they were doing at the time? Maybe something changed, made her decide to leave?”
Cassandra handed me the journal. “It’s exactly like the other entries. They talk about ‘materials’ and ‘variations’ and ‘subtypes,’ but nothing specific.”
I moved beside Lucas and held the journal between us as we read the last half-dozen pages. Then I flipped to the start of the book, which dated back to 1996, and skimmed to the present.
“The only change I see is a gradual increase in ingredient Hf and Hm. It appears on and off in the earlier entries, then becomes a regular ingredient in the last year. Otherwise, the entries are pretty similar—variations A through E, methodologies A through K.”
“Let’s see what other goodies we have, then,” Aaron said. He scanned the equipment shelf. “Lots and lots of unlabeled, half-filled bottles.” He grabbed one, pulled out the stopper, sniffed it, and gagged. “I may be invulnerable, but please don’t ask me to taste-test anything.”
I took the bottle from him and sniffed. “Sulfur.” He handed me another one. “Rosemary.” I eyed the shelf and named three more from looks alone. “All fairly common potion ingredients. Same with the dried stuff. Half these things you could pick up in any New Age shop.”
“Which could mean that this is all they use,” Cassandra said. “Or it could mean that they’ve hidden the more damning ingredients.”
“Time to start looking for more cubbyholes,” Aaron said. “I’ll get the top shelves.”
He ran his hand over the highest shelf, which appeared empty. As he swept along it, he dislodged a bottle and sent it crashing into the tub. Cassandra reached into the tub and touched the bottom, beside the broken pieces.
“Dry,” she said. “It was empty.”
She started to stand, then stopped, and ran a finger along the inside of the tub. With a frown, she leaned farther in, then shook her head and straightened.
“See something?” I said.
She shook her head. “It’s been scrubbed clean.”
“I believe I’ve found something here,” Lucas said.
He was crouched in front of the equipment shelf. I expected to see another doorway behind the shelf. Instead, he gestured at the shelf itself, which he’d cleared of bottles. When I looked, I saw not a wooden shelf, but a drawer. It seemed too shallow to hold anything. Then Lucas pulled back the velvet cloth that lay over the contents—a row of surgical instruments.
“They, uh, could be veterinary tools,” Aaron said. “Some questers use animal sacrifice. It’s discouraged, but it does happen.”
I met Lucas’s gaze. “Hm and Hf.”
He gave a slow nod. “Human male and human female.”
Cassandra said nothing. When we looked over at her, she was bent over a hole in the floor, where she’d taken off a section of board.
“What’s that?” I said.
She slammed the board back into place. “More ingredients. They’re…human.”
Aaron squatted beside her and reached for the loose board, but she held it fast to the floor.
“You don’t need to look, either,” she said.
“I’ve lived through Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson, and Jeffrey Dahmer. Nothing under that board is going to shock me.”
“It’s not going to make you sleep any easier, either.” She looked at us. “I’ll draw up an inventory of what’s in here, and package it if you’d like. For now, I can tell you that they were using body parts, from multiple humans, and they weren’t retrieving them from graveyards.”
Her gaze skittered toward the tub. She blinked hard and looked away.
“It smells of blood, doesn’t it?” Lucas said.
“I caught a whiff of something, and I thought it might be blood, but I can’t pick it up again.”
Aaron ducked his head into the tub. He inhaled, then shook his head. “Nothing. That’s one smell we can always pick up but I’m not—” He stopped. “Scratch that. I caught it. Very faint, but definitely human blood.”
“So that’s what the tub is for,” I said. “They put them in there to…harvest what they needed without making too big a mess.”
“Could be,” Lucas said.
I met his gaze. “But you don’t think so.”
He picked up the journal and turned to a page near the end. “There are several references this year to immersion in source material Hm and Hf.”
“Elizabeth Báthory,” Cassandra murmured.
My gut sank, as I understood what they meant.
Elizabeth Báthory was a Hungarian countess who lived in the sixteenth century. According to legend, she’d killed six hundred and fifty young women, most of them peasants, and bathed in their blood because she believed it would grant her eternal youth. After several decades of killing, Báthory was arrested, tried, convicted,