no other way you could know . . . that you would guess . . .”
“I’m not! I swear it.”
“I know one thing for certain: Ashcrofts do not leave their victims intact.” A feverish sheen glazed his eyes. “Can you even begin to imagine what drove me to choose an eternity of isolation over the attentions of my dear old friend? I left everything behind. My real body became a mindless, drooling husk. But that is what Cornelius would have done to me anyway when he finished tearing my mind apart. At least this way I was able to thwart him, the devil.” Prendergast spoke with sudden ferocity. “He will never have it. And neither will you.”
“Have what?”
Prendergast didn’t answer. He spun and began to walk away, his robes billowing out around him, though there was nowhere he could go except deeper into the workshop, among the cluttered, sagging shelves.
“You may have outsmarted Cornelius,” Elisabeth cried, hurrying after him, “but his descendant is after your secret now. He knows you’re here, and he’ll stop at nothing to find you.”
Prendergast waved a thin hand, the gems on his fingers winking in the candlelight. “It doesn’t matter. He will not be able to—”
“Get here, like I just did?”
He went still. “You’re wasting your time.”
“Listen to me,” she urged. “I sought out your grimoire because he’s been releasing Maleficts from the Great Libraries. Dozens of people have died. I need to find out why he’s doing it, so I can bring proof to the Collegium. Otherwise, he’ll never face justice.”
Silence reigned. “So he’s begun, has he,” said Prendergast finally, weary. “He’s trying to finish what Cornelius started.”
“If you would only tell me what he’s planning. I know that whatever it is, it hinges upon the Great Library of Harrows—”
Prendergast’s voice lashed out like a whip. “Enough! Leave me be. It doesn’t matter what he’s planning, because”—he bent over, bracing his hands on his knees, and forced out the rest—“without me—he cannot succeed.”
She hadn’t come this far, stolen from the Royal Library, sought help from a demon, only to give up now. She strode up behind Prendergast and seized him by the arm. At her touch, his entire body shuddered, and he collapsed to his knees. Pain twisted his gaunt face.
Guilt overwhelmed Elisabeth. “Are you all right?”
But as soon as she spoke, she saw that whatever was going on, it wasn’t limited to Prendergast. The candles sputtered, guttering in pools of wax. Darkness fell over the workshop. Then the floor heaved, a seismic convulsion that almost threw Elisabeth from her feet. Jars rolled from the table and shattered.
“The Codex Daemonicus,” Prendergast gritted out. “Something is happening to the grimoire. You’re in danger, girl. Your body is still in the mortal realm.”
Her heart pounded in her throat. “How do I go back? I don’t even know how I got here.”
“Jump!” he snarled.
She didn’t have time to think about his order—not with the world shaking apart around her. She sprinted toward the edge, gathering her strength, and hurled herself over the jagged ends of the floorboards, thinking, This isn’t real. It’s only in my mind. I will not fall.
But it felt like falling: tumbling end over end through the air until she had no sense of up or down, the bitter taste of ink filling her mouth, flooding her nose, choking her—
She woke with a gasp and a sense of impact, as though her soul had been slammed back into her body by force. She sat on the floor of her bedroom, dazed, with the Codex cradled on her lap.
The candle had gone out. Not because it had finished burning, but because she had slid sideways in her sleep and bumped her shoulder against the nightstand. This had knocked the candlestick over, drowning the flame. She counted herself lucky that the tipped candle hadn’t started a fire. But she quickly changed her mind, because it had done something even worse.
Droplets of hot wax had splattered across the Codex’s pages. As she watched, ink spread outward from the edges of the wax like a bloodstain, soaking through the paper, turning the pages black. She scrambled upright, flipping the grimoire onto the carpet. Overturned, its cover heaved and bulged as though something inside were trying to escape. Its moonlit shadow lengthened across the floor. Elisabeth tore a salt round from her belt, not a moment too soon, for the second she reacted, a thin, scaled hand stretched twitching across the floor and seized her ankle in its shriveled