Oliver Marst. Black mark.
Lukas Nocthare.
Lukas.
‘Lu—’ I gasp, choking on a sob. ‘Lukas.’
Black. Mark.
Dead. All these people are dead.
My body bows with the force of the pain that spears through me, and a mournful cry falls past my lips.
‘Aria?’ Tilly’s concerned voice comes from the other side of the aisle. I can barely hear her hurried footsteps through the loud thudding in my ears as she makes her way toward me. ‘Oh Stars,’ she whispers whenshe reaches my side, dropping to her knees beside me to wrap her arms around my shoulders.
‘He – he’s in this. His name,’ I breathe. ‘They’re all in here. All of them.’ I shove the book into her lap, needing to get it away from me. ‘Look.’ I use the backs of my hands to wipe at my tears.
Tilly nods and starts to scan the page. Her lips purse together tightly as she flips backward to the beginning. ‘Oh.’
Her expression grows grave the more she reads, until she gets to the final page and ever so slowly lifts her eyes to mine. ‘There … shouldn’t be five of them.’
‘W-what?’
‘Five, Aria!’ She stabs the page with a finger. ‘Abbott, Davis, Finch, Marstandyour brother. That makes five. Every other entry had four names and look …’ She reaches beside her to where a brown dusty book is sprawled open at her feet. As if she dropped it in her haste to wrap me in her warmth. She picks it up and flicks through it, turning frantically until she gets to her destination. Tilly places the open book down on the cold stone floor.
Its yellowed pages are filled with nearly unidentifiable scribbles of ink, though I make out several words.
Possession. Soul. Death. Sacrifice. Host.
‘Magia Malefica,’ Tilly points out. ‘Black Magic. This spell is ancient, used when one desires to inhabit another’s body. To kill another’s soul essentially and use their body as a vessel for their own.’
My eyes drop to the page, where a diagram is scribbled at the bottom corner. A five-pointed star with the word ‘host’ written at the top of the star. The word ‘sacrifice’ is written on the other four.
Four sacrifices.
The dots start to connect as I look between the two books, connecting the names written in mine, to the diagram written in hers. ‘If these two books coincide, it means this has been happening for hundreds of years.’
‘If that’s true, this is proof that your brother is innocent and what happened to those students last year is part of something that’s been happening long before any of us were here.’
‘L-Lukas couldn’t have performed a spell this intricate either.’ I tell her what Professor Fern and Jed confessed to me. ‘I have a theory,’ I whisper.
‘What is it?’
‘I know this might sound crazy, but what if whoever started this all those years ago is the same person who did it here?’ I touch the most recent date, my finger tracing delicately over my brother’s name. My heart squeezes at the sight of the black mark beside it; it feels like a stain on his memory. Like the book is taunting me. He’s gone. Look, here is proof.
‘What if they started something back then and realised they could live forever, continuously inhabiting other bodies, therefore prolonging their life?’
Tilly shakes her head in disbelief. ‘That amount of black magic over such a long period of time … it would destroy a person’s soul. Xavier told us that much the night by the cliff.’
‘I know. But look at this.’ I flip back to the beginning of the book and point at the first entry then flip to another and back again. ‘See the way the G’s and Y’s all curl into perfect little loops? It’s constant throughout the entire book. Every entry has the same handwriting. Till, thismustbe the same person.’
She visibly pales, and I think she’s finally seeing what I’m seeing here. A pool of dread starts to rise up in my stomach as if someone else agreeing with me makes the horrifying discovery real. Part of me was almost hoping she’d argue against it. It might halt the fear currently stretching out to sink its teeth into my bones.
‘We need to get out of here,’ I say, picking up the book and holding it to my chest. This is it. I did it. This book and the spell in the one Tilly found is the proof I needed to stake my claim for Lukas’s innocence. Not only that, but we’ve also discovered there is also someone among us who has been living a lie, who has been murdering students every few decades over the course of centuries.
‘And do what? We can’t take these with us. They could be enchanted for all we know, And even if they aren’t, then what? We just walk out of here with two giant books and hide them under our cloaks?’
She has a point.
