“Wolfboy?”
“You call me Mouse.”
He snorted. “You’ll need to do better than that. Also, it’s way too…on the nose.”
“Maybe I’ll just stick with the rodent theme and call you rat.”
“So, you’re willingly going to admit I’m bigger, stronger and more intelligent than you?”
I opened my mouth and then shut it again.
“Didn’t think so.” He headed toward one of the book aisles. “I’ll start on this end. You start on the other.”
“What are we looking for? A giant sign that says, ‘Secrets Here’? It won’t be that easy.”
“Probably not. But let’s hope there’s something about the war. Or maybe about when the galeons and phaanons first arrived.”
We began searching. We went aisle by aisle, book by book, and didn’t find anything. We spent the night sleeping on the library floor after Ace got to enact one of his library fantasies. When the sun rose the next day, bathing us in golden light, we started again. We only broke to find food.
Now, midafternoon, I was beginning to lose hope. We were only an aisle away from meeting in the middle and then this trip would’ve been for nothing.
I picked up a black leatherbound book and flipped open the cover. Dust rose in the air and I sneezed. The title had worn off the front, but the title page read, “The Fall of the Phaanon.”
I gripped the book tighter and started reading. Most of what the book detailed was common knowledge, though it also mentioned blood-tipped arrows. Apparently, galeon blood was just as fatal to phaanons as phaanon blood was to galeons.
I could be killed.
Somehow, that wasn’t so reassuring. There was a lot of galeon blood out there…
Wait.
Wait a phaaning second.
Maybe that was why the first arrow had affected me more. Maybe it had nothing to do with my body acclimatizing to the phaanon poison. Maybe the first one had been tainted with galeon blood.
I sucked in a deep breath.
If that was true, it meant someone else already suspected I was a pureblood phaanon. We already figured O’Reilly was behind the attacks, but did he know I was phaanon as well?
I kept leafing through the pages, scouring it for new information, when I flipped to a full spread image.
It was the same artwork from Sley’s tapestry.
“I found it,” I whispered.
“You want me to pound it?” Ace called out. “I mean, we took a break already, but I’m game.”
“No, Fluffykins. I said I think I’ve found it.”
“And I think I prefer Wolfboy to whatever the phaan you just called me.” Ace dropped whatever book he’d been holding and walked over. He leaned over my shoulder and studied the page. “It’s the same art piece.”
I nodded. “The tapestry artist must’ve seen this somehow.”
“It could be in more than one place. What does the book say about it?”
I flipped back to the preceding page. Nothing. No reference. I flipped past the artwork to the next page, and there, scrawled down the center of the page was a poem written in script:
They breeched the veil with magic and zeal
