“That’s all right,” Anais told Enoch. “All you need to do is study some old writings with me to try and figure out what the Spellscript’s effects are.”
A light switched on in my head, and I jumped to my feet. “Lucien,” I said, looking at the gorgeous, tired man. “Where is my duffel bag?”
Lucien frowned. “I think it’s still in the car—”
“Give me the keys,” I said, stretching my hand forward expectantly as I looked up at Anais. “Please wait.”
Confused, Lucien handed them to me. “It’s right outside.”
“Thanks,” I said, and left the house. Or rather, the cabin.
I headed to the shiny Rolls-Royce, which stuck out like a sore thumb in the midst of an endless spreading wilderness that surrounded Lucien’s house—cabin—and clicked it open. I grabbed my duffel bag and returned inside, dropping the keys on the table as I rummaged through my things.
It occurred to me then that the contents of this duffel bag were all I had left to my name. My entire apartment had been trashed, my furniture, clothes, everything I owned damaged beyond repair, after all.
The memory of the apartment haunted me as I pulled out my notebook and handed it to Anais. Trying to ignore the sudden suffocating feeling that squeezed my throat, I answered Anais’s silent question when she looked at the notebook. “For the past eight years, I’ve compiled a list of all sigils I encountered.”
“Sigils?” Lucien, Enoch, and Anais echoed simultaneously, turning to look at me with confusion.
My cheeks flushed at my little slip of the tongue. “I mean, Spellscripts,” I mumbled, embarrassed. “Before, I named them sigils. But they’re Spellscripts. Obviously.”
Enoch took the notebook from Anais and studied it, his eyes widening. “You encountered a lot of different Spellscripts,” he noted, flipping through the pages, stunned. “I know you write forThe Hallowing Hour, but I didn’t expect that you would’ve done such extensive research.”
Anais peered at the notebook as well, with a narrow-eyed expression, but she didn’t say anything.
A moment later, Lucien rounded the table toward us, heading to Enoch and staring down at my notes with a heavy contemplative look. Thayer, too, approached us, or rather, me, with a confused yet curious look. “What’s all this?” he asked me in a low murmur.
Still flushed with embarrassment, I stared down at my feet. The response to my notebook, which indeed contained years of dedicated research, made me shift from foot to foot uncomfortably. I felt like an obsessive, die-hard fan of the supernatural rather than a journalist.
But I wasn’t a fan. All I had ever wanted was to meet the supernatural—the Otherborne—and find out what really happened to Willow and Julianna.
“You know why I took the job atThe Hallowing Hour,” I said now, folding my arms. “You know what my end goal is—and has been since that day.”
Thayer didn’t reply. Instead, he merely put his arm around my shoulder, which made me automatically stiffen before I slowly relaxed. “Can you tell me again?” my brother asked. “About what happened?”
I stiffened again, this time in surprise—and dread. I hadn’t retold everything that happened then in detail after that one time, when I tried to convince our parents and Thayer that what I saw was real. It was hard enough that the memory didn’t seem to vanish with the years but only embedded itself harder into my psyche. The thought of speaking about it, reliving it, made a chill crawl down my spine.
“You already know what happened,” I evaded, shrugging off his arm.
His gray eyes were full of emotion. “Back then, I didn’t believe you,” he said, regret coloring his voice. “Because I didn’t believe you, I hardly listened to anything you had to say. I’m ashamed of it, but it’s the truth.”
I scowled but let out a long sigh. “I don’t ...” I started, before dropping my gaze to my fingers, which fiddled with the hem of my shirt. “It’s not ... easy to talk about.”
“Talk about what?” Lucien’s voice suddenly interrupted, and Thayer and I raised our gazes to him. Anais was now holding the notebook in her hands, and the three were staring at us with identical suspicious gazes.
Thayer and I exchanged glances, as if we could read each other’s minds. And at that moment, peering into his gray gaze, I knew our thoughts, for the first time since God knows how long, were aligned.
They should hear that too,Thayer’s eyes said, echoing my own thoughts.They must be able to help.
But I hesitated. There was a reason I hadn’t said anything to Lucien so far—though, admittedly, a part of it was the fact we hadn’t had a dull moment or a right time to sit down and talk things through.
Yet I couldn’t help but fear what Lucien’s reaction would be.
So I stalled as I turned to him. “I thought you have another meeting?”
Lucien didn’t seem satisfied by that, yet he looked at the clock on the wall and grunted. “Yeah, it’s almost time.”
“I’ll go to the Ward and start looking into this until the gathering’s over,” Enoch said, shooting me a momentary glance before looking at Lucien. “I need Anais for that, though.”
