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I tied my hair up into a high bun on the back of my head and rolled my shoulders, watching Maria’s eyes take in the room. I cleared my throat. “Put these on. You’ll need them to touch the books.”
“And you don’t?” She asked, eyeing me as I stepped up to the largest shelf.
“Nope.” I sighed.
Lifting my hands, I closed my eyes and let the enchantment in the pages sense my desires. There was a beat of silence and six books slid out from their places as one.
Maria jumped back. “What the fuck? How did you do that? How did you—”
“It wasn’t me,” I said. “The shelves are enchanted to sense my needs. They were a gift Annie picked up from one of her charges when she was younger. A witch she monitored.”
“Adrian told us that you believe witches were involved in the creation of the monsters, but I thought he was just being an ass,” she said, hovering behind me.
“Back in the day our pack were witch hunting experts,” I said pulling each book from the shelf, and setting it on the table. “Annie was among the last of the hunters.”
“Last of them?”
“Witches are near extinction,” I said. “So, the hunters have been needed less and less. Wolves began monitoring witches, instead of killing them a few generations ago, trying to make peace. It’s a whole thing. The point is…Annie saved this stuff and trained me on how to handle it so the tradition wouldn’t die out completely.”
Maria shifted, to stand at the side of the table opposite me and bounced on her heals. “And there’s something here that could help Dillon?”
I winced. I didn’t want to give her lie to her, but she looked so hopeful and skeptical at the same time. I felt horrible for dragging her into it all.
“I’m hoping there is, but I don’t know,” I said, sliding a few of the books over to her. “Flip some pages, look for references to healing, or curses, and let me know what you find. The shelf said these books could fill my needs, so there’s gotta be something in them.”
She gave me a curt nod, secured her gloves, and grabbed the first book with a determined look on her face. I flashed her a smile and began my own search.
The first book was useless. It was about herbs that would heal cuts and scrapes. Herbs that would come in handy after surgery. I fought the urge to groan and stacked it on top of the other things Annie had left out on the table.
I was about halfway through my second book when Jamie came climbing down the ladder. He took one look at the expression on my face and his shoulders sagged. “Going that well, is it?”
“We’ve got six options. I’m down one already,” I said.
“I’ve got my laptop,” he offered. “If that helps at all.”
“Oh right, here…” I ducked back under the table and pulled out a thick brown ledger and slid it across the table to him. “Look through that for the most recent entries. We need to find the closest witch Annie was tracking and see if they’ll help us figure out whoever is attacking us.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said giving me a mock salute.
“I think I found something,” Maria said. “Maybe. I don’t know. My French is rusty.”
“Let me see?” I said, holding out my hand. “The spell we found was written in French.”
She passed the book over, and I scanned the page. It was a curse construction study, and the page she’d come across was covered in notes. From what I could tell they were things the person had written down while they were trying to figure out how to break a blood curse. I didn’t see anything all that special about it, but as I began to tell Maria that it wasn’t enough, a word caught my attention and a light bulb went off in the back of my mind.
“Wait,” I said, setting her book aside to grab the third one in my stack. I ripped it open, flipping roughly through the pages, and slammed my hand down on a spell halfway through the book. “Here it is.”
“What? What is?” Maria asked, her eyes growing wide.
“A transference stone.”
“A what?” they both asked in unison.
I rolled my eyes, and darted for the table wedged against the wall, pulling out the box that sat beneath it. “A transference stone. It should transfer the energy of the curse to the stone instead of Dillon for a while. It’s not a cure, but it could buy us some time.”
“And you know how to make one of those things?”
I shook my head, rifling through the box in front of me. Annie had a thousand knickknacks. Each one did something special, but the one I wanted seemed to be wedged at the bottom of the pile.
