Jenna was wearing an equally annoyed expression. “It’s not here,” she said. “Maybe we should look downstairs again.”
I bit back disappointment. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to see the book so badly. I already knew where I’d heard Thorne before, and why it was so important.
Thorne was the last name of the woman whose spell had made Alice a demon. Who had, inadvertently I guess, mademe a demon. There was no doubt in my mind that Alice had been one of those girls sent here during the Blitz, and that Thorne Abbey was where everything had started.
Still, I wanted to see a picture of Alice here. Before she’d been changed.
“Yeah,” I told Jenna. “We can look again later. It’s not that big a deal.”
Jenna wasn’t an idiot. She’d known me long enough to know when I was lying. But she let it go and said, “Oh, check this out.”
Shoved in the corner, just under Pissy Guy on a Horse, was a small black bookcase that only came up to my chest. It was covered in dust, and I saw immediately why Jenna had said it was weird. There was only one book on the shelf, but it was under a thick glass cube. Scratched into the glass were symbols I’d never seen before.
“Try to open it,” Jenna said.
There wasn’t any handle that I could see, so I curled my fingers around the edge of the glass, trying to see if it could be pried open.
I immediately jerked my hand back. “Whoa.”
“I know, right? That thing is covered in some serious mojo.”
Serious mojo was an understatement. My fingers were burning. The sensation was similar to what I’d felt when I’d touched Archer’s chest and felt the mark of The Eye sear into my palm. “Whatever that book is, someone really didn’t want anyone to look at it.”
“No, they didn’t.”
Jenna and I both jumped and whirled around.
My dad stood behind us, a small smile on his lips. His hands were clasped behind his back. “That book is the Thorne family’s grimoire. A spell book.”
“I know what a grimoire is,” I said irritably, but he continued like I hadn’t spoken.
“It contains some of the darkest magic ever known to Prodigium. The Council locked it up years ago.”
“They were witches, then? The Thornes?”
Dad ran a hand over the top of the cabinet. I flinched for him, but he didn’t even seem to feel the shock of magic. “They were,” he replied. “Dark witches, of course. Very powerful and very adept at concealing their true identity from humans.”
“They’re the ones who made Alice a demon, right?”
Jenna made a little surprised noise next to me, but Dad just studied me for a moment before saying, “Yes. And aren’t you clever for putting that together so quickly?”
He sounded genuinely pleased, and a little surge of happiness went through me. Still, I said, “Jenna actually helped me figure it out. She read something about a bunch of girls being sent here during the Blitz, and I remembered Mrs. Casnoff saying that the lady who, uh, changed Alice was named Thorne. That’s why we were in here, actually. I was going to see if I could find Alice’s picture in one of the books Jenna was reading.”
“If you want a picture of your great-grandmother during her time at Thorne, I have one. Why didn’t you just come ask me in the first place?”
A sarcastic comment sprang to mind, but I immediately bit it back. He was right. Asking him would’ve been the logical thing to do instead of playing cloak-and-dagger in the library.
Thank God for Jenna, who looked up at my dad and said, “Mr. Atherton, Sophie’s spent the last sixteen years of her life having people lie to her about one thing or another. At Hecate, she got pretty good at finding things out on her own. Hard habit to break.”
Jenna may have been a tiny blonde with a nearly pathological love for pink, but she was still a vampire, and that meant she could be pretty intimidating when she wanted to be. Right now, I kind of wanted to pick her up and hug her.
Dad looked back and forth between us. “Mrs. Casnoff said the two of you were a formidable team. I see now what she meant. Well, if there’s nothing else you ladies need in the library, Sophie, would you care to accompany me on a walk about the grounds?”
I wondered if there were ever times when Dad didn’t sound like he’d just escaped from a Jane Austen novel. It was weird to think of my superpractical mom falling for a guy like him. She’d never struck me as the type to go for a smooth talker. Of course,I never thought I’d fall for a pretty boy who was secretly a Prodigium-killer, so what the heck did I know?
