“Precisely.” He sits up beside me, passing back the card. “What do you suppose she was trying to show you?”
I study the card. The cup held between the blonde woman and the little girl. The light.
“Only one way to find out.” I kick off the sheet and hunt around for my pajamas. Cold air kisses my bare flesh. I’m already missing his warm embrace, his hot, talented mouth, but this can’t wait.
Merrick rises to follow.
“There’s something in her bedroom,” I say, my blood warming with the certainty of it. “Something we overlooked.”
twenty-nine
MERRICK
High up in the tower of House Bonnivarde, Elizabeth runs her hands along a broad stretch of wall, searching for a false panel, a secret door, a hidden window to a world I can only guess at.
“There’s something about this wall,” she says, knocking. “It’s warmer here. Sort of… fizzy. Like it’s calling to me.” She turns to face me, her cheeks still flush from our earlier encounter. I imagine mine are as well; I can still taste her on my lips. “My mother hid something here.”
I press a kiss to her forehead, savoring the rose and vanilla scent of her hair, but only for a moment. “Then we’d best keep looking. Though, short of taking a sledgehammer to the place, I’m out of ideas. Plus, it would ruin the lovely wallpaper.”
She laughs. The wallpaper—faded blue with gold velvet roses—is quite heinous.
Then, suddenly, her eyes widen. “Merrick, that’s it! The freaking wallpaper!”
She turns back to the wall, attacking a loose seam. “Here. Help me.”
Picking a few sections loose, we tear away a great swath, then another, as if unwrapping a gift. The paper comes away easily.
“What in the fiery lakes…” I stand back, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing. The wall is gray and bare, down to drywall and plaster… but it’s covered in several dozen pages of spellwork.
“Holy shit, I knew it!” Elizabeth grins and leans in closer, fingers gliding over the pages. They come loose at her touch, curling away like autumn leaves, falling neatly into her hands.
“Magic,” I whisper, once more itching for my field journal.
“She hid these here for me to find. I know it, Merrick.” She flips through the pages. “I have no idea what it all means, but… wow. The power in this spell is immense. Like, I can literally feel the magic moving through me. My fingers are hot, and I’m getting kind of woozy. Not in a bad way, just… it’s intense.” She glances up at me, eyes bright. “Merrick, could this be the transference spell?”
“What makes you say that?”
“These pages weren’t loose— they were torn out of something. Probably the grimoire. It’s about the same size, right? And look—see the tattered edges?” She hands over the pages. “In the vision, my mother was pacing around like a trapped animal. Like she knew someone was about to bust in, and she wanted to hide this stuff before they found her. Helena said she was being tracked… Maybe she foresaw the hunters trying to take control of the portal. Maybe this was her insurance policy.”
I glance through the pages with great care, taking in the neat writing, the fine drawings of symbols and plants. The language is ancient—demonic in source, from one of the earliest known written languages of Hell—but the writing itself is recent. There are four pages of ingredients and ideal conditions—moon phases, times of day, seasonal aspects, astrological alignments.Subsequent pages detail the ritual magic in elegant symbols and layers upon layers of carefully-crafted spell weaving, not a breath or gesture left to chance. It’s delicate and complex work, likely years in the making, and more advanced than that of any human witch I’ve ever encountered.
But it’s not the spell of transference. Not even close.
I read through it one more time. There’s no mistaking it. If Elizabeth feels the pull of this dark magic, I am utterly drowning in it.
My knees give out, and I fall to the bench at the foot of the bed. My world shrinks to this room, this moment, a pinpoint in a vast universe of realms and possibilities, all of them collapsing at once.
“What is it?” Elizabeth kneels on the carpet before me, her hands curling on my knees. “Merrick? What was she hiding?”
I meet her eyes, unable to keep the emotion at bay. “Something for which I’ve been searching for well over a century.”
She waits for me to explain, concern darkening her features.
I close my eyes, unable to bear the sincerity in hers. My heart has cracked open, exposing the darkest rooms within. Rooms that were never meant to see the light. Especially not hers.
For a fleeting moment, I think to deny her entry. To shut it all down and say I was mistaken and pretend the pages are nothing but a witch’s ramblings.
But I promised her honesty tonight. I promised her trust.
