cold darkness. Crawling on her hands and knees, she approached the gallery and peeked through the marble balustrades. There was no harm in watching. She hadn’t come this far and undergone every nightmare imaginable just to sit back and hope that Ralph sent everyone home with a polite please and thank-you.

But as she stared down, she wished maybe she had listened to Ralph after all, and stayed put. There should have been little left to shock her after what she had experienced, yet all the same, as she stared down at the scene below her, she felt as if she was witnessing some strange waking dream unfold.

A stone pool had been brought into the hall—lord only knew how, it looked like one of the huge fountains found in a London park—and the men stood around it, transfixed. It was a strange sort of baptism, with Arthur standing in a white robe in the center, hands clasped in prayer before him. For it was not water that came up to his knees, billowing the robe out around him—it was blood.

Where had the blood come from? It was so much blood, more than simply that of a slaughtered cow or pig. Bile rose in Ivy’s stomach, the antiseptic smell of hospitals rushing back to her. Blood slicking the hallways, men missing limbs, the putrid stink of flesh rotting on the bone. The blood in that pool was human, she was sure of it. She knew it just as sure as if she had read it in a book, because she had. Arthur was recreating the illustrations from the manuscript, bringing the bizarre rituals to life. A cry escaped her throat.

Arthur snapped around at the sound of her voice, then looked up. The candles lit him from the back, casting him in a halo of light, illuminating the shape of his body through the white robe. Yet he looked like nothing so much as a young boy, wading ever deeper into a dangerous current at the jeering encouragement of his friends.

“Ivy,” he said, his face blank. “You shouldn’t be here.”

Movement out of the corner of her eye. Lord Mabry was conferring with another man in harsh whispers, pointing up at them.

Ralph had doubled back at her outburst and was gripping her arm, almost to the point of bruising. “I’ll deal with this. Go back to the cottage.”

“Isn’t this why we’re here?” she retorted. “I can end this now.”

“Not if it costs you your life,” Ralph hissed, tightening his grasp.

“Lady Hayworth,” Lord Mabry said, as he began the slow ascent up the stairs, one of his men close behind. “You are a slippery one, aren’t you?”

Ivy wrestled her arm free. On one side was Ralph, all restless, dangerous energy, and closing in on the other, Lord Mabry.

“It’s over, Arthur,” she called, slipping from Ralph’s grasp and skirting round the edge of the gallery, putting more distance between her and Lord Mabry. “The manuscript doesn’t hold any power anymore, or the library. The monk is dead, gone. Whatever you are trying to do, it won’t work.”

“It’s never over,” he responded. He appeared cool and determined, but there was a slight tremor in his voice. “It can go on forever. We are eternity. If the monk is gone, even better. It means that the library is ready for a new master. My father thinks that it could be me.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you? What has your father ever done for you? What do you have to gain from this? Please, come out,” she begged. Arthur had betrayed her in every sense possible, treated her like a child, a prisoner, a sacrificial lamb. But under the bravado and hard veneer was a scared little boy who wanted to please his father.

There was the faintest ripple in the blood as his body swayed, but then he set his jaw, shaking his head. “This is for the glory of the Sphinxes, of the Crown. Britain can once again take her rightful place as the greatest empire in the world, but first we must make sacrifices.”

Lord Mabry’s man—big, with a crooked nose and bulging neck muscles—had reached the top of the stairs, and made a clumsy lunge at her.

Running along the railing, Ivy easily evaded the advance, Ralph intercepting him instead. Behind her she heard a fist connect with meaty flesh. She prayed it was Ralph who had landed the blow. “It won’t work! It’s over, truly over,” Ivy called down. “The curse is broken.”

“You’re trying to deceive me,” Arthur said darkly. “My father was right about you.”

“What do you think this will achieve? Nothing good can come of this.”

“What will it achieve?” He let out a laugh, a delighted, if not manic, sound. “Why,everything! Eternal life, the rejuvenation of broken bodies, the ability to amass knowledge unlike anything man has ever seen.”

It all happened so quickly. One moment Arthur was looking up, past her, as if searching for some unknowable sign in the stars just visible through the damaged roof. Then his body was tensing, and with a gurgling plunge, he was under the surface.

Darting down the opposite staircase, Ivy rushed to the fountain. “Arthur!” She lunged, grasping for fingertips still just visible above the blood, but one of the men had caught up to her, pulling her back by the waist.

A hush fell over the hall, even Ivy going still as she watched. A handful of weak bubbles peppered the surface, spreading in rings.

She measured the ensuing silence in the rise and fall of her own chest.One breath, two breaths, three breaths...even if Arthur were to hold his breath, by now he would have been forced to come up for air. But his body did not resurface, and he stayed below, drowned in the elixir of life.

The man holding her had loosened his grip as he watched everything unfold, but Ivy was likewise too transfixed to try to run.

“You killed your son,” she let out in a choke when the last bubble had burst. Lord Mabry had come to stand on the other side, staring stone-faced at the pool. “You killed your own son, you monster! And you just stand there!”

The remaining Sphinxes exchanged glances, cleared throats. Some wore expressions of shock, others of polite embarrassment, as if they had not actually expected something so vulgar to occur. An acrid breeze swept through the hall, candles guttering in its wake. Nothing else happened: no grand celestial event, no light bursting forth from the fountain, no heavenly chorus of angels.

Lord Mabry finally dragged his gaze from the blood fountain and met Ivy’s eye. He looked old, the bags under his eyes more pronounced, the corners of his mouth drooping into what might have been a frown or a grimace, or just age. There were thousands of fathers in England who had lost sons, but none looked as utterly beaten down as the old general did in that moment. She thought he might be in shock, the reality of what had just occurred belatedly setting in, but then he was reaching into his waistcoat pocket, drawing out a gun.

“I can’t risk you going to the authorities,” he said, leveling the pistol at her. Her captor immediately stepped away, releasing her so that her only bond was the threat of a bullet tearing through her flesh.

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