“It’s getting dark,” I said to Dad.
“Oh, I think we still have plenty of light left. And the view of the house at this time of day is quite spectacular.”
In the few weeks since I’d met Dad, I’d learned to read his eyes and not his tone of voice. And right now, his eyes said I was going on a walk with him whether I wanted to or not.
“Okay,” I said. “Why not?”
“Excellent! You’ll be fine on your own for a little while, won’t you?” he asked Jenna.
She glanced at me. “Sure, Mr. Atherton,” she said. “I’ll, uh, just go see what Cal is doing.”
“Wonderful idea,” Dad replied. He held his elbow out to me. “Shall we?”
chapter 8
We made our way to the front door, passing one of the servants. She was dusting a marble-top table in the hallway, but instead of using a feather duster or Pledge, she just held her hands above the surface. The dust swirled up in a tiny cloud, vanishing as it rose. Watching it was every bit as jarring as the computer and cell phone had been. At Hecate, no one was that…well,casual with magic. Mrs. Casnoff certainly wouldn’t have let us use our powers to dust.
Dad and I didn’t speak until we were outside. “Look,” I said, “I’m really sorry I touched your magical bookcase or whatever that was. I didn’t know.”
Dad just took a deep breath as we walked down the gravel drive. “Lovely. Can you smell that, Sophie?”
“Um…smell what?”
“Lavender. Thorne Abbey has it planted in every garden on the premises. It’s especially fine on evenings like this.”
I took an experimental sniff. Itwas nice, and the evening was beautiful; the air wasn’t too warm or too cool, and there were shadows creeping across the green lawn. I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more if I hadn’t been at the Home for Wayward Demons.
We kept walking in silence. My hand rested lightly in the crook of Dad’s elbow, which was equal parts nice and weird. As we walked, all I could think was, This is mydad. I’m hanging out with my dad, and we’re acting like he hasn’t been the World’s Most Absentee Father for nearly seventeen years.
Dad led us over the stone bridge and up a small hill. We stopped at the top and turned to look down at the house.
Dad was right. The view was amazing. Nestled in its valley, Thorne Abbey was bathed in soft, golden light. In the distance, the forest seemed to curl around the building, protecting and sheltering it. I wanted to think it was beautiful, but looking at it, all I could think about was how different my life would have been if Alice had never come here.
“I’ve loved this house from the moment I set eyes on it,” Dad said quietly.
“I just wish it were a little bigger,” I said. “I need at least five hundred bedrooms to keep from feeling cramped, you know?”
It was a lame attempt at a joke, but Dad chuckled anyway. “I hoped you would like it. It’s our birthplace, in a manner of speaking. Would you like to hear the story?”
Even though my mouth was dry and my knees were shaky, I forced myself to sound nonchalant. “Might as well.”
“Members of the Thorne family were dark witches and warlocks. For hundreds of years they managed to keep their true identities secret from humans, all the while using their powers to increase the family’s wealth and influence. They were ambitious and clever, but not particularly dangerous. At least not until the war.”
“Which war?”
I thought back over all my classes last year, but I had to admit I’d spent a lot of that time thinking about other things, like Archer, and Jenna, and how girls were getting mysteriously attacked. Who could blame me if I hadn’t paid that much attention in class? “We might have. I just don’t remember.”
“In 1935, a war broke out between L’Occhio di Dio and Prodigium. It was a particularly grim time in our history. Thousands were killed on both sides.”
He paused to clean his glasses with his handkerchief. “At that time, there were only two members of the Thorne family left, Virginia and her younger brother, Henry. Virginia was apparently the one who came up with the idea of raising a demon to fight The Eye. No one had ever been able to do that before in the history of Prodigium, but Virginia decided to try. It took her years, but she finally found the ritual she was looking for in an archaic grimoire.”
“I’m guessing that’s the one in the locked cabinet?”
