by Jeff Tidball
Lucy knew there was a carriage house behind the main building and her first impulse was to race there to recover Cooke's car, but as she turned that way she realized she'd never get it started in time.
Lucy changed course to head for the tree line. It was nearly a hundred yards away over rolling fields, but it was dark (how many days and nights had passed?), and she thought that perhaps the darkness would hide her.
She glanced over her shoulder to see the first pursuers stop just outside the mansion's main entry. Lucy kicked her shoes away - once pretty, now worse than useless - and ducked her head as she ran, hoping a low profile would aid concealment.
There was shouting. Had they seen her?
She slowed to risk another glance over her shoulder. A knot of figures had accumulated outside the door. Then she heard a hound bays and her blood ran cold. Dogs.
Lucy had made the tree line without being spotted, but an hour later her plight was no less grave than it had been. The wood turned out to be small - less than an acre - and as nearly the only place she could have hidden and not already have been found, the cultists had surrounded the wood and then sent in teams with dogs.
Lucy pressed herself down into a low place and listened to the men in the search parties calling to each other. Her feet bled from running over the rocky ground.
She saw the group of three men and two dogs closest to her coming up on her trail. The men had rifles.
Lucy knew she couldn't stay still. She doubled back on her trail about twenty yards off from it, heading back in the direction she had come from. She managed to get past them, keeping a careful eye on their progress...
...but not paying enough attention to where she was putting her feet. Lucy stepped into a hole, rolling her ankle. Fire shot up her leg and she cried out.
The three men and their dogs were after her in an instant, the men fanning out and bringing their rifles up. Lucy bit her lip to prevent herself from crying out again when she tried to put weight on her foot. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
She crouched down as best she could in the hollow of a tree.
One of the three men approached...
...stepped past...
...and Lucy lunged, grabbing for his gun.
The man cried out, alerting his fellows, but Lucy managed to swing the barrel under his chin, and the man's own backpedaling jarred his finger on the trigger and sent an eruption of brain and gristle from the top of his head.
Lucy yanked the gun from his hands, but had only just managed to get her finger inside the trigger-guard when everything flared to white and she fell.
Lucy lay still in her cell. The same one as before, she imagined, although there was no telling.
It pained her to move - made her head ring, made her ankle scream, re-opened scabs on her bare feet.
After her capture in the wood, she had been brought directly to the ritual chamber and Garfield and the others hastily re-assembled, all of them dirty and indignant at her flight.
"Kill me, then, if that's your plan," Lucy had spat at them.
"There are far worse fates," Garfield had said. "And more useful."
Lucy had seen Cooke die, and shuddered to think what Garfield might suppose was worse.
Lucy heard footsteps approach in the hall outside her cell, but saw no light.
"It's your own fault it's come to this," Dart's voice hissed out of the darkness.
Lucy couldn't bring herself to respond.
Something clattered to the stones on the inside of her cell, something metal.
"One last kindness," he said. "Although you'd best act quickly." She heard Dart scamper away.
Lucy felt around on the floor until her fingers found the object - a dagger. To kill herself?
She had no doubt she'd be better off dead than live to see whatever fate awaited her.
Lucy took the dagger in both hands and put its point against her breast, exactly where Dart had lain the dagger used in her initiation.
(Was this that same weapon?)
Lucy steeled her will to end her life.
And it occurred to her suddenly, in a flash of insight, that perhaps she was being tested.
After all, would Dart truly provide her the means to take her own life in direct contradiction to whatever sentence had been pronounced on her?
A flash of memory came to her from that night in the library, the first night she'd come to this godforsaken mansion. A passage she'd read in the Esoteric Commandment:
"...and the initiates at each rank shall be tested before advancing to the next, grim tests and severe, to prove their loyalty beyond any doubt, and let those who fail the test fall to their ends..."
Lucy felt the dagger's sharp tip pressed against her flesh.
All was silent, but inside Lucy's head, battle raged - a war of thoughts between self-preservation and the sure knowledge that there was no such thing as sure knowledge.
Lucy wondered if she'd gone mad.
She gripped the knife, and...
