“Yo, you want to hurry it up in there?” Finch’s voice barked through the door. “Hate to be a killjoy, but there’s no sexy time allotted in the schedule. And I don’t think you’d be too happy if Katherine won because you two couldn’t keep your paws off each other.”
I collapsed in a fit of giggles, and Wade did, too. It was so nice to hear him laugh again. I’d forgotten how much I missed his laugh, and his smile, and the way he was when he wasn’t up to his eyeballs in stress. I didn’t know when we’d get the chance to be alone again, just him and me with no outside pressures, but I’d savor this moment until we had that opportunity again. After all, if we couldn’t have this, then what the heck were we fighting for?
“Are you decent?” The door opened and Finch stepped back in, his hand covering his eyes. Cue me and Wade scrambling to make it look like we hadn’t been smooching each other’s faces off in his hospital bed. Wade shot me a cheeky grin as I readjusted any clothes that were askew and waited for Finch to take his hand away from his face.
Wade chuckled. “What are you doing here, anyway? I would’ve thought Imogene would’ve sent you packing to Purgatory by now, Finch.”
“Nice use of alliteration,” Finch replied. “But no, I’m still hanging around like a bad smell. Imogene’s given me temporary amnesty, so long as I stay within the SDC and I don’t leave Harley’s side. So, you’ve got her to blame for me ruining the romance. Ugh, now you’ve got me doing it.”
“At least we managed to get the Grimoire,” Wade said, his fingertips stroking the dappled bruising and faint singe-marks on my throat. I could tell he hated looking at the marks he’d made. “Which means we’ve got work to do.”
I nodded. “You can say that again.”
“Which means we’ve got work to do,” Finch parroted.
“We need to figure out what’s in the Grimoire,” I replied, trying to shut Finch out. “Specifically, how to find the hidden pages inside it. I think I might have found one when I was in Imogene’s office, but it was all jumbled and weird. I couldn’t read it, but that doesn’t mean I can’t.”
Finch frowned. “Whoa, you didn’t tell me that.”
I shrugged. “I didn’t think it was important yet. It’s just comforting to know there are actually secret spells in there, but we still need to find a way to discover all of them, and then decipher the code that my parents put on them. That first page might have been a fluke, you never know.”
“Let’s hope it wasn’t,” Wade replied.
Finch grinned. “Well then, it’s a good thing I’ve kept to Imogene’s rules, or you’d be stumped. I know a decent spot in the coven where we can open the Grimoire and look through it for as long as we need. It’ll be isolated enough that this chump and I can save your ass if you don’t handle the magic well.”
“That’s a good point. We don’t know how you might react to the spells, especially now that your Suppressor is gone,” Wade added. “Plus, you haven’t exactly reacted well in the past.”
“Not cool, Wade. You should never bring up a lady’s shortcomings.” Finch tutted.
“Just so you know, Finch, if I accidentally summon Erebus again, it’s your name that’s going into the ring.” I shot him a look, and he smirked.
“You wouldn’t do that to me, Sis. You like me too much.”
Ugh, he’s going to be insufferable. I smiled.
As Finch reluctantly helped Wade out of his bed and put him in something other than a somewhat risqué gown, I took a moment to tell Jacob and Krieger where we were going. Although, I couldn’t help but steal a glance at Wade’s peachy backside as he turned to put proper clothes on. Like two Christmas hams, and just as delicious.
“Keep your burner phones on,” Krieger urged, while I tried not to blush, hoping the doctor hadn’t noticed where I’d been staring.
I nodded. “For sure. How’s the detector coming along?”
Jacob groaned. “It’s never-ending.”
“That’s not exactly true,” Krieger interjected. “We’re getting there.”
“Who’s your friend?” I spotted a strange girl crouched under Krieger’s workbench. She was definitely hiding from me—there were no two ways about it.
“Oh… she’s a… she’s a friend of mine,” Jacob replied stiffly.
