The reverence in his voice made me lean forward, trying to get a peek of whatever he was retrieving from beneath the bed.Maybe it was something useful, something worth this emergency.
“I am entrusting this to you,” he said.“You are the one.”
Somethingthunked, him moving aside a floorboard maybe.Then he slowly, carefully pulled out the priceless… relic?
“We’re here for a book?”The thought that this emergency would be worth the time vanished as quickly as a shifting werewolf’s human form.
“Animportantbook.”Deagan placed the tome on the wrinkled and displaced comforter and motioned me closer.
I moved to his side as he opened the tome, its spine and pages crackling, and stared down at line after line of scribbles.If I wanted to be generous, they could be called words.Some of the lines and loops were faded by time.The rest of it was barely readable cursive and bad or antiquated spellings.The script ran from the top of the oversized pages all the way to the bottom with hardly any breaks.Even though it made my eyes hurt to look at it, I squinted, trying to figure out what made this thing so special.
“Is it magical?”I asked hopefully.
“It is useful.”He turned a page.“These are my notes.”
He sounded so pleased with himself I made a second attempt to read.If I tried really hard, I could make out about half the words.To actually make it through an entire paragraph, I’d likely need a magnifying glass and a hell of a lot of Advil.
And there were a lot of paragraphs.The script was tiny, fitting twenty words or more on a single line, and the pages were filled front and back.
Deagan turned to another page.Then another.“Here we are.I’ve written in chronological order, of course.Many individuals have multiple entries, but this is the start of what you need.”
Patience running thin, I skimmed the page.Nothing jumped out at me.From what I could decipher, each line just listed observations and rumors about different paranorms, mostly vampires I hadn’t heard of.What was I supposed to do with this?
Then a name midway down the page caught my attention.Satine.
NowI was interested.
It took context clues and some guessing to piece the sentences together.Satine traveled to the New World—I’m assuming he meant the US—with Samuel, the elusive king of the vampires.I’d met one of his Heirs, Aidan, a couple of weeks ago.That was the mistake that pissed Satine off because I’d been scheduled to meet with her.I hadn’t because my gut told me she wasn’t someone I wanted to ally with.My gut had been one hundred percent right.
“Are you finished?”Deagan asked.
“Not yet.”
I scanned the next few lines for Aidan’s name, found it, then tried to decipher the following sentences.I already knew Satine and Aidan despised each other.According to Deagan, she had tried “thrice” to kill him.She was never able to.
“Are you finished now?”
“No,” I said.“This isn’t the easiest read ever.”
It looked like Deagan had added to the entry over time.The ink was darker, and his handwriting changed.All the Heirs hated Satine.It went as far back asKalends Mar 1281?Pretty sure that was a date.
Deagan huffed behind me.“Youareliterate, are you not?”
If I didn’t like Deagan so much, I would havestronglydisliked him.
Stepping back, I motioned toward the book.“Why don’t you read it to me?”
I’d barely finished speaking when he said, “I’ll summarize.”
He placed his fingertips toward the bottom of the page.“Satine is one of Samuel’s five—now four—potential Heirs.She is a lethal, conniving, sinister woman who abhors the other five—four—as much as they abhor her.They tried to destroy each other, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.It became such a mess, they nearly revealed our existence to humans.Samuel had to take action.He commanded them to cease hunting each other.They were bound to his wishes, and something resembling a détente lasted a century or so.Then the Heirs began to mysteriously perish.”
“You’re sure they perished and didn’t just disappear?”I asked.
“Absolutely.When a master dies, the link between him or her and their bonded vampires is severed.It’s uncomfortable and painful, especially if the master is Aged.Heirs weredying.”
Even though Deagan hadn’t glanced again at the journal, he turned a page.“I began to suspect Satine in the early seventeenth century.We savored each other’s blood and bodies.At the—”
“You slept with Satine?”My voice shot up.It felt like a betrayal, which, granted, was ridiculous considering it probably happened hundreds of years ago.
