Wolves at the Door - Lidiya Foxglove Page 0,43

thief doesn’t mean I wasn’t also his friend, and that I am not concerned when I see a small group of naive young people in the sway of a demon,” Gaston grumbled. “I can tell none of you trust me and couldn’t possibly believe me when I say I’m just a concerned citizen who has seen too many people lose their lives for a bad idea.”

Good lord. What to think? Byron’s friends murdered him. Who does that? They must have thought he was dangerous and now I had to trust Byron that they changed their minds. But was it a little convenient that they were all dying and dead?

Sometimes I saw a determined look in Byron’s eyes that freaked me out just a little.

Jake stood up from the table abruptly. “Hel, where are the Arcana? Bring them here to the table.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re going to figure this out right here, right now. We’re not leaving this table until we figure out what Pandora’s Box does. We’ll all look through the books together and brainstorm.”

“But I haven’t translated them yet.”

“You’re never going to have time to translate them. Enough excuses. Either we figure it out or we walk away right now. I’m not going to get myself killed and make our parents cry for no reason. But if there’s really something to it, something worth dying for if it came right down to it, we should be able to figure it out by studying the pictures.”

“But…”

“Those books come from a time when most people were illiterate,” he said. “The pictures will tell us something.”

I was surprised to see Jake leading the charge. Usually he seemed to be more interested in flirting with me and working on the house than all the rest, but right now I glimpsed some deeper passion in him, deeper than I had ever seen before. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but I could see that he had some deeper reason for working so hard. He had a fire inside him that always burned, and it was why the Sullivan Brothers were the most successful flippers in the northeast.

I wondered if I was the only person here who just wanted to ditch my past without a plan for my future.

“I’ll get them.” I pounded up the stairs. I’d been sleeping in the smallest bedroom, and I kept our treasures locked in a cabinet built in to the wall.

Now I brought them downstairs and each of us grabbed a book. I looked through Arcana Wyrd while Billie searched Arcana Etherium and the Sullivans both looked over Arcana Sinistral.

Trap a bunch of contractors and decorators in a room with a pile of books and you get a lot of twitching. I knew we were all dying to get back to work as we turned heavy pages and tried to puzzle meaning out of the tiny scenes that had been painted by wizards so long ago that I hardly knew what their lives might have been like. My nerd brother would have been into it, but although I was capable of studying when forced, I didn’t love it. The paintings all seemed to be of battles between demons and warlocks, or ethereals or demons, or just random Medieval scenes with like, a priest, or a weird looking dog.

All I could see was the being with one demon wing and one angel wing, and one demon horn, with his lips sewn shut.

They sewed my lips shut, Byron told me when we first met.

This being seemed to be the protector of Pandora’s Box. In Arcana Etherium, he was killed by a group of men in warlock’s robes. They looked about as happy as Medieval paintings could look, too.

“I wonder if this is the same creature,” Jake said.

“‘Creature’?” Byron said. “I would call that a man, not a creature.”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “You’re protective of him, huh?”

“I am,” he said.

“The man, then.” Jake was pointing out a painting in Arcana Sinistral. In this painting, a beautiful angel was weeping over the corpse of a man with his lips sewn shut, but now he didn’t have wings. His skin was gray and he was wearing just a loincloth. The depiction of his death in Arcana Sinistral was considerably more sympathetic than the triumphant murder portrayed in Arcana Etherium.

“We know demons can make their wings disappear, or maybe the artist just didn’t feel like drawing them.”

“Byron, this is you,” I said. “I know this is you.”

He couldn’t reply, could barely even signal at