My stomach rolled. “Oh my God.”
“It’s not that interesting,” Jenna said, but I shook my head.
“No, not that. Did the book have any pictures of those girls?”
“Yeah. I think I saw a few.”
I could hear the blood rushing in my ears as I said, “Okay, I need to see that book. Now.”
Jenna looped her arm through mine as we walked down one of the many hallways branching off the main foyer. “I left it sitting on the window seat in the library,” she said. “I bet it’s still there.”
We passed countless closed doors and turned down three different halls before reaching the library. Like the rest of the house, it was gorgeous. And gigantic.
I actually froze in the doorway for a second. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen so many books in my life. Shelf after shelf stretched out before me, and twin spiral staircases curled up to the second level, where there were even more books. Low couches were scattered throughout the room, and Tiffany lamps cast soft pools of light on the hardwood floor. Large windows at the other end of the room looked out over the river and let in the last few rays of the setting sun.
The window seat was empty.
“Crap,” Jenna sighed. “I swear I left it there like twenty minutes ago.”
“Do you remember where you found the book?” I asked. “Maybe someone came in and reshelved it.”
Jenna bit her lip. “Yeah, I think so. It was upstairs by this really weird cabinet.”
I followed her as she headed to the second floor. “Weird how?”
“You’ll see. Okay, I was near the back, by the painting of some dude on a horse….”
I could see where Jenna would have trouble remembering which shelf was which. Downstairs, the books had lined the walls, leaving the floor open. Up here, there were roughly thirty bookcases vying for space, some of them so close together I had to turn sideways just to pass between them.
“Aha!” I heard Jenna exalt from somewhere to my left.
I found her standing on tiptoes, scanning a shelf that was indeed next to a painting of a dude on a horse. I thought he looked awfully irritated for a guy in such a spiffy ermine cape.
Jenna was wearing an equally annoyed expression. “It’s not here,” she said. “Maybe we should look downstairs again.”
I bit back disappointment. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to see the book so badly. I already knew where I’d heard Thorne before, and why it was so important.
Thorne was the last name of the woman whose spell had made Alice a demon. Who had, inadvertently I guess, made me a demon. There was no doubt in my mind that Alice had been one of those girls sent here during the Blitz, and that Thorne Abbey was where everything had started.
Still, I wanted to see a picture of Alice here. Before she’d been changed.
“Yeah,” I told Jenna. “We can look again later. It’s not that big a deal.”
Jenna wasn’t an idiot. She’d known me long enough to know when I was lying. But she let it go and said, “Oh, check this out.”
Shoved in the corner, just under Pissy Guy on a Horse, was a small black bookcase that only came up to my chest. It was covered in dust, and I saw immediately why Jenna had said it was weird. There was only one book on the shelf, but it was under a thick glass cube. Scratched into the glass were symbols I’d never seen before.
“Try to open it,” Jenna said.
There wasn’t any handle that I could see, so I curled my fingers around the edge of the glass, trying to see if it could be pried open.
I immediately jerked my hand back. “Whoa.”
“I know, right? That thing is covered in some serious mojo.”
Serious mojo was an understatement. My fingers were burning. The sensation was similar to what I’d felt when I’d touched Archer’s chest and felt the mark of The Eye sear into my palm. “Whatever that book is, someone really didn’t want anyone to look at it.”
“No, they didn’t.”
Jenna and I both jumped and whirled around.
My dad stood behind us, a small smile on his lips. His hands were clasped behind his back. “That book is the Thorne family’s grimoire. A spell book.”
“I know what a grimoire is,” I said irritably, but he continued like I hadn’t spoken.
“It contains some of the darkest magic ever known to Prodigium. The Council locked it up years ago.”
“They were witches, then? The Thornes?”
Dad ran a hand over the top of the cabinet. I flinched for him, but he didn’t even seem to feel the shock of magic. “They were,” he replied. “Dark witches, of course. Very powerful and very adept at concealing their true identity from humans.”
“They’re the ones who made Alice a demon, right?”
Jenna made a little surprised noise next to me, but Dad just studied me for a moment before saying, “Yes. And aren’t you clever for putting that together so quickly?”
He sounded genuinely pleased, and a little surge of happiness went through me. Still, I said, “Jenna actually helped me figure it out. She read something about a bunch of girls being sent here during the Blitz, and I remembered Mrs. Casnoff saying that the lady who, uh, changed Alice was named Thorne. That’s why we were in here, actually. I was going to see if I could find Alice’s picture in one of the books Jenna was reading.”
“If you want a picture of your great-grandmother during her time at Thorne, I have one. Why didn’t you just come ask me in the first place?”
A sarcastic comment sprang to mind, but I immediately bit it back. He was right. Asking him would’ve been the logical thing to do instead of playing cloak-and-dagger in the library.
Thank God for Jenna, who looked up at my dad and said, “Mr. Atherton, Sophie’s spent the last sixteen years of her life having people lie to her about one thing or another. At Hecate, she got pretty good at finding things out on her own. Hard habit to break.”
Jenna may have been a tiny blonde with a nearly pathological love for pink, but she was still a vampire, and that meant she could be pretty intimidating when she wanted to be. Right now, I kind of wanted to pick her up and hug her.
Dad looked back and forth between us. “Mrs. Casnoff said the two of you were a formidable team. I see now what she meant. Well, if there’s nothing else you ladies need in the library, Sophie, would you care to accompany me on a walk about the grounds?”
I wondered if there were ever times when Dad didn’t sound like he’d just escaped from a Jane Austen novel. It was weird to think of my superpractical mom falling for a guy like him. She’d never struck me as the type to go for a smooth talker. Of course, I never thought I’d fall for a pretty boy who was secretly a Prodigium-killer, so what the heck did I know?
“It’s getting dark,” I said to Dad.
“Oh, I think we still have plenty of light left. And the view of the house at this time of day is quite spectacular.”
In the few weeks since I’d met Dad, I’d learned to read his eyes and not his tone of voice. And right now, his eyes said I was going on a walk with him whether I wanted to or not.
“Okay,” I said. “Why not?”
“Excellent! You’ll be fine on your own for a little while, won’t you?” he asked Jenna.
She glanced at me. “Sure, Mr. Atherton,” she said. “I’ll, uh, just go see what Cal is doing.”
“Wonderful idea,” Dad replied. He held his elbow out to me. “Shall we?”