Persie Merlin and the Witch Hunters - Bella Forrest Page 0,97
sound. This wasn’t a skill I used frequently—it was tantamount to stealing private information, and I wasn’t an advocate of that—and getting back into the feel of it took some time. Focusing on my breathing, the steady inhale and exhale, I felt the world around me slow and fade, leaving the still silence of my emptied mind.
Where are you? My thoughts reached out for those telltale whispers, coaxing them out of their hideaway. Much like riding a bike, the physical recollection of how to do this came back swiftly. However, after a few minutes went by and the whispers still hadn’t come, I knew I was dealing with a Grimoire of epic proportions. The more powerful the Grimoire, the quieter their siren call. And this one was proving to be near silent.
To break the heart of a betrayer… Finally, a soft hiss pierced the quiet in my skull. The voice rattled with bitter, cruel energy, giving me an idea of the state of the creator when it had been written. Victoria must have hated someone a great deal to put so much venom into a spell. To make him forget he ever knew you… A second hiss pinballed between my temples, though these words were much softer. Sadder. Victoria must have been suffering a great deal when she wrote this one. How to speak to those who have passed through the veil… A third hiss, even sadder than the last, so much that tears welled unexpectedly in my eyes. But it brimmed with power, intense enough that I had to gasp for breath. It made me wonder how much pain Victoria hid behind that impeccable mask of unflappable serenity.
How to extract abilities… How to meld two monsters… A sharp pain jabbed at my skull as the enormous energy of those two spells careened into me, leaving me momentarily breathless. The nature of these spells was borderline forbidden, which was likely why she’d kept them secret in her Grimoire. Perhaps they’d been a bygone experiment from her younger days, when rules were made to be broken instead of enforced. I knew of many magicals who had crafted spells and curses in their Grimoires that they later came to regret and had buried deep in the pages. That was usually where the magical erasure came into play. If Victoria had any of those in her Grimoire, I’d still be able to read them. Like a back-up recovery file, I could still tap into the obliterated words.
Sensing the epicenter of that pulse of power, I turned around and faced the vacant windowsill. There didn’t seem to be anything there at all, aside from a few candles and a framed picture of Victoria on the day she had been inducted into the Institute. But the energy was definitely coming from there. Puzzled, I traced my hands across the sill, feeling for where the energy was at its strongest.
There! A potent shock, like sticking my fingers into a plug socket, jolted up my fingertips from a wooden square of paneling, the kind usually used to conceal a radiator. Feeling around the edges of the panel, I gave it a firm push, and the panel swung loose on hidden hinges with a faint click. Beneath lay a recess of sorts with a solitary item inside, wrapped in a large pouch of dark green velvet. I could barely catch a breath as I reached in and took the package out, the power overwhelming my senses as jumbled whispers bombarded my brain.
Hastily, I unwrapped the article and looked down upon the white leather binding. Elegant golden fleur-de-lis adorned the front, with the letters “VJ” glinting at the center, encompassed by a raised circle of mother-of-pearl. It was one of the most beautiful Grimoires I had ever seen, and my fingertips itched to turn the pages and see what was inside. I knew it was wrong on many levels, but impulse took over. Before I knew what I was doing, I had turned to the index. As I’d suspected, the interior was a mass of sigils and markings that made very little sense… but they would soon.
No sooner had I thought it than the seemingly nonsensical symbols merged together in a collision of mesmerizing, dark golden ink that spread out onto the page, unfurling into words that my prying eyes could read.
An index appeared, listing spell after spell. The ones I had heard in the Grimoire’s whispers, and so much more: Ut Loquuntur Verum, which translated to “speak the