“A human friend, called Suri. Jacob saved her from Lethe. She’s staying here, at my request, until we can be sure that a memory wipe will hold.” Krieger looked shifty, and now I knew why. He was covering for Jacob, out of some misplaced sense of kindness. It only took a little hint of Empathy to feel their emotions pulsing outward; Jacob and Suri were both besotted with each other. That worried me, though I couldn’t say anything about it right now. I mean, she was adorable and everything, but this couldn’t possibly end well for Jacob. He’d have been better off letting Krieger wipe her mind there and then and letting her go. This world wasn’t the right place for humans, and he was already scarred for life after what had happened to the Smiths. What if something like that happened to Suri because he cared about her?
Speaking of which, a thought hit me—it was probably better for the Smiths if their memories were wiped, too. They’d seen way too much and knew way too much, which was putting them at risk. Ever since that huge memory dump I’d gotten back in the New York tunnels, I’d been having a few changes of heart over certain things. It wasn’t that I’d become colder, simply more logical and less emotional about matters. It was almost like I was seeing things through my parents’ eyes, making me understand why some difficult choices had to be made. Including Suri’s memory wipe.
However, that could wait. The Grimoire couldn’t.
Forty-Two
Harley
Finch’s “decent spot” turned out to be an abandoned classroom in a very old part of the coven that I’d never been to. It looked pretty similar to the classrooms in the newer part of the coven, though it had a dirty chalkboard standing front and center, and the vaulted ceiling, complete with a Neo-Classical frieze of winged gods, didn’t quite fit with the current aesthetic. It looked more like something I would’ve expected to see in New York. And some of the walls had taken on patches of that same oily glaze I’d seen back in New York—a tell-tale sign that this part of the coven had been left to decay, since it was apparently too much hassle to just sever it completely.
“Geez, Finch. Is there anything you don’t know about the SDC?” I glanced at him, expecting to see a smug expression. Instead, he looked sad, like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.
He trailed his fingertips across the desks. “I used to come here with Adley.”
“Ah…” What was I supposed to say to that after everything he’d told me? He’d given her up for us, and that decision was probably going to haunt him for the rest of his life. Especially here, in the room where he’d snuck off with her.
“How did you even find this place?” Wade marveled at the room.
Finch forced a smile onto his face. “You know how it is, when you’ve just got to have a moment alone with your woman. You’ll always find what you need. What can I say? The SDC delivered.”
I removed the Grimoire from my satchel and laid it out on a desk, sitting down in front of it. With the book unopened in front of me, I felt the enormity of what I was about to do and all the weight of responsibility that came with it. Like Imogene had said, I might well have been the final hope in stopping Katherine dead in her tracks. No person alive could know that and not feel terrified about messing it up.
“Well then, here goes nothing,” I murmured. Finch and Wade were standing off to one side, ready to intervene if everything went awry.
Slowly, I reached out to touch the cover, my body buzzing with the Chaos spilling out from inside. I let my fingertips move across the black pearl and the white pearl, and the indented vines that had been inlaid in silver and gold. Guide me through this, okay? I didn’t know if my mom and dad could hear me, but at least touching this book brought me close to them. They’d crea
ted everything inside it, and I was about to try and find the hidden spells that they’d put there for me to discover.
My nerves jangled as I opened the cover and looked at the first page. Finally, I had the chance to look through it, with no pressure or fear of being caught in the act. Finding nothing of interest on the first page, I flipped through the fully written leaves until I found that secret symbol again. It was tucked away in the corner of a spell called “The Binding of Souls.” Reading through it, it seemed to be a more romantic kind of magic, rather than the kind that bound souls to the earth, the way that Katherine had done with my mom. I wondered if my mom and dad had performed this to bind their souls together. If they had, then perhaps they really had been able to reunite in the afterlife, whatever that might be.
As I touched the Veve of Erzulie design, the whispers grew louder and more intense inside my head. This hadn’t happened in the office with Imogene, making me realize that the Grimoire had chosen this moment, when I was more or less alone with it, to whisper its secrets again. “The blood is strong. The blood is clear. The blood will bring clarity.” Those three sentences pounded between my temples, repeating in an endless cycle.
