“Am I, though?” she pushed.
Eustace eyed her sidelong. “A couple of days ago you told me the landscaper worshipped the devil. Remember that? And then we found out he had a music career. I know what it looks like down there, but I think we should reserve judgment until we know more.”
“It looks positively macabre,” Cordelia said. “What did Bennett say in the crypt? Something about our family being very old and having all thesecustoms.”
“Don’t remind me,” Eustace said, tugging a vape pen from her pocket and taking a drag to settle her nerves.
“Do you think he knows about that room? The wall of names?Our bloodline?” Cordelia questioned. “Do you think he knows they were witches?”
“We’rewitches,” her sister clarified. “You said our names were on that wall too.”
Cordelia’s head thumped with pressure, as if it were swelling.
Eustace slammed something down on top of the ledgers they’d left strewn about.
“What is that?” Cordelia asked, straining to see.
Her sister rested a hand on it. “I’m not sure. I was trying to look at it down there, but you had the light. It was in my other hand when you dragged me out.”
Cordelia took a step closer. On the cover—a wormy, brown leather with raw edges—was burned the same oddly formed eight-pointed star from the stair hall floor, its center uncomfortably mesmerizing, drawing and repelling her at once.
Eustace ran her fingers over it. “What do you think it means?”
Cordelia shook her head. “I have no idea. I thought it was just a standard medallion at first. You know, like a compass design. But now I’m not so sure.”
Eustace peeled back the cover. Rough, rag-laid pages were marked with tight lines of cryptic writing. Cordelia recognized many of the same symbols they’d already seen. Some of the lines ran vertical instead of horizontal.
“Jesus, that would give anybody a migraine,” Eustace complained.
Reflexively, Cordelia lifted a hand back to her head, but the gnaw was quieting.
Eustace eyed her but didn’t comment. “What language do you think it is?”
She shrugged. “High gibberish? It looks like hieroglyphs, or maybe just pieces of them.”
Eustace nodded, flipping through. On the final page, she pointed to some numbers at the top. “Is that a date?”
“Seeing as there’s not a sixteenth month or a sixty-fourth day, I doubt it.” Cordelia started organizing some of the ledgers and books they’d left in the ransacked room, returning them to the shelves.
Eustace screwed her mouth to one side. “Cordy, this has to be what we’ve been looking for. If we can translate this book, we can figure out what they did in that room. We can decode those symbols on our aunt’s face and Mom’s tattoo, the scratches in the wall. Maybe we’ll find a way to stop your headaches in here.”
“Yeah, if we can figure out how to read it,” Cordelia told her. “Here, open it for me.” Holding her phone out, she took a photo of one of the simpler symbols. “I saw this same one on the floor in the basement and in the crypt on our aunt.”
It looked like anFwith broken arms. Using a reverse image search, she waited to see what the internet had to say about it.
“Well?” Eustace asked.
“Ansuz,” Cordelia read. “That’s what it’s called. It’s part of something called theElder Futhark.”
“The what what?”
Cordelia scrolled up the screen of her phone, scanning for the most pertinent information. “They’re Nordic runes,” she told her sister.
“As in Vikings? I thought Bennett said our ancestors came here from Britain.”
Cordelia shrugged. “Could just be a cipher, a way of coding so it can’t be easily read.”
“Maybe,” Eustace agreed, but she didn’t look convinced.
