Slaying Monsters for the Feeble - Annette Marie Page 0,98

into the glow. He grasped the padlock and its defensive spell lit up, but he clenched his hand. Power flared and the padlock deformed as though he were squeezing putty instead of steel.

He pulled it off the cabinet doors and dropped it. I cringed at the clatter.

Pushing in beside him, I opened the doors. Plain cardboard boxes were stacked on the shelves inside, each labeled neatly … in Latin. My Latin wasn’t good enough to decipher more than a few.

Zylas inhaled through his nose. Leaning down, he sniffed again and pointed to a box on the bottom shelf. I crouched and squinted at the label. Magia Illicita. Even I could figure out what that one meant.

I tugged the box out. Inside were book-shaped packages wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. Zylas squatted beside me and lifted the first one. He sniffed at the paper, then handed it to me. Picking up the next, he checked it for the scent of blood.

My nerves wound tighter as he smelled each bundle. This was taking too long.

Zylas picked up the sixth package and sniffed. “This one.”

I set the others back in the box. With a worried glance at the door, I pulled the paper apart, revealing a grimy grimoire, maybe fifty years old, with a cheap leather cover and a revolting brown stain darkening the pages. A piece of crisp white paper was tucked inside the cover and I slid it out.

Someone’s neat handwriting, in English, laid out the basics of the book—that it had belonged to a Demonica summoner named David Whitmore, who’d died in 1989, as well as where the book had been found and in what condition. The final paragraph described its contents, and I pushed my glasses up my nose as I read.

David Whitmore engaged in methodical experimentation involving demon blood. He initially tested various theories that combined demon blood with sorcery arrays and alchemic transmutations. Later, he began conducting dangerous and unethical experiments on unwitting subjects, in and out of the mythic community. Despite the continual sickening and/or deaths of his subjects, Whitmore persisted with these trials. Whitmore resisted arrest and was killed by MPD agents.

The Analyst notes that this grimoire is among the most disturbing he has ever evaluated.

The Analyst further notes that, by his own assertion, Whitmore’s experiments were largely failures. However, he references the work of sorcerers for whom we have no records, whose details have now been logged in the MPD database.

Recommendation: Grimoire to be transferred to MPD Illicit Magic Storage.

I looked again at the Magia Illicita box. All its contents must be destined for internment in MagiPol’s strictly guarded storage facilities for dangerous or illegal magic and magical knowledge.

“This book smells of blood and death,” Zylas muttered.

Even I could smell it—a musty, moldy tang that coated my nose like oil. I wanted to wash my hands. I wanted to throw this grimoire into a fire and watch it burn.

Nose wrinkled, I rewrapped the book and set it in the box. Zylas watched me slide the box back onto its shelf.

“You are not taking it?”

“No.” I stood up and closed the cabinet. “We don’t need it, and it’s better that it be sent to the MPD for safekeeping.”

“Hnn.” He canted his head. “I hear footsteps.”

I jolted away from the cabinet and opened my mouth to order Zylas back into the infernus, but he was already dissolving into crimson light. I burst into the hallway as Amalia rushed to meet me. I swung the door shut, then we both dashed into the washroom at the end of the hall and locked ourselves in.

“The librarian was coming this way,” Amalia whispered. “Not sure if she’ll come over here, though.”

“Let’s hope not,” I muttered, leaning against the sink.

Amalia scanned me. “Weren’t you stealing a book?”

I described what I had found and how I’d decided I didn’t want to take it. “We don’t need to know the details of that guy’s messed-up experiments.”

“No …” Amalia agreed, her gaze distant.

I figured she was thinking the same thing as me. “Claude must’ve gotten the idea to feed demon blood to vampires from somewhere, right?”

“Yeah, from sickos like that Whitmore quack and his idols. Who knows what other ideas Claude has gotten from their experiments?”

Silence settled over us, broken by the slow drip of water from the faucet.

“There’s something really weird about Claude,” Amalia murmured, her words slow and thoughtful. “Something really …”

“Insidious?” I suggested.

“Yeah. He—”

The loud bing of my phone interrupted her. I dug my cell out of