He eased himself down into a chair across from where Emma was sitting and put the pendant back on the table before he picked up One Hundred Ways to Banish Elementals Beyond the Gate of Linaria and opened it to one of his Post-it notes. “We’re just going to have to figure it out on our own.”
Three hours later, Emma shut the last of the books and let out a groan. “There’s nothing in any of these,” she said before remembering that she still wasn’t speaking to him. She determinedly looked away from him.
“What about the other book?” Curtis suddenly asked.
“What other book?” Emma demanded while staring directly ahead of her.
“The one your dad gave you last night? Loni said you took it back to your room. I was just wondering if you’d found anything useful in it.”
Emma realized that she’d forgotten all about the book after she’d thrust it into her slaying kit before she headed out of her room this morning.
“Er, no, I haven’t found anything yet, but let me check again,” she mumbled as she fished it out of her kit, still berating herself for having forgotten it. Her fingers curled around the old leather cover before she carefully opened it up, the ancient pages crackling as she did so.
Now she remembered why she had fallen asleep last night while she had been trying to read it. The typeface was tiny and the words blurred together and she had to squint to read it. However, after suffering through the first chapter, in which Sir Francis described (in great, great detail) how he had first stumbled across the Gate of Linaria, Emma had started to feel like she was in a boring history class.
She was just about to flip to the next page when something caught her attention.
Today I can rejoice because the Gate of Linaria is finally shut. My heart aches to realize that any of these foul creatures have been allowed to pollute our Earth but at the same time I am filled with joyful relief that some of the most vile ones seem to have died off completely. For this I am grateful. One such dark beast that no longer walks on our soil is the darkhel.
I have fought only the one. The beast was surrounded by some of the smaller fairies, who, if I’m honest, are more of an annoyance than a danger. However, this hideous creature was different, and our battle was great and long. My bones ached with weariness and still I could not defeat it. Eventually I fended it off, but I fear that if I had not managed to close the gate and banish these abominations, everyone would have felt their wrath. For not only are they the strongest and most evil of all the elementals, but as far as I can tell, there is no way to kill them. . . .
She stared at the words as the bile churned in her stomach. Loni had said last night that the darkhel couldn’t be killed, but Emma had secretly been hoping there might be a loophole. Unfortunately, if Sir Francis, the most powerful elemental slayer who had ever lived said it couldn’t be killed, she was going to have to accept that there was no loophole.
Emma turned her attention back to the page, and her eyes widened as she realized that down at the very bottom was her mom’s writing, in ink so pale that it would soon be completely gone.
Emma squinted to read the faded words and then felt a shudder go racing through her.
Darkhel says Pure One is here. No mention of banishment. Must find; must protect Pure One.
So they had been right. The darkhel was hunting for the Pure One and it was hunting for it at Burtonwood. Just like it had been doing when her mom had fought it. And she knew her mom had succeeded since the Gate of Linaria was still shut. Now all Emma had to do was figure out how her mom had done it. The answer must be somewhere in the book.
Feverishly she flipped through the delicate pages, reading her mom’s entries, always in faded ink, dulled by the passage of time. Most of them concerned various ways of killing or banishing the darkhel, all of which her mom dismissed as useless. But at the end, when Sir Francis finished talking about his hopes for a future on Earth that was free of elementals now that the gate had been shut,