Page 56 of Phoenix Academy: Madness

"That's the thing," he says, his eyes dancing with excitement, "Reggie is going to be there too. He said he's completely okay with it, so we don't have to worry at all—or hide."

"Oh." I don't know why disappointment is twisting in my stomach; this is good news. "I guess he can help with the research, too."

"Exactly."

I can't help wondering, though, if this means something else: that Reggie doesn't like me at all, maybe even was never attracted to me like David claims, and that's why he's okay with me kissing his brother.

There's no other explanation that really makes sense, so it must be true.

I shouldn't be so disappointed, I know. One of the twins liking me is more than enough—especially the one who's kind and sweet. But for some reason my greedy heart wants more, and I can't convince it otherwise.

Somehow I'll have to tame my wild feelings just like I'm taming my feral magic, or what David said will come true, and my stupid mouth will break the trio apart—forever.

Chapter 26

Readingdense texts is difficult when you're sitting at the table with two hot twin guys. It's made even harder when you made out with one of those guys recently, and know you have a crush on the other, who you hope also has a crush on you, except if he does it could spell trouble.

So I find my attention wandering through the guide my ancestor wrote about our shared witch powers. There's some new information in this book, but so much of it is repeated from what I've already learned on my own that I can't concentrate on it easily.

A spell to tame a doe. Another to tame a stag. Still another for a rutting stag in season. Words to whisper to a brook to make it babble louder, and words to ask a still pond if its water is tainted with pollution.

All of these are spells my mother taught me, or one of the naturalistic witches at a coven we stayed with for a short period. When I saw that a Wolfe witch felt writing down her spells was important enough to break coven rules to do it, and even ally with a school of mages, I thought for sure there would be closely-guarded secrets in here.

But either Viveca didn't want to write down thegoodstuff for mages to find, or she didn't know much that was special in the first place. If this is the width and breadth of witch knowledge, I'm starting to wonder if the reason why we don't write our spells down is because we don't have many, not because it's dangerous.

Flipping back to the section about speaking to the dead, I mourn its brevity. She wrote about contacting spirits in the beyond, but her method was haphazard, and she wasn't able to figure out how to call any one spirit in particular. Pages of the guide here are blank, waiting for more information to be filled in as she discovered it, but she either never got around to doing the research or never found out more.

If I want to speak to the spirit from this morning, I'll have as much of a chance of getting a ghoul long past being capable of communicating with humans, or any other random ghost instead. It would take months if not years of contacting the beyond to get the spirit I want to speak to.

Glancing up at the twins, who are each reading small biographies on witch hunters—books I made very clear I had no interest in ever cracking open—I consider another book I desperately want to read. One with a dark spell described within, a spell that might have something to do with how the Heretic was created.

I didn't really pay attention to that book as I cracked it open, and now I'm regretting not memorizing its title. When we left the library it was tucked beneath the table on one of the empty chairs, but when I got here and checked that same chair it was empty. No doubt it's been re-shelved, probably by a heavily irritated Head Librarian, who will quite possibly eviscerate me with her talons if I ask her to find the book for me.

"I'm going to look into something," I tell Xavier in a low voice, grabbing a bookmark to slide intoThe Savvy Hedge Guide to Naturalistic Magicand save my page. "There's... something in here I want to follow up on. I just need to find the right book. I'll be back."

"Got it." He shoots me a soft smile. "Let me know if you need any help."

"I'm good," I tell him, unsure why it is I feel like I'm keeping some big secret from him.

It's not really that I don't want to tell him all the details about the Heretic—he already knows that my birth father is a criminal—but rather that talking about it would reopen the wound. This whole time I've been letting it heal, silently planning my revenge and trying not to let my emotions spin out of control. I'm afraid if I start describing all the gritty details of the Heretic, like the way he hunted us or how it felt to look up into his soulless eyes as he tortured me to death, knowing he's my father, I'll break down.

And once I'm broken down that thoroughly, I don't know if I can build myself back up again—ever. So I refuse to think about it too much, meaning talking about it is out of the question. Especially to someone as kind and empathetic as Xavier, whose voice alone will make me want to spill every horrible detail.

Shaking off my thoughts, I try to remember where I got the book from. I managed to memorize the page number the passage I found was one—seventy-two—and some of the details on the cover, but the title and author escape me. All I really know is that it was a history ofsomething,located somewhere near the books about arcane magic.

One thick, black cover catches my eye as I trail my fingers across the books, but I'm clearly not looking forThe Arcane Arts of the Living and the Dead.Something about it feels familiar, though, so I follow my instincts from its spine down, a few books to the left, and then I spot a familiar spine: thick, green, with embossed gold lettering and ivy leaves trailing across the bottom of the cover. The title says it's calledA History of Dark Magic's Follies.

Heart in my throat, I glance over to make sure neither of the twins is watching me, and grab the book quickly. Its weight and size feel right in my hand, but the real test will be finding the same passage as yesterday. Flipping open the pages, I skim to the right paragraph and feel a surge of adrenaline that I found it so quickly. Then, leaning a hip up against a bookshelf, I skip to the part where I was cut off.

The necromancer then performed a ceremony to reanimate his flesh, while the witch whispered a spell to call spirits from the spirit realm, and together they created what they did not know then was a terrible, empty shell of a boy with black eyes and a soul that had been split in two. While the angriest and most violent parts of the boy lived on, his kindness was dead, along with his fear, understanding of other's pain, and the ability to change and grow. Though the necromancer tried many times to reverse the spell, or even change his son's new state of being, everything he tried failed. Eventually he was so angry that he blamed the witch, and made an example of her by hunting her down with a group of witch hunters, who together burned her on a pyre while she was still alive. His son, now a soulless husk skilled only at violence, joined the army and rose through the ranks to command many men—who he sent to their deaths with nothing but blackness in his eyes. Eventually he was lost in battle and never returned, though some say he wasn't killed but rather defected, either to the opposite side in the war or to his own side as a seeker of death and nothing else. His father, the necromancer, died of a broken heart shortly after his son joined the army, and in his last written entry in his journal wrote that he feared he created a monster who might never die—and hoped one day someone would find a way to kill even the immortal.

A little shiver goes through me at this bit of the text. I've been afraid of the Heretic all my life, but I was always certain there was a way to kill him, even though he seemed impervious to every method we tried. The thought never occurred to me that he might actually be immortal—after all, he sired me, and I'm certainly quite mortal, or at least I was before I became a phoenix.

If he can't be killed—if he's really immortal—then that means I have to figure out a whole new way to take him down. Phoenix fire, even the strong, powerful, blue kind, won't do it.

I'll never be free of him if he won't—or can't—die.

Frantic, I flip through the book to find more information about this necromancer's son. Surely someone noticed an immortal black-eyed murderer with no sign of a soul. But the next chapter tells a different story of magic gone wrong, and every chapter after that is a new, different history. They're each cautionary tales, born from oral history that may or may not be true, but I have no doubt of the veracity of what the witch and the necromancer did.

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