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“I'll examine it first, see if I can find any clues to the cause of your abnormal abilities by comparing it with old samples from other Quatura.” He picked up one of the tubes and examined it as if he could discover something special in it. “And then I'll test Umbra on it.”

The curiosity that had increasingly haunted me in recent weeks regarding the dark practices now crept out of its hiding place again.

I had a thousand questions, and he owed me answers. After all, we had made a pact. And knowing Erik, he had answers to such things, had acquired a wealth of knowledge.

I suppressed a smile, as well as the suffocating feeling in my chest.

“Assuming Umbra is not part of us, what is its origin?”

He lowered the tube with my blood and put it back in the plastic case.

“A good question,” he began, closing the case before walking around the table where he had placed his black leather notebooks after David had disappeared. “Umbra is something that seems to be accessible to all supernatural species.”

He opened one of the books and looked at the runes.

I took the opportunity to slide off the table and carefully walk over to him, curious to see what the runes looked like up-close.

“Why exactly, I'm currently trying to find out.”

Arriving beside him, I tried to ignore how unfamiliar it felt to stand so close to him. If I wanted to look at the mysterious black ink symbols, I had no choice.

They were small, listed like an alphabet, and there were twenty-nine of them, three more than in the modern Latin alphabet.

“You have to think of it this way,” he continued, turning to me, completely focused on his explanation. “The substance that grants Quatura access to their abilities flows through our veins. Our neural network is attuned to it.”

He pointed to his chest, as if that were the core of our elemental powers, before tapping one of the closed notebooks.

“Umbra, on the other hand, is something we can access through sacrifice. Provided we already have the ability to access higher energies within us, as is the case for Quatura, Senseque, and Ruisangors. In most cases, it is enough to shed blood in combination with the appropriate runes.”

His finger moved to the open notebook.

“In the scriptures available to me, everything points to it being a kind of sacrifice to the goddess Umbrana.”

“Umbrana?”

Quentin stared at me. Not with the tense expression he usually had, but as if I were a colleague with whom he was discussing his latest research findings.

“Does Medusa mean anything to you?”

I nodded silently, even though everything inside me screamed Erik. It was as if I was discovering more and more of him in the man in front of me.

My heart continued to flutter, more and more intensely, without me being able to stop it. If this continued, something else would happen. I could already feel ice crystals on my fingertips.

“Umbrana is the goddess of darkness. In the ancient Umbra writings, she is also known as the Snake-Whispering Martyr Queen of the Ravens.”

Quentin turned back to the book in front of him and began to leaf through it. On the very next page was some illegible text, obviously written by him, using the same script as the alphabet.

Quentin tapped an ornate corner decoration next to which he had scribbled a question mark.

“Since all the writings are decorated with snakes and the symbols often contain the same serpentine shape or even snakes themselves, I assume that the Greek goddess Medusa and Umbrana are the same mythological deities. Greek scholars in the eighth century B.C. likely misinterpreted Umbrien sources that had been translated into Greek and erroneously turned a very ancient entity in Hesiod’s Theogony into a monster.”

Medusa was not a goddess. Erik was the only one I had ever met who made her one.

Now what Erik had wanted to tell me back then made sense. It seemed to have kept him busy, and he had felt the need to share this theory with me, but the humanity he expected to find in me had prevented him from doing so.

I remembered a second thing he had wanted to talk to me about. Atlantis. But if I asked now, it would be too obvious...

“Anyway,” he began again. “I'm trying to find out how exactly each species reacts to Umbra by testing it on the two of you.” He focused on me again. “On your blood, and later on you directly.”