***
Once we arrivedin the palace library, I shut the doors behind us and set the latch in place, to avoid any potential interruptions.
“Won’t that draw more attention?” Lucas pointed out. He was probably right. Should anyone come by, it would be hard to explain why they couldn’t enter. It looked more suspicious, not less. As it was, we could simply say we were doing schoolwork. I unlocked the door. When I turned around again, Nix was already ankle-deep in a pile of books. She was yanking them off the shelves, flipping through the first few pages, scanning what I assumed to be the titles and tables of contents, then dumping them unceremoniously at her feet when she was through.
I walked over to join her, trying to avoid stepping on the pile, and began picking up the books and returning them to the shelf. “What are you looking for?” I asked her.
“I’ll know when I see it” was all she said. Then she returned to flipping pages and tossing books on the ground.
“Hey,” I said. “You’re making a mess. And, worse, ruining the books.”
She looked down at the growing pile and grimaced. “Right. Sorry.” She turned a few pages in the dark-green leather-bound book she was holding and then placed it back where she found it when she was done.
“Thanks,” I said. “Plus, someone’s probably going to notice if they’re all out of order. We don’t want to leave a trail of evidence behind us. What if the mambabarang is onto us? They can see which books we’ve been through.” Okay, that was highly unlikely, but I’d seen enough movies to know anything was possible.
And my heart told me the witch had been in the king’s chambers right before we were. They could be someone working in the castle...They could be watching us right now, in fact, maybe through the eyes of one of the portraits on the wall...
Nix flashed me a finger gun. “Right. Cover our tracks. Gotcha.”
Lucas had started on the opposite end of the shelves. He made his choices far more carefully, face scrunched in concentration, scanning the spines whenever they were labeled, gently pulling the ones from the shelf that were not and opening them to check the contents. If he decided they weren’t relevant, he returned them and continued on. I watched his finger trace the spines, the way he was totally absorbed in the task, contemplative, deliberate. I found it all too attractive, how mature and serious he looked. I hated that I couldn’t trust him, that Elias had put doubts in my head.
“Here,” Nix said, her face inches away from the huge dusty tome she held open in both her hands, titledThe Mysterious Properties of Magical Herbsand authored by someone called Lady Elowina. Nix walked over to a table with it and sat down. I shook off my trance over Lucas and joined her. He was paging through a brown leather book.
“Check this out,” Nix said. She turned the book around to face me and pointed to a table of contents in the beginning of the book. I followed her finger to the chapter title: “Forbidden.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” I said. I turned around in the chair and called out to Lucas, “Come see what Nix found.”
He pushed a book back into place and came over to the table to stand right next to me. He crouched down to see better, and I could feel the heat coming off his body. I cleared my throat, anervous reflex, but he didn’t seem to notice. I scooched in the chair, and my leg accidentally brushed against his. “Oh, sorry,” I said.
He put a hand on my leg and rubbed it. “No need to apologize.”
Once again, when he stopped touching me, I felt it as a physical loss.
Lucas began turning pages in the book, looking for the ominously named “Forbidden” chapter. He stopped and turned back a few pages, then a few more, then began flipping forward again. “I don’t understand,” he muttered. He turned back and forth again, faster, frustrated. “It’s not there.”
“What do you mean?” I leaned over to look. He showed me one page, then the next.
“This is where the ‘Forbidden’ chapter should be.” He picked up the book and opened it wider. “It was cut out.” He showed me where the few pages that made up that section were cleanly removed.
“Holy...” Nix said under her breath.
Lucas put the book down. “Looks like someone was already here.”
“Now what?” I asked them. “I mean, I guess the good news is we were on the right track. But we’re a few steps behind.”
“We need to find another copy of the book,” Lucas said.
Nix clapped her hands together. “Guess we’re going to town. The bookstore will have it.”
28
On the wayinto town, we shared theories about the culprit.
“The witch cut out the information they used to commit the murders,” Lucas said. “That’s option number one. But we shouldn’t jump to conclusions either.”
“Maybe it was cut out to prevent anyone from using the information,” I offered. “Maybe the witch didn’t even need it. Could just be a case of good old censorship.”
“Distinctly possible,” Lucas said. “That’s option number two.” We sat in quiet contemplation for a minute. “Can either of you think of anything else?” he asked.
