Page 46 of House of Hearts
I shake my head. “I don’t know, but it has to be a sign, right?”
The desk before me is solid rosewood, a genuine antique with delicate brass knobs, frieze-carved shelves, and glass inkwells. In an age before iPhones and safe-deposit boxes, there were false bottoms in desk drawers and secret compartments tucked away.
With the drawers already swung out, I move under the desktop itself and prod at the decorative panel in the center. It budges, ever so slightly, and from a rap of my knuckle against the wood it sounds promisingly hollow.
That’s all the validation I need to keep going. It takes a good ten minutes of me mapping out the underside of the desk to find a hidden depression in the wood. I’m careful as I locate the wooden spring next and pop the concealed drawer out.
A leather-bound book sits inside with a single piece of paper resting on top.
Please, Ana,
Let this end.
—Helen
Sadie’s at my side in a heartbeat. “What is it?”
“Give me a second, that’s what I’m trying to figure out,” I gripe as I turn it over in my hands. It’s a deep russet red with intricate gold tooling and a curiously shaped padlock. “It’s locked.”
Not only that, but someone’s unsuccessfully tried to rip it open.It’s clear from the significant wear and tear on the leather and the divots that someone took a screwdriver to the lock. Multiple attempts, but even more obvious than that, multiple failures. The journal stays locked.
“I’ve never seen a lock like that,” Calvin intones over my shoulder. “It almost looks like a heart.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” I ask as a glint of silver metal flashes in my peripheral. My broken-heart necklace hangs from my throat, the pendant a perfect match to the broken-heart-shaped indent of the lock. I feel like “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,”too big, too small, just right. With a wrench of my wrist, I place the heart in the lock, and smother a tiny gasp as the gears click to life and the front page opens.
“It’s a book of curses.”
“What?” Sadie is at my side in a second, but not before I get a better look at the first page. The paper itself is yellowed and blotted with stray flecks of ink, the text written in a cipher and punctuated with curious sigils and eerie runes. There’s a lot of stuff that could be running around in my head as I hold a literalmagic grimoirein my hands, but all I can focus on is the faded sticker stuck between the ripped pages.
Not just any sticker; it’s one of the holographic hearts that Em would paste on her fingernails every week. They came in a cheap pack from Amazon, and they’d peel off constantly; I’ve lost count of all the times I found one of them in my backpack or on the floor, curled up on itself like a dead spider. She left them behind like her own personal breadcrumb trail.
And now there’s one in Anastasia’s old curse book.
“Guys, I think Em and Percy beat us to it…and they ripped out the first page.”
14
Life doesn’t play out like it does in the movies. There’s no way on earth the main character would make an earth-shattering discovery like an ancient spell book only to spend the next several weeks cramming for an exam in multivariable calculus.
But, because real life follows no cinematic rules, that’s precisely what I find myself doing. Anastasia’s grimoire and Em’s secret involvement play second fiddle to the rules of differentiation. I can hardly keep searching for Percy if I flunk out of school. I’m desperately trying to stay awake in class as my teacher reviews test material, but the chalkboard grows fuzzier by the second as I drift in and out of focus.
I couldn’t tell you how the hell Oliver’s managing between the Cards, school newspaper, and school itself. He’s studiously taking notes on the opposite end of the classroom and even going as far as to raise his hand and participate. With the exhaust fumes I’m running on, I don’t trust myself to speak coherently, let alone ask questions on the derivative matrix.
I’m not even the one working on transcribing the book in the first place. Oliver and Ash are leading that particular expedition. Oliverexplained the harrowing process to me by referencing the infamous Copiale cipher.
“We’re not the first secret society, and we definitely won’t be the last,” he said mid-yawn. “An eighteenth-century group of Freemason eye doctors—yes, you heard that right—wrote an entire ritual guide in code, and it took scholars years to crack. Researchers broke the symbols down and searched for letter pairs. After that, they eventually realized the original source language was German.”
“You speak German?”
“Nein.”
My head dips, and I jerk myself awake for the seventeenth time this hour. My pencil’s scratched a graphite streak down the page. It’s somewhat fitting given the messy state of my notes.
EXAM NEXT WEEK
THE IN-BETWEEN????????
RABBIT HOLE? IS THIS A CODE FOR SOMETHING? RABBITS BURROW IN THE EARTH…DOES SHE MEAN A TUNNEL?
