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“The firm’s in full panic mode. As soon as he heard you were off the case, he snapped. He’s threatening to pull his business and find another defense team,” he says.
“Blackhollow wants you back or he walks.”
“I’d seriously let that man have his way with me, if you know what I mean. Well, everything but murder, of course. That seems excessive.”
I start with the most recent case first, the one Detective Harris mentioned—Carla Moretti.
I find what I’m looking for right away. It turns out Moretti was not just a housekeeper. She was Damien and Lucien’s former nanny and helped raise them.
Neighbors claimed she was a “mother figure,” fiercely protective of the boys even as they grew up into adult men.
It seems Elise Hartsworth—a former girlfriend of Damien’s, his college sweetheart—was killed three years ago, on Halloween, at a dinner party in Peabody packed with New England elite.
She was posed in what the papers described as a “sacrificial position.”
The family business was crumbling until suddenly in late November 1994—after the last Halloween murder—Ian acquired a string of new investments and partnerships. Blackhollow Industries’ wealth skyrocketed again seemingly overnight.
“I guess what I don’t understand is what happened with my family. My dad said he had the knife, that he was ready to go through with the Blood Rite ritual. But if these rituals are real—if they actually do something like you say—then why didn’t it work?”
“Whatever that ritual was supposed to do… it failed for him.”
“Of course… I see it now. Your father’s ritual must have failed because it was missing a Tether—someone bound to the Veil by blood, oath, or love,” he murmurs, a spark of something intense flaring behind his eyes. “The Book of Eternal Rites makes reference to this. It’s clear the person sacrificed can’t be random; it has to be a Tether. Your parents probably lacked any true connection to the Veil. Without that bond, the ritual is meaningless. It’s just theatrics.”