Is that how I read this? The hidden spell had appeared, but it was no clearer to me. The strange symbols and words swirled around the page, just as they’d done before, moving beneath the fully written page. I fixated on the symbols, trying to go into some kind of Beautiful Mind mode, where the words and symbols would somehow come together to give me the answer. They didn’t, but that didn’t stop me from staring at the page, begging it to become clear.
Across the room, Finch and Wade were busy putting up protection spells, more for their sake and the coven’s than mine. If I accidentally caused the interdimensional bubble to crack, they needed to make sure that all angles were covered. Returning my attention to the book, I delved deeper into the symbols, trying to make sense of them. The trouble was, they seemed to be from a mishmash of cultures—voodoo glyphs, with some random bits of Cyrillic, Hangul, and Arabic thrown in, just to baffle me even more. And that was just the stuff I vaguely recognized.
You need to help me… I couldn’t do this alone. I needed my mom and dad now, more than ever. Only, they weren’t here—I just had these pages as a reminder that they were gone, and they were never coming back. My sadness flowed outward, spilling right into the pages and spreading across the jumbled ink.
“I can’t feel her moving. How can I concentrate on this when she’s not moving?” A very clear voice echoed in my head. A soft, feminine voice that I recognized as keenly as my own. My mom was talking to me, transcending time and space to enter my brain.
“You don’t feel that?” That was my dad, his voice a rich baritone that boomed into the core of my chest.
“Don’t tease me, Hiram. I can’t feel anything. I should be able to by now, shouldn’t I?” My mom sounded worried.
“There! Didn’t you feel the peanut kick?” There was a pause.
“I… I think I felt it that time!” My mom sounded deliriously happy. I could hear them laughing together, all her worries disappearing in a split second of joy.
Peanut? Was that what they’d called me? The voices shifted, the room they were in sounding more echoey.
“Nope, I don’t see it,” Hiram said.
“There! That’s her head, and that’s her cute little butt, and those are her legs,” my mom replied, chuckling.
“You sure she isn’t a he? That looks like a—”
“She’s going to be our daughter, Hiram,” my mom interjected. “We’re going to have a little girl.”
“If you say so.”
“You’re not happy?” My mom sounded sad.
“I couldn’t be happier, love. I’m just being silly.” He paused. “I can’t wait to meet her. Our little peanut.”
The voices shifted location again, their surroundings making them sound more muffled, almost like I was hearing them underwater.
“We should write one that locks your sister deep in the earth, like she’s one of the Titans.” My dad chuckled, but my mom didn’t sound too impressed. I realized, in that moment, that I was hearing clips of their conversations, from when they’d written the spells into the book. Although, I hadn’t seen one that involved trapping Katherine inside the earth. I could’ve used something like that.
“It’s not funny, Hiram. She’s dropped off the face of the earth. Nobody’s heard from her in months.”
“That’s probably because you tried to invite her to the wedding. You should be happy she didn’t show up. She’d have waltzed in like freaking Maleficent and cursed everyone. You know what she’s like.”
“Yeah, I do know… That’s what worries me.” My mom seemed to be the more logical of the two, and it hurt to know that she’d been concerned about her sister. If she’d acted on those concerns earlier, I wondered how things might have turned out. Would I be with them right now, in the land of the living? Or would Katherine have killed them anyway, and me too?
The voices shifted again.
“What are we supposed to do, Hiram?” My mom sounded like she was in tears.
“Don’t worry, Hester. Katherine isn’t going to risk getting thrown in Purgatory. And even if she does try something, we’ve got these spells to protect ourselves and the peanut. Nothing’s going to happen to us.”
“What if she comes for us? You saw her face at Christmas. She wanted to kill us all then, I’m sure of it. She’s gone mad, Hiram, and I don’t think there’s anything I can do for her this time.”
