Page 88 of Infamous

He did not. When midnight approached, he came to fetch them from the drawing room in his finest dark fur, solemnly broke the seal atop a glass bottle, and indicated that they were to each hold out their hands to receive some of the contents.

Eddie, who remembered her last experiment with questionable substances with some trepidation, hesitated. She hardly wanted to seem like a coward, but she had just enough sense not to puteverythingshe was offered directly into her mouth. She automatically began to imagine what Rose would say, and then determined not to care.

Manuscript thieves did not get to have jurisdiction over her thoughts.

‘It’s dried fungus,’ said Nash, sensing her hesitation. ‘A friend of mine procured them abroad. Don’t worry, they’re perfectly natural. Medicinal! They’ll help us relax.’

Both Valentine and Kitty took their mushrooms and immediately swallowed them, as casually as if they were grapes. When Nash reached Eddie, she was still wavering; he reached up and cupped her by the chin, causing her to dart a startled glance at the others.

‘Receive it like a Catholic, you infidel,’ Nash said, gently easing her mouth open. He placed the mushroom on her tongue and then released her.

Eddie sighed, and swallowed.

It took a while for everybody to gather their cloaks and for Valentine to successfully manage to light a lamp, but then Nash shut Juno inside the house and they all made their way down into the woods. The wind was picking up, the clouds rushing past overhead, so that the moonlight kept blinking out and plunging them into darkness.

‘It’s going to rain,’ said Kitty, frowning up at the sky.

‘It wouldn’t dare,’ said Nash.

It was around the time they reached the trees when Eddie began to notice that her mind seemed to have vacated her body. While her feet were undeniably on the ground – she could see them, when the moon came out – she rather thought that her head was elsewhere. Aloft. Adrift. It was only when Nash spoke again that she could convince herself that her brain was where it had always been, tucked safely behind her eyes.

‘This’ll do nicely.’

They were in a small clearing. Kitty had been in charge of soft furnishings, and produced blankets for them to sit on. They arranged themselves cross-legged on the soft ground.

Eddie hardly realised she had pressed her fingers into the mud next to her until Valentine gently prised her hand away and placed it safely in her lap. Kitty and Nash were attempting to light a fire; they had brought dry wood from the house, and it only took a minute or so of fiddling with the lantern to get it to catch.

‘Now, we really ought to have a white goat to slaughter, but we’re running low on livestock .?.?.’

Nash produced the duck bones, and lazily tossed one into the fire, where it crackled and spat.

‘We are not really attempting some sort of ancient ritual, are we?’ said Eddie, surprised by the effort it took to get these words out.

‘Of course! We wish to ascend! To dance with Dionysus! To set out on a noble quest for divine mania, and come back forever changed!’

‘Do we indeed?’ said Valentine. ‘I thought we were simply getting foxed outdoors, for a change of scenery.’

‘Do shut up, Valentine,’ Nash said, arranging the bones into some sort of pattern in the mud. ‘Actually – don’t. I need you to help me with the Greek.’

They conferred, and Eddie let her mind drift again. If she squinted, she could just about see the stars, glittering suggestively through the gaps in the branches when the clouds parted.

‘The sky has lights in it,’ she said to Kitty.

‘You’re damn right it does,’ said Kitty, who took a sip from the bottle of wine she was carrying and then handed it to Eddie. ‘Important to stay hydrated during these things.’

‘Oh. Have you done this before?’ Eddie said, realising that shewasthirsty and drinking deep.

‘Done what?’

Nash had begun chanting something, Eddie presumed in Greek; he suddenly increased in volume, with a pointed look at Eddie, who abruptly closed her mouth.

It was hard to pinpoint exactly when it all stopped feeling like a ridiculous joke and became something much stranger. Eddie closed her eyes, listening to Nash and Valentine chant, and then as their voices dragged on, lost all sense of time. She thought she saw Juno, snuffling through the trees towards them, something unidentifiable in her mouth; meanwhile, the chanting blurred into a hum, a frequency in harmony with the sound of the woods, primal and all-encompassing. Eventually she realised that she couldn’t have been looking at Juno, because she hadn’t opened her eyes at all. When she did, she noted that she also could not have been listening to any chanting, because the rest of the clearing was empty. She was quite alone.

This did not seem on. Eddie didn’t know much about pagan rituals, but shedidthink there was something baked-in about the spirit of togetherness. She managed to get to her feet, smearing quite a lot of mud on Valentine’s breeches as she did, and stood swaying indecisively before deciding on what seemed like a likely path and taking it.

The feeling of twigs and leaves brushing against her hands as she staggered through the undergrowth was so heightened that she experienced each one as an odd little zip of static, skittering across her skin. She thought she was makingfartoo much noise, the sound of her steps comically loud; she stopped, and in the relative quiet she heard something crashing through the trees towards her.

For a moment she was frozen, her vague interest in her surroundings turning to bone-deep fear, and then she started to run. She only made it a few clumsy paces when something caught her by the arm; she sucked in a breath, intending to scream, but hadn’t let out more than a squawk before she felt a hand clap over her mouth.