She peeled.
The stone came away.
It buckled under its own weight, its impossible existence, and crumbled into nothing. She fell back against the metaphysical bricks she had built up around her and felt them give way as well. The circle settled out. The world regained its color and solidity.
The opening yawned, dark and ominous, as she struggled back up to her feet. Her stomach was a seething molten mass beneath her lungs, and her head spun. She clutched the revealed doorframe, panting, until she was still enough to light the tapers of the candelabra.
And then she plunged down into the crypt.
The candelabra’s light flickered and guttered from her harsh pace. The cool, dank air of the tunnels closed in around her, but Jane pressed forward, heedless of the spirits that might gather. She felt eyes on her, heavy and pressing, closing in as she reached the room with the table and chairs, but no looming shadows waited for her in the doorways. She slowed only long enough to look at Elodie’s name engraved upon a seat, and then she pressed onward.
“Augustine!” Her voice rang out, amplified and echoing down the hall she found herself in. “Augustine, I am here!” For half a second, she was terrified to let the sound die out, too afraid of what she wouldn’t hear when it was gone, but she stilled her lungs. She looked from side to side, scanning every inch of the hallway for a figure, a shoe print, a smudge.
There was nothing, nothing but white stone.
The hallway seemed impossibly long, studded with branches and broken once or twice by turns that did not double back but instead pressed outward to new dimensions. The cellar was a maze. How had it been built? How had nobody questioned it when they laid the huge stone slabs, joined almost imperceptibly? Had it been built so long ago that the builders had understood, implicitly, the promise that its geometry made, or had it been built piecemeal so that no one person but its designer could see the final sequence?
It went beyond the surface boundaries of Lindridge Hall. Whatever magic of Dr. Nizamiev’s ritual still remained failed in that moment. She felt the rupture throughout her body as she crossed the threshold.
She kept walking.
But not three minutes later, the hallway she staggered down ended in a blank wall, carved with faint shapes, shapes she traced with her fingertips but could find no meaning in. More esoterica, more fervent beliefs held by generations that had gone before, beliefs she could not access, let alone know with such certainty. She stared at it, wavering on her feet. Her legs ached. Her feet screamed. Her stomach … it did not help, to think about the pain in her stomach, the pain that called when the magic came thickest in her veins.
Stopping did not help, either. The longer she was still, the harder it would be to move again. She knew that. She had learned it on the long road back to Larrenton and in the emptiness of the Cunninghams’ home. She made herself turn around, even as her candles burned lower, even as the cold bit into her, ticking down the clock of her endurance.
She was not alone.
Just far enough from her that her candle’s light limned the outline but not the substance, somebody waited. Jane surged forward, then stopped again as she made out the slightness of the frame, the curve of the throat, the line of the clothing. It was not Augustine. It was not Elodie.
It was her mother.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
HER MOTHER STOOD turned away from her, dressed in her auxiliary uniform. Even before Jane was sent away, her mother had joined Jane’s father out in the streets, part of the corps of volunteers who helped people who were trapped in wreckage and cordoned off unsafe areas after each round of shelling. A stitched leather gas mask hung loose around her neck, as grotesque as Jane remembered it, and her hair was cropped close to her head.
This was not the mother she had dreamed of conjuring. This was plucked impossibly from her memories. Dreams of her parents had long ago faded to bare suggestions, and when Jane had thought of her mother, her vague form always had long hair. Her vague features were always happy and loving. But this … this was her mother as her mother had been, the last time Jane had seen her.
Until that moment, Jane had believed she’d forgotten her face.
But Jane knew the lines that were just beginning to form at the corners of her eyes, the sweep of her pale lashes, the upturned angle of her nose. All the details a child had memorized in happier times, fixed fast upon her mind by the bright panic of calamity, as sure as any photographic plate.
“Do not do this,” Jane said. Her voice trembled.
Her mother made no response, as if she hadn’t heard. And even though Jane knew that it was not her mother, that it was only one of the creatures wearing her face, that quiet disregard broke her.