“You’ve wasted enough time on her, sweetheart. We just need to make sure we can fight her if she does anything stupid.” He paused. “I’ll always be here for you. Always. I’m not leaving your side. And if she wants to hurt you because of something I’ve done, then she’ll have to go through me.”
“I love you.” That damn near broke me in two. The dramatic irony was unbearable. Katherine did go through Hiram, and she murdered my mom by using him. What hurt the most was how earnest he sounded. He genuinely meant what he was saying, but he hadn’t realized that Katherine would use his greatest weakness against him—my mom.
“Not as much as I love you,” he replied softly.
The voices shifted again, the clips getting shorter. At first, I’d thought this insight was pretty amazing, but now it was borderline torture. I had to listen to my parents’ last moments, more or less, and that wasn’t easy to stomach.
“No matter what happens, we have to protect her,” my mom said.
“We will, love. We will. Katherine isn’t getting her,” my dad replied.
“Do you promise?”
“With all my heart.”
My mom’s voice disappeared altogether, leaving only my dad’s. He was talking rapidly, like he was running out of time. He seemed to be putting one more spell into the Grimoire, going solo, and that meant one thing. By this point, my mom’s death warrant had likely already been signed, and my dad was doing everything he could to keep the promise he’d made to her, to protect me.
“It’s too late for us,” my dad murmured. “It’s too late for us, but there’s still hope. I’m going to kill my wife tonight, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. But I can stop her. I can stop Katherine. I have to.” His voice broke, as though he was crying. “This spell will put an end to her, once and for all. And though I won’t live to see it, I hope that my daughter might be saved. Let her be saved. Let her know that she was loved. I love you, Hester.” He choked on his words, whispering them as he spoke with a shaky voice. “I love you, peanut. I’m sorry. I hope this can make it better, in some small way. Forgive me. Please, forgive me for what I’m about to do.”
I wrenched away from the Grimoire, realizing I’d been almost nose-to-paper with it. Where there’d been nothing but a jumble of symbols, now there was an actual spell. The inky etchings had spread out, forming coherent sentences that filled the page in a hasty scrawl. There was just one major problem: the spell was writte
n in an ancient language that I couldn’t read.
I kept looking at it, feeling rattled by the dangerous buzz that shivered off the unfamiliar text. This wasn’t a simple spell—this was dark and menacing, and very, very important. I didn’t know why it was important, but it was just a sense I got. It felt important. My dad had been crying and whispering as he wrote the spell, to the point where I could see splashes on the ink. This was the last entry in the Grimoire. The very last thing he wrote before he gave in to the Sal Vínna curse and killed my mom. And it was on one of the hidden pages.
But what does it mean? I wasn’t leaving this room until I figured it out. My parents had left this for me, and I wouldn’t let them down. Not now. Not after they’d sacrificed themselves so that I might find this and end Katherine for good.
Forty-Three
Jacob
I stared at the magical detector.
After so many hours of work, it was almost finished. A few more screws, and this thing would be complete again. We had an audience, too. Krieger, Louella, and Isadora were standing around the workbench. The latter two had come back to the infirmary as soon as Krieger called Isadora to tell her we were close to finishing it. And, where Isadora went, so did Louella. They’d become a double act lately. I didn’t mind. Louella needed good people around her, and Isadora was the best.
Raffe, Santana, Tatyana, Dylan, and Astrid had also come to watch the grand unveiling. So it was more or less a full house. No Suri—she’d been sent back to the quarantine room, since this was top-secret info. There was no Harley, no Wade, no Finch, and no Garrett either, but they were here in spirit. Actually, come to think of it, where are they? I’d sent a couple of texts and received pretty vague replies. Garrett was back in LA, so he was accounted for. But the other three? I tried not to let it worry me. Harley was a big girl. Whatever she was up to, she could handle herself. Besides, Imogene had probably given her something to do, same as everyone else. The rest of the Rag Team were shirking right now, but it was for a good cause.
Harley Merlin 7: Harley Merlin and the Detector Fix Page 35