“But the prophet guy said we should take it.” I could hear the will in my son’s voice. “I don’t think Kelsey would like the wizard playing around with Gladys. She would say something about consent and then take it back. I’m just going to steal it.”
I was with baby boy on this one. “Yes, we are. But first you’re going to look at those books and see if you can translate any of them. This feels like a project to me, and I don’t like not knowing what Myrddin’s doing.”
We eased over to the table and Gladys’s blade shone in the lamp light. Pure silver forged on the Heaven plane. I found it interesting that there was a pair of gloves sitting beside the sword. Myrddin couldn’t touch her without getting burned. His demonic side apparently held more sway than he liked to discuss.
“These are almost all in Latin,” Lee said, studying the spines of the books. “And they all refer to one thing. Caelum.”
“Yeah, I’m going to need a translation.” It was weird, but my son was proving how capable he was once again.
“Heaven, Mom. These are all books about the Heaven plane. And angels. Except that one. It doesn’t have a title. It looks different from the others.”
“Which one?” I tried not to think about the fact that Myrddin was studying up on Heaven and angels.
“The black leather one.”
I stared at the tall desk, trying to figure out what I wasn’t seeing. All of the books were old, each one with a leather cover and carefully made binding. “They’re all brown to me, and from what I can tell they’re all leather.”
I would have questioned if my eyesight was going, but it really couldn’t go. I was full up on king’s blood. I was kind of in top condition.
“The one that’s open by the sword.”
I should have worn a sweater because another chill went through me. There was nothing sitting particularly close to the sword with the exception of the gloves. “I don’t see it. Lee, I need you to describe it to me.”
I wasn’t about to argue with him. He wouldn’t pull some prank on me in the middle of a job. He’d been taught by my father, and even at his age, he would be professional. If he said something was there it was there. I just couldn’t see it, and boy that made me wonder.
“It’s a big book. It probably has like a thousand pages in it. It looks heavy. It’s open to a page that’s written in some language I don’t even know. It’s weird and has a lot of squiggles.”
“It’s probably Demonish. We can have your Aunt Sarah confirm it for us.” Sarah had grown up in a dark magic family. She had some demon in her DNA, and it gave her spells quite the kick. She should be able to read whatever was written on the page.
If she could see it.
“It’s bound in something, but now that I really look at it, I don’t know that it’s leather, Mom. And I’m going to be honest. I’m afraid that the spells are written in something that’s not ink. It’s red but it doesn’t look like ink.”
Blood. My son was looking at a blood spell written in a language so old the damn demons didn’t use it anymore.
“It’s got a picture of a door,” Lee continued. “I think that was painted in blood, too. I think that book is bad.”
That book had been written by the man who’d killed Lee the first time around. Oh, I was sure Daniel would argue, but I knew what the wizard had done. It had been the wizard who sent us all out that night knowing full well the Council had come for us. I even remember that he’d warned me he was doing it. He’d told me I would have to look past my grief to get the job of handing Daniel his crown done. He’d known Lee would die. He’d wanted Lee to die.
“I can’t see it,” I admitted. “And that means he’s got it warded against me.”
I had to hope I was the one he’d specifically warded it against and not Sarah. It would be hard to have Lee describe each spell to her. But that was a problem for another day.
“I can get it, Mom. There aren’t any cameras in here. Grandad and I studied the plans.”