“I did wake because I heard arguing, and I crept downstairs.” She shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts. “But I know I was sitting on the stairs when he came through the door.”
“Then who was she arguing with if it wasn’t your father?”
“I don’t know.” She tried to remember but the more she tried to focus, the more the details slipped away. “I followed him into the kitchen.”
“If you saw him come through the door and you followed him into the kitchen, that means you saw everything.” Theo sat on the bed beside her, taking her hands gently in his. “Olivia... you saw the murder.”
She shook her head, trying to block out the pain. In her mind she could see the flowers strewn across the floor, their stems snapped, and their delicate petals crushed, turning a darker shade as they absorbed the blood that they lay in.
“Olivia,” Theo spoke more firmly as she became lost in the panic of an eight-year-old child. “What happened next?”
“I don’t know.” Her desperate gaze locked on him. “I don’t remember.”
She shut her eyes against the onslaught of images. The blood was everywhere, it was all over her hands and the flowers, and the overwhelming sickly scent of them was choking her, and she couldn’t breathe.
“Get rid of them,” she whispered as her voice broke. “Please… get rid of them.”
He slid off the bed, picked the flowers up and disappeared from the room. She could still smell them. Her heart pounded in her chest, and she could see her mother lying on the floor in front of her. All the pain and heat went straight to her hands and with it came a shocking realization. When Theo came back into the room, the look she gave him was filled with utter devastation.
“The fire…” Her voice was so low he had to step closer. “It was me…”
“What was you?” He sat on the bed next to her.
“The fire was my fault. I couldn’t control it. All the fear and confusion and heat went straight to my hands.” She looked up at him as a tear slid slowly down her cheek. “I started the fire.”
“Olivia,” he whispered, cradling her face gently in his hands as another tear slid down her face. “It wasn’t your fault.’
“I started the fire.” She shook her head.
“Olivia, they were already dead, your mother… your grandmother. It made no difference.” He forced her to look at him, his expression grave. “They were already dead,” he repeated more softly.
The first sob escaped as he pulled her into his arms and drew them both down onto the bed, holding her tightly.
She felt as if she was flying apart at the seams, and the only thing holding her together in that moment was his arms. Unable to hold it in any longer, she buried her face in his chest and cried as though her heart was breaking.
They were so wrapped up in each other that neither noticed when the first few errant flakes of snow descended in the darkness outside her window.
28
Olivia stood at the window, staring out as the snowflakes drifted down on ghostly wings and settled onto the thick blanket coating the ground. Beau fidgeted in her arms, reaching up and licking her jaw as she stroked his soft golden coat. Putting the puppy down, she watched as he ambled over to his cushion in front of the fire. He climbed on top of it, padding it down by turning in circles until he finally settled, tucking his paws under his face and regarding her with big brown eyes.
Turning back to the window, she stared out with a hollow gaze. They were almost out of time. Theo’s premonition put the last and final murder after the first snowfall. The problem was that without a definitive timescale to work with, they had almost no hope of stopping her father from raising the demon.
Frowning to herself, she wandered back to the shabby old couch and dropped down, folding her legs underneath her. Beau, excited at the prospect of snuggling, scrambled up next to her and plopped himself down. Stroking his head absently, she picked up Hester’s Grimoire from the small coffee table and laid it in her lap.
It was a big, heavy book bound in thick dark leather and inlaid with intricate designs. The pads of her fingers traced the triple moon design on its face and down to the ornately inscribed tree of life beneath it. As it had before, the book rippled beneath her fingertips like it was shivering at her touch. When she opened it, the whisper of the dry crackling pages sounded like a sigh, as if it had been waiting for her somehow.
Once again, the curly black script swirled across the page until it formed words she could read. Written in the same handwriting as Hester’s journal, she felt a profound sense of connection. So far, she had been the only one able to read Hester’s Grimoire, and it made her feel as if she were bound, in an intensely personal way, to the ancestor she’d grown up hearing everyone talk about.
Flipping idly through the pages, her gaze once again rested on the spell Hester had created to trap the demon. She’d read it and re-read it many times, but half the words didn’t make sense. Sighing in frustration, she was about to turn the page when she noticed the illustration in the top right-hand corner. It was a crescent moon, but it seemed to be facing the wrong way, like a mirror image. Turning back to the previous page, there was a large inverted ‘c’ at the top of the page. With her mind working furiously, she looked across to the left-hand page. There was another large ‘c’, this one facing the correct way, and on the page before that, another crescent moon facing the right way.
Very carefully, and not quite believing what she was considering doing to such an old, valuable document, she folded the pages inwards so that the two ‘c’ shapes met and formed a circle. Next, she folded in the two pages either side, so that the two crescent moons were placed either side of the circle. She suddenly found herself staring at a hidden illustration of a triple moon, and beneath it the words, which had not made sense before, were now perfectly aligned.
She scanned down the now familiar handwriting to the message it revealed.
“Only night under a blood moon, when the moon overpowers the sun, shall the door be opened.”
Under a blood moon, she chewed her bottom lip thoughtfully. A blood moon— a full lunar eclipse—it had to be during a full lunar eclipse when direct sunlight would be completely blocked by the earth’s shadow. The only light seen would be refracted through the earth’s shadow, and it would appear red like the sunset. Frowning in concentration, she re-read the message.
