Mateo pulled a book off the shelf and showed her the cover. “21st Century Cross Stitch? I’m terrified.”
She just shook her head and pulled on the carved statue of the wolf to release the hidden latch.
“I should have guessed,” he said flatly, and she missed the wild enthusiasm of the truth serum.
The shelf swung toward them, and they both stepped out of the way as it revealed the double secret werewolf room where the twins had been collecting weapons, potions, and a giant library of every book ever written that they thought could help protect them.
“Holy shit,” Mateo said and stepped inside.
She felt cold without him touching her, or maybe it was just the room, filled with so much violence and hatred.
It looked less violent now because all the weapons were arranged in the foyer and not on their hooks on the wall.
He looked around the room and stepped toward the bookshelves.
He flipped one open and showed her a gruesome drawing of a half man half wolf. “Do they honestly believe this shit?”
She leaned against the doorjamb, strangely unwilling to go any further. “Honestly, I don’t know.”
He closed the book and started rummaging through the others. There were books from every age, including a couple of old wrinkled scrolls, but he bypassed them to pick up a heavy tome she had never seen before on the second-to-bottom shelf in the back. He shook out the hand not holding it. “Should I be worried that this book is tingling?”
“What on earth? Don’t open it; maybe it could be a?—”
He opened it. Nothing happened.
“—charm,” Cat finished.
“A charm would be a bad thing?” Mateo asked as he eyed the book.
“A charm is a stable piece of magic that doesn’t need a witch to activate it. It could be a very bad thing. Or not.”
“So this is a book and a charm?”
Cat looked down at the book and gasped. “That’s not a charm. That’s agrimoire.”
“What’s a grimoire?”
“A coven’s spell book. Another talent is scribing, written magic.” Cat spun back to the library to check that the Griffin’s grimoire still had pride of place under a bespelled plastic dome in the library proper. “And that’s not the Griffin’s grimoire. Whose is it?”
She took it from him and blinked at a flash of magic that whited out her vision.
“Not now,” she said through gritted teeth.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She shook her head, dispelling the sparks, and flipped through the book gingerly, more and more shocked. When did the twins pick up another coven’s grimoire? Usually, a coven ended up with one after a hostile takeover. The twins’ entire project of finding witches in foster care was to not do that. So where the hell did they find this?
She started searching the other shelves but couldn’t distinguish anything in the avalanche of paper. She rolled her eyes and called on her magic. Normally, she had to focus it through water or crystal, but this was the simplest question on earth. “Anything else?”
Her hand was drawn down to the bottom shelf, where she pulled out another thick tome, this one done in purple leather instead of red. She swallowed and touched it, bracing for another flash, but nothing happened. She hauled it into her arms and cracked it open to be sure.
They had two grimoires.
“What on earth are they thinking?” she mused.
She switched to the red one. The moment she opened the cover, the pages started flipping.
“That was a rhetorical question,” she whispered as the book’s pages flipped and flipped. They went faster and faster, and she held her breath until it settled close to the front of the book, where the oldest spells would be written. They met each other’s eyes and then looked down.