“Yes. According to Council records, she wanted to perform the ritual on herself, but the head of the Council refused to allow that. He thought it would be safer to attempt it on a regular human. Luckily for Virginia, there were hundreds of girls staying at the Abbey.”
I shivered. “And she picked Alice.”
“She did.”
“Why? I mean, you said there were hundreds of girls here. Did she draw Alice’s name out of a hat or something?”
“I honestly don’t know, Sophie. I’ve always believed the fact that Alice was pregnant at the time had something to do with it. Perhaps she and Henry…Well, in any case, Virginia never told anyone, and after the ritual, Alice was in no position to say anything.”
I rubbed my nose with the back of my hand and said, “In stories like this, there’s usually a magical diary hidden in a trunk that gives you all the answers. Any chance of that happening here?”
“I’m afraid not. Anyway, I think you know the rest of the story. Virginia performed the ritual, but something went wrong. We’ll never really know what happened that night, but the end result was that Virginia and her brother were both dead, and Alice had become a demon.”
“A monster,” I muttered, thinking of those silver claws sliding into Elodie’s neck. I plopped down on the lawn and drew my knees up to my chin. Dad sighed and, after a long moment, sat next to me.
“You’ll get grass stains on your suit.”
“I have other suits. You know, that’s not the first time I’ve heard you use that word to refer to us. May I ask why?”
I raised both eyebrows. “Seriously? You have to ask why demon means monster to me?”
“When you thought you were just a witch, did you use the word ‘monster’ to describe yourself?”
“Of course not.”
“And yet witches, faeries, shapeshifters, demons…we all have the same origins.”
“What do you mean?”
Dad plucked a piece of grass and began shredding it absentmindedly. “We all started out as angels.”
“I know that regular Prodigium did,” I said. “They’re descended from the angels who didn’t pick a side in the war between God and Lucifer.”
Dad met my eyes. “Well, demons are the angels who did pick a side. The wrong one, as it turned out.”
“So what? Just because they used to be angels doesn’t make them—us—the good guys.”
“No, but it does make us a little more complex than monsters. For example, you weren’t particularly disturbed to find out you were a dark witch, and their powers are remarkably similar to ours. In many ways, a demon is nothing more than a very strong dark witch.”
“Or Hogaroth the Slimy,” I muttered.
“What?”
“I just mean…when Virginia called that demon to possess Alice, did that mean Alice—like, actual, real Alice, her soul or whatever—was gone, and it was just some monster wandering around in her body?”
Dad gave a startled laugh. “Oh, God, no. Is that what you’ve thought this whole time?”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Well, how was I supposed to know? It’s not like anyone was in a big hurry to answer all my burning, demony questions.”
He stopped laughing and actually looked a little sheepish. “You’re right. I’m sorry. No, when a demon is called forth, it’s really nothing more than a large dark…force, basically. That’s what being exiled to hell does to an angel. It strips it of everything but its power. They don’t have names, or personalities, or even bodies. They’re nothing but pure, undiluted magic.”
“Wow.”
“Possession isn’t even really the right word for what happens,” Dad said. “It’s more like ameshing. The demon alters everything about that person, even their blood, their DNA. That’s why it can be passed down through families. That’s why if we’re ever grievously injured we don’t die. Our powers heal us.” He nodded at my scarred hand. “Unless, of course, someone uses demonglass on us. But for all that, a demon who was changed during a possession ritual is still essentially the person they always were.”
“Only now they have the darkest, most powerful magic in the world literally flowing through their veins,” I added.
“Exactly.” Dad smiled proudly, and I suddenly remembered Alice standing in the clearing, exclaiming, “You did it!” right before I cut off her head.
My throat was tight when I said, “So if Alice was still Alice, why did she have claws and start drinking blood?”
Dad shrugged and held up his right hand. Long silver claws sprang up in place of his manicured fingernails, and then disappeared just as quickly. “Any witch or warlock could do that if they wanted to. Try it yourself.”
