That night I had strange dreams. Of strange planetary alignments and moving through an empty house. Floating without speaking, without noise, without light. Symbols marred the walls, but all I could do was feel them with my fingers. Running over them again and again, until I woke up.
I started carrying the Book of Autumn with me all the time. I slept with it on one side and my Greek dictionary on the other. Though no matter how much I set my will against it, parts of S’s text continued to elude me.
The nights started to feel late even after the sun had barely left the sky, and I guzzled espresso after espresso to stay awake. It seemed as if the translator—whoever they were—hadn’t translated only for the benefit of others, but also for themself. Specific passages by S were copied over and over again, as if they were trying to understand it, too, the same lines that had given me such trouble. At each turn, my head ached and vision blurred.
Sleepiness came, and then more coffee. I lost track of how many espressos I had, until I was so jittery I felt like I could’ve leaped off a building and made it to the next roof. I was determined: I would make sense of at least one of these rambling passages, just take it one sentence at a time, but it was no use. My eyes kept glazing over, and before I knew it, I’d been reading the same sentence for the last twenty minutes.
At one point, Max caught me dozing off at my desk.
“Cella … how long have you been awake?”
“A couple of days.”
“What? Jesus, get some sleep. You can’t stay up for days reading this book.”
“I’m fine.”
But it was clear to me now that this was, unequivocally, a book of Magic. And among the rambling notes and healing prayers, omens and instructions for gauging the Moon’s patterns, practices for health and well-being that S had learned in his travels, was the spell Dani had undertaken.
And, I hoped, one to bring her back again.
FROM THE JOURNAL OF DANICA STEWART
MARCH 12TH[THREE WEEKS BEFORE THE MURDER]
Nyktipoloi, bacchants, maenads, initiates in the mysteries. A fiery punishment awaits us, my dear, didn’t you know? For, as Heraclitus says, initiation into the mysteries is unholy.
but we’ve always been unholy, you and I, haven’t we?
And what has happened once, happens again.
the chief of charlatans,
our fraudulent art
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
“Found anything yet?” Max asked, sliding me a bottle of green tea.
He’d been gone more and more often. It was almost like he was afraid of the book, or afraid of how much time I spent studying it. Despite all we’d gone through to get it, he discounted the book at every turn, finding new suspects to chase down instead. He hunted down Strauss’s students to question them, was trying to get info on Joselyn Hart’s family after trying to use his charm on her and being summarily greeted by a brick wall.
I shook my head. “No, but there’s Magic here. I can feel it.” It wasn’t something I could put into words as much as something I could feel coursing through my veins, its heady buzz drawing me closer, beckoning me over a ledge that stood above a dark chasm.
After looking at the symbols in the book, things had started to shift for me. I felt as much as saw the symbol for Magic, for the One. I felt it as S had described it, as if it were its own entity, a presence all its own. And I felt like I could feel its eyes on me, watching over my shoulder, never far from me. I could even picture its voice as if I’d heard it before: ancient, and deep as the earth. These thoughts had started invading my dreams, and Bear had woken me up on more than one occasion, paws on my chest, big eyes full of concern. Always this was after I’d woken up on the floor, my throat raw as if I’d been screaming.
Max nodded and turned to leave before hesitating, chewing on his lip. “Hey … you okay? It wouldn’t kill you to leave it for a second. I can take over.”
“I’m just a bit tired, is all.”
Max reached for my hand. “Cel, it’s more than that. I can see it all over your face. Maybe we should switch off now, and I could hold the book a while. I don’t like what this book is doing to you. Let me help.”
But how could I tell him that reading this book was the only time that I felt okay? That it distracted me from the stuff on the walls, from the words written in my shower, the shadows creeping up my dorm wall? And the gnawing feeling that maybe there really was something there, that I wasn’t just imagining it. Something that I just kept missing, that stayed just outside my reach.
How could I tell him that losing myself in a centuries-old book was the only thing that made me feel better? If I could just figure out this problem, maybe everything else would be fine, too.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
When the Winds Blow, Worship the Noise
