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“That is to protect ourselves and our land. Especially the Lesser Bloods. They are the worst, the lowest—”
“Stop,” I snapped at her, and the table shook with my anger. I couldn’t help but be mad as I thought of Lucy, a Lesser Blood merely trying to exist with the person she loved, too. “Because you love Jason, you see him as different, but he is a vampire, he drinks blood, and he’s most likely killed also. He is not different from any other vampire. But you love him anyway, so you find a way to overlook it and see him as someone, a person with a history, a life, wants, and needs. A person like all of us are. Why is that hard for you to accept?”
“Because we weren’t taught that,” she whispered slowly, taking a seat across from me and running her hands through her hair in frustration. “They are monsters. Monsters who attacked most of our families and killed our parents. Cruel, evil, without conscience or heart. And I’ve seen it, watched as they attacked and killed people we cared about…and laughed. I’ve fought them. All my life, vampires were the curse upon the earth. Then I met Jason…and…”
“And you no longer know who the bad guy is?” I said.
“I just want my magic back so I can save him and disappear,” she replied as she lifted a book. “Whoever the bad guy is, I don’t care. I don’t want to think about it.”
She also seemed not to want to think about the fact that, as a mortal, she’d die. Jason would live on without her. If she chose to become a vampire, she’d become what she’d been taught to hate.
I wondered if I were just like her a year ago. Was that why I didn’t want to become a vampire.
“So, where is your grimoire?” she asked, looking around the table.
I shrugged. “Who knows. Maybe disguised as something else in here.”
“Why don’t you just call it?”
“How do I do that?”
She tilted her head to the side as her eyebrow twitched in evident frustration and annoyance before sighing. “You outstretch your hand and call its name.”
I winced, knowing she’d want to scream at me, but I had to ask. “They have names?”
“Ugh.” She groaned and put her head to the table. “This is so frustrating!”
“Sorry—”
“Derowen,” she called, and a dark, wooden book with a leather-bound spine and a Celtic tree knot burned into the front appeared in her hands. It smelled of an old forest, not just trees, but spices, herbs, grass, and I even smelled fresh water coming from within. She opened the book to show me the first luminated page with her name on the front. “Derowen has been in my family for generations. It has all of the magic my family has ever done, where they lived, what they had seen, the spells they cast or broke. It is the history of us.”
I stood up and moved to her side.
“Whoa! Not so fast!” she hollered at me as I didn’t realize how quickly I had moved.
“Sorry,” I said, my eyes on the pages as they flipped. “Mine wasn’t like this at all. It looked like a book of sermons the first time I saw it, but when I touched it, it turned into a regular black and white composition notebook, the first time I really saw it. Then the next time I saw it, it was glowing and telling me something about the God of Eden and the Goddess of Terra.”
“What?” She looked back up at me, confused. “Disguised? Glowing? Are you sure you are talking about a grimoire?”
“About eighty-five to ninety percent sure?” I said back.
She rolled her eyes but then paused, looking me over again. “The God of Eden and the Goddess of Terra, you said?”
“Yeah. Do you know what that means? It had pictures of chaos. No spells, though…”
She flipped back to the worn, sand-colored pages of her grimoire, searching for something. The book seemed endless, and when she was getting to the end of the book, new pages would appear. However, she still didn’t seem satisfied.
“I could have sworn I read something about Terra once—wait, what am I doing,” she said, flipping back to the front. “The most important thing is unlocking your magic since you do not know its name. One of my ancestors had a different sort of reminding spelling.”
“Reminding spelling? Did she lose her memories?”
“No, Great-grandma Abagail was just forgetful, so she’d set these spells to remind her of her things… Here.” She pressed her hand over the colorful page of flowers, and the handwritten directions faded as she rose from her chair.
“Stand in the direction of the rising sun,” she ordered as her gaze was glued to the page.
“So, stand east?” I asked, moving to do what she had said. “Should we be outside?”
“No, it’s fine. Now light your finger as if it were a candle,” Adelaide directed.
