Page 20 of Witchlore
“Shopping lists?”
“Uh-huh.” Bastian frowns and runs his finger down the page. “I read one from the 1500s that included a list of what type of buttons she wanted to buy.”
“So what family had this one?”
“No one knows. Sometimes family names are inscribed in the leather, but not this one.”
“How can that be possible?” I stare at all of this history, so rare and wonderful, and the authors of it all lost to the sands of time.
“I guess you go back far enough in history, one life looks very much like another,” Bastian muses, turning the page.
“So we’re all boring in death?” I say, stroking René’s ears.
“You’re a morbid person, you know that?”
“I do, yes.” It is one thing I know to be definitely true. “But then how can you know it’s a shapeshifter grimoire?”
“Lucky guess.” Bastian’s voice is evasive. I wonder if I should press him, but does it matter how he came to his “lucky guess”? After all, I’m just here for the results. On the other hand, does blindly trusting him make me the careless idiot my parents always thought I was? “Here it is.”
I’m distracted from my conflicted thoughts by my first look at the resurrection spell. The page is etched with complicated symbology and text, and Bastian’s face takes on an eager quality as he looks it over.
“So this is all normal, all expected gramarye.”
“Is it?” I say dryly, looking at the complicated notations that look like music, indicating hand movements and hints of ancient languages that I can only understand about 2 percent of. Gramarye, the act of writing or creating spells, is one of my worst subjects. This is what comes from only taking one practical witchcraft module a semester. Bastian is glaring at the page, tracing hisfingers over every word, as if expecting something to jump out at him.
“If this is all of it, why didn’t it…?” he mutters.
“Why didn’t it what?”
He turns the page. The next doesn’t look like the others. It’s completely dark, as if it’s been dipped in blood.
“Is it a replacement page?” He turns it and then, seeing only blank pages after it, says, “Fuck.”
“So it’s incomplete? We can’t do the spell?” I ask. Bastian doesn’t answer. He looks thoroughly pissed off, biting his bottom lip. I feel a confusing mix of things: relief, then creeping disappointment. This has been a scary, thrilling day but at least it’s been different. Now it’ll just be more of the same—days at college, nights at Beryl’s, the rest of my life spent missing Elizabeth.
“Maybe it’s not a replacement page,” I say, trying to find something to hold on to. “Maybe they dipped it in a different color to hide it, maybe there’s a way we can… I don’t know, lift the dye off it?”
I touch it and, oddly, it’swarm.When my fingers meet the dry, slightly textured surface, the red dye shimmers. It wiggles, as if hundreds of wood lice are trapped underneath it. Bastian sucks in a breath of surprise. I withdraw my hand sharply.
“Whoa,” I say shakily. I wasn’t expectingthat.
“Yeah, whoa.” Bastian hesitates and then touches it, too. Nothing happens. “Why would it work for you and not for me?”
I frown. I have no idea, but having such an old book in my hands makes me think of my father’s own collection, of the ancient tomes smelling sweetly of dust, some locked with spells so intense only he can unravel them. I remember him standing over one, pressing a bloody fingerprint into the cover.
“Could it be blood-locked?” I ask hesitantly. I’m sure Bastian’sthought of it already, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. “Shapeshifters in the past sometimes used blood locks.”
“Really?” He looks up at me, eyes bright with excitement again. “Witches haven’t used them for hundreds of years, but shapeshifters still can?”
“Yeah.” I’m weirdly nervous. This would definitely fall into the category of a secret my father would hate me to repeat. I even imagine the angry furrow of his brows.
“It’s a good idea.” He’s immediately rifling in his bag and pulling out a penknife. “Try it.”
I look between the sharp edge of the pale knife and the deep red of the page. I swallow in trepidation. Gingerly, I take the penknife. I try not to remember the bathroom, focusing hard instead on the feeling of a French bulldog panting beside me. Mouth dry, I dig the tip of the knife into the bulbous pad of my finger, gritting my teeth against the sting. I wipe my bloody finger over the ancient page. I hold my breath as my fingerprint sinks into an ocean of blood, losing itself. Then, the wriggling begins again, intensifying, splitting like curdled milk.
“It’s working.” Bastian’s eyes are wide with astonishment. “Whoa.”
Unlike the notations I’ve seen in college, the words are written in script that circles the page in a strange pattern, too small to even make out. When I look closer, it seems like the page shifts, or the words do, impossible to catch. “Wait, is it seeping through?”