I looked down at my ragged nails, still splotched with Iced Strawberry polish from the last time Jenna had tried to give me a manicure. “No thanks.”
“As for the…other part, blood magic is a very strong, very ancient practice. Again, many witches and warlocks have used it in the past. Your friend Jenna certainly benefits from it. In fact, that’s how vampires were created. Nearly a thousand years ago, a coven of witches were performing a very complicated blood ritual, and—”
“Alice killed people,” I said, my voice breaking on the last word.
“Yes, she did,” Dad said calmly. “That much dark magic can drive a person insane. That’s what happened to Alice. It doesn’t mean it will happen to you.”
He looked at me, his expression intense. “Sophie, I understand your hesitation to embrace your heritage, but it’s vital that you stop thinking of demons as monsters.” He reached out and covered my hand with his. “That you stop thinking ofyourself as a monster.”
Struggling to keep my voice level, I said, “Look, I get that you’re big into this whole Up With Demons thing, but I watched one kill a friend. And Mrs. Casnoff told me that your mom demoned out and killed your dad. So don’t stand there and expect me to believe that being a demon is all sunshine and kittens.”
“It’s not,” Dad said. “But if you’re willing to listen to me, and to learn more about what it means to be a demon, you’d understand that the Removal is not your only option. There are ways of…well, fine-tuning your powers. Of lessening the chances of hurting someone.”
“‘Lessening’?” I repeated. “But notremoving, right?”
Dad shook his head. “I’m going about this all the wrong way,” he said, sounding frustrated. “I just want you to understand that…Sophie, have you given any thought to what it will be like once you’ve gone through the Removal? Provided you survive it, of course.”
I had. It sounds dumb, but one of the first things I’d thought of was that I’d look like the Vandy: covered in swirling purple markings, even on my face. It wouldn’t be an easy thing to explain away in the human world, but I was hoping “crazy spring break” might work.
When I didn’t answer Dad right away, he said, “I’m not sure you understand what really happens in that ritual. It�
��s not just that you won’t be able to do magic anymore. You will be destroying a vital part of yourself. The Removal gets into your blood. It rips out something that’s as much a part of you as the color of your eyes. You weremeant to be a demon, Sophie, and your body and soul will fight to keep you that way. Possibly to the death.”
There’s nothing you can say to a speech like that. So I just stared at him until he finally sighed and said, “You’re tired, and this was a great deal to tell you on your first night. I can understand if this is overwhelming.”
“It’s not that,” I said, but he just kept on talking, something I was beginning to learn was an annoying habit of his.
“Hopefully, after a good night’s sleep, you’ll be more receptive to what I have to tell you.” He glanced at his watch. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I was supposed to meet with Lara fifteen minutes ago. I trust you can find your way back to the house.”
“It’s right in front of me, so yeah,” I muttered, but Dad was already walking down the hill.
I sat in the gathering darkness for a long time, watching Thorne Abbey, trying to absorb everything Dad had just told me. I’d been sitting there for about ten minutes before it occurred to me that I hadn’t asked him anything about the demon kids and what they were doing here. Or how they even existed. Finally, I got up, dusted off my jeans, and headed back toward the house.
As I walked, I thought about what Dad had said. I’d only had my powers for a few years, but they were a part of me. For the first time, I admitted to myself that the thought of slashing the magic right out of myself—and maybe dying in the process—scared the heck out of me.
But I couldn’t go through life as a ticking time bomb either, and no matter what Dad said about “fine-tuning” my magic, as long as I had powers, exploding would always be a very real possibility. Somehow, my whole existence had become a really complicated word problem.
I’d always sucked at those.
There was no sign of Dad when I got back to Thorne, and I trudged up to my room. Earlier, I’d been starving, but the conversation with Dad had killed my appetite. Despite my long nap, all I wanted to do was take a hot bath and crawl into bed.
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