Jacob's body slammed into the stone floor with a crunch that sent white-hot pain through his left shoulder. The impact knocked the breath from his lungs, leaving him gasping like a landed fish in the damp darkness. His dagger skittered across the uneven stones, coming to rest against something pale and fleshy in the gloom.
Moonlight filtered through cracks in the vaulted ceiling above, painting the underground chamber in fractured silver. As Jacob pushed himself up on trembling arms, the horror before him came into focus:
Lord Richard Blackwood sat propped against the catacomb wall like a macabre puppet, his silk finery now moldering rags. Someone - or something - had sewn his lips shut with coarse black thread interspersed with crow feathers that still quivered with each ragged breath. His eyelids had been peeled back and pinned to his forehead with rusted needles, forcing his bloodshot eyes into a permanent, staring agony.
Eleanor retched violently beside him, her half-shattered mask slipping further as she doubled over. "Mother of mercy...he's still alive."
The words barely registered as Jacob crawled toward his fallen weapon. The lord's chest did indeed rise and fall in shallow, wet hitches. Worse still - when Jacob's shadow fell across the ruined face, those unblinking pupils contracted sharply. Recognizing him.
"You." The word formed soundlessly behind the feathered stitches, but Jacob heard it as clearly as if Blackwood had screamed.
A memory detonated behind his eyes with concussive force:
Twelve-year-old Jacob standing in the Blackwood conservatory, his hands shaking around a stolen kitchen knife. Lord Blackwood - younger, but with the same cold eyes - pressed something cold and metallic into his palm. "It's the only way to save her," the lord murmured, gesturing to the chalk ritual circle where little Emily stood clutching her stuffed rabbit, confused but trusting. "The Crow demands one child every generation. But if you don't act, it won't just take her life - it'll take her soul. Forever."
Jacob recoiled so violently his elbow cracked against stone. "No. That's not how it happened. Emily was my sister - my blood-"
The corpse's hand snapped up with unnatural speed, rotting fingers clamping around Jacob's wrist with terrifying strength. Blackwood's lips tore open as he forced words past the feathers, each syllable spraying blackened spittle:
"You. Lit. The fire."
Above them, dirt rained down as the Hollow Priest's boots scraped against the tunnel entrance. The dragging sound of his tattered robes mixed with that awful, childlike humming - a nursery rhyme Jacob suddenly recognized.
"Ashes, ashes," the Priest sang softly in Emily's voice, "we all...fall...down."
Eleanor grabbed Jacob's arm, her fingernails drawing blood. "We have to move. Now." But Jacob couldn't tear his gaze from Blackwood's ruined face, from the terrible knowledge dawning in those tortured eyes. The lord's free hand twitched toward his own chest, where something glinted beneath the torn fabric - a rusted key on a chain, its teeth dark with old blood.
The first torch in the tunnel extinguished with a hiss. Then the second. Then the third, each snuffing out in sequence as the Priest drew nearer, his progress marked only by that creeping darkness and the increasingly garbled singing:
"Ring around the rosie..."
Jacob snatched the key as Eleanor hauled him backward into the deeper blackness of the catacombs. Behind them, Blackwood's body began to convulse violently, a wet tearing sound suggesting something was working its way out from inside his ribcage.
The last thing Jacob saw before the darkness swallowed them whole was the lord's mouth stretching impossibly wide around the feathers, his final, silent word unmistakable:
"Run."