Hopefully, a hint was in the library somewhere.
Zack reached the library doors just before Katie, zipped in, and opened the left one wide. She had a habit of zooming too fast to stop herself from hitting it.
“Shoot! Not fair!” Katie declared as she came to a halt.
“How is it not fair?” Zack asked.
“I had a head start. I know your sire’s a gajillion years older than mine, but come on!”
“You’ve got to stop saying shit like that, or you’re going to slip up in public next week,” Zack told her.
Katie rolled her eyes. “And you have to stop saying ‘shit.’”
Fuck, I miss Amber. Zack waited for Seamus to make a remark. Nothing came.
They’d set up working at the two tables in the middle of the library a few nights back. Hers was strewn with books while he kept his work in orderly stacks. The books deserved respect. Some went back to the Middle Ages, and Zack suspected a few might be older than that.
“I didn’t findRichmond’s Guidevery illuminating,” Katie said as she neared her seat. Growing up in schools run by the Enduring Circle of Chicago Mages, she had the benefits of a magic-based education. Where Zack’s focus had been monstersand how to kill, her studies had focused on how to craft spells and brew potions alongside the typical mundane studies for private schools of wealthy elitists.
Hunters tended to drop out of high school—Zack had graduated, but Cal had dropped out at sixteen—but mages went on to prestigious colleges, some going so far as to get doctorates. From what Zack understood, getting a degree in advanced magical theory was usually attributed to either physics, chemistry, or philosophy, depending on the student’s area of focus in order to keep mundanes from asking too many questions.
Which meant Katie was pretty great at doing the math for how much salt was needed for a binding circle of whatever size, but she didn’t have specialized knowledge of how shifters worked. She’d been curious, so Zack had suggested his default since she hadn’t read it.
“Shifters are as different as vampires are.” Zack flipped open the notebook where he was compiling his dragon research. “What were you hoping to learn?”
“I don’t know. Something new.” Katie sat in her seat with a humph. “I didn’t think being a vampire was going to be boring.”
Zack waved his arms around at the massive number of books around them. “I’m sure you don’t know everything in the library.”
She sighed as she dragged the nearest book closer and opened it. “But some of us don’t get off on reading musty old pages.”
“I don’t?—”
“Just an expression, Zack. Lighten up.” She disregarded him to stare at the page in front of her.
He settled into his own stack of books. Treating the books with care meant not reading things at incredible vamp speed. If he relied on that power, he had a habit of accidentally movinga page with too much strength. He’d ripped more than one page. Whoever was keeping the collection had laid some basic enchantments, and the books had repaired themselves, but he didn’t want to tear up books and hope that’d keep happening. Plus, if he overdid his vamp ability, he wound up extra hungry.
However, he didn’t take long to work through his current stack of dragon lore. Most of the books kept repeating the same information. The dragons had left the world after making enemies of just about everyone on the planet and spent their time in the fey realms. Mages had a tendency to blame the lack of magical prowess in the world as a fault of the dragons’ departure. In their theory, dragons were literal magic made flesh. A shifter philosopher was pretty sure that the Age of Reason had dampened abilities, positing that the increasing population of humans who began to reject the supernatural as part of their reality was creating a psychic field that suppressed all magic.
The theories were great, and he was thinking of starting up a paper, only he wasn’t sure where he’d try to get it published or if Seamus would even let him.One, he’d probably love it if I built a reputation as a scholar. And two, why the fuck should I let him stop me?
Once again, no Seamus remark.
He took the stack of dragon books and put them back in their original locations the best he could. Then he went into the section he’d discovered the night before.
Turned out that the library did have books on vampires.
Using his mind’s eye, he moved through fighting maneuvers. Seamus probably hadn’t lied when he said he didn’t constantly watch Zack’s mind, but Takashi had said that building a mental shield of other thoughts would be good practice. Keeping up the buffer also helped Zack remember his training.
Unfortunately, the book he’d been reading didn’t have any answers. He reached for the next, discovered it was in French, and went for the one after that. Flipping open to the title page revealed a stark, serious font that declared,A Translation and Continued Examination of the Theories Proposed by Beatrice the Profane Sorcerer by Edmund Weldrick.
The text was overdramatic, and the author was clearly trying to show off his language skills and vocabulary. Apparently, Beatrice the Profane Sorcerer believed vampires inherently had a connection to the Shadow Realms. Weldrick was adding on that the fey realms were tied to the shadows, which was what made all vampires abominations.
The book was theory without evidence, but Beatrice hypothesized that all vampires should be capable of moving within shadows along with a myriad of other powers. She agreed that the mundane world’s attempts to quash magic were working and that even supernatural species were not immune to having their magical abilities clipped. Weldrick claimed that was utterly preposterous—and from there, he began to argue with everything Beatrice had to say.
True power will not return to the world until true dragons return, Beatrice claimed. Weldrick took affront to that and spent three pages describing how his grandfather Ross Weldrick had performed some of the greatest feats of magic in written history.
The flaw in that point was that there was no way Edmund could consult all of written history, and he didn’t address the idea that such things could have been written and then lost or that powerful magic could have happened outside of written history. The Wrights and the Gladwells had lost many homes in their fights with supernaturals. Valuable tomes and even personal journals were destroyed nearly every time. That was information about magic lost, and Edmund probably hadn’t considered his hunter contemporaries as a source of knowledge.He seemed to put all his respect into mages, and he was making disdainful remarks about warlocks.
