“Can you read it?” Magda asked, her lips moving as she tried to decipher the handwriting.
“Let’s take it to the light.” We scooted two chairs over to the table lamp, angling it so the light shone down on the mottled pages.
“It’s definitely old,” Magda said, hunching over it next to me.
“I think it’s a diary of some sort. That’s a date, isn’t it?” I asked, pointing to the upper corner.
“Looks like it. April? August? Something with an A. From 1642. Wow. Seriously old. I can’t make out what the writing says, though. Can you?”
I concentrated on the thick black writing. It appeared to be in a language that I didn’t recognize. I ran my finger along the lines of handwriting, trying to pick out words that made some sense.
My finger stopped; my heart contracted. “That . . . that’s Kristoff’s name.”
“What? Where?” She craned to see.
I tapped the word. “Right there. That says, ‘Hannelor Kristof,’ which has to be a reference to my Kristoff.”
“Hmm. Maybe it’s when he first met Kristoff.”
“Could be. I wonder if this is the reaper journal Kristoff mentioned.” I continued searching the diary. There were several more instances of his name, but nothing struck me as recognizable.
“Maybe Kristoff can read it,” Magda suggested as I finished running my finger along the lines of text on the last page. Something niggled at the back of my mind, something that I had just seen that was important.
Magda sat back, a look of disappointment on her face.
“Maybe.” I looked at the book again, going back to the beginning, where Kristoff’s name was first mentioned. My finger traced the centuries-old text, following along until I came to a spot near the bottom of the first page. “Magda.”
“Hmm?”
“This, right here. Does that look like ‘ in tua luce videmus lucem ’?”
“What is that, Latin?”
“Yes.”
Her dark head leaned over the book. “Yeah, it does. Why, what does it mean?”
“‘In thy light we see light.’”
“Sounds like a university motto.”
I stared down at the page. “It well could be. It also happens to be something that the Brotherhood people say as part of their rituals.”
Her eyes widened. “What do you think it means?”
“I’m not sure. Look, does this say ‘Lodi’?”I tapped a word on the following page.
“Um . . . maybe. It could be. Then again, it might be ‘loom.’ Or even ‘look.’ The writing is too hard to decipher for sure.”
“I think it’s Lodi,” I said slowly, trying to remember what Rick Mycowski had told us about the origins of the war against the vampires. My fingers slid across the thin vellum until they rested beneath the date noted alongside the entry in question. “It says 1643. That sounds about right for the Lodi Congress.”
“The what?”
I explained what I knew of the history of the Brotherhood.
“Gotcha. So this is, like, a mention of the war starting. If so, it’s seriously old, and has to be valuable. I wonder why Alec doesn’t have this in some sort of archival protective storage rather than shoved into the hidey- hole of a desk?”
I flipped back a page, looking at the dated entry containing Kristoff’s name. Why, if the Lodi Congress started the year following that, was the Brotherhood mentioned in the earlier entry? Had Kristoff been one of the first vamps to go after the reapers? I made a mental note to ask him when things were less hectic and he’d be more inclined to chat.
“Regardless, it’s valuable enough to warrant having Kristoff translate it,” I said, gently rubbing my thumb across the goatskin covering. “If it turns out to be nothing, we’ll return it to Alec. Assuming he comes home, that is.”
“I guess we’re finished here, then,” Magda said, glancing around the room.
“We’ve looked everywhere. We can move on to the floor below us.” A thought occurred to me: Kristoff hadn’t been in contact with me for over half an hour. While that wasn’t in any way remarkable, I would have thought he’d be interested to know of our progress, or lack thereof. Boo, I’m ready to go on to the main floor. You about finished in the guesthouse?
Silence was my only answer.
Kristoff? Everything OK?
I stood up as the profound silence filled my head. “Something’s wrong,” I said, trying to open up my senses to locate Kristoff.
She paused at the door. “What?”
“Kristoff isn’t answering me.”
She glanced at the phone for a moment before her eyebrows arched. “Oh, the mind thing? Maybe he’s busy. Or out of range.”
I shook my head, suddenly filled with the strongest portent of danger. “I don’t think so. Something has happened to cause him to close his mind to mine, and that can only be one thing.”
“Reapers?” she asked, her face losing some of its animation.
I nodded. “Or worse.”
She froze for a moment. “Come to think of it, Ray should have been upstairs by now. Even if he had been drinking that lovely Costa Russi, he should have. . . . I’m going to go check on him.”
She dashed out of the room without waiting for a response.
Possessed by a sudden sense of urgency, I hurriedly wrapped up the journal, shoved the bit of trim back onto the desk, and without an alternate choice, stuffed the journal under my dress, into the band of my underwear.
I snatched up the penlight that Kristoff had left me, flipping off the room’s light before carefully closing the door. The house was dark now that the sun was setting, but the penlight allowed me to pick out the way to the stairs that led down to the main floor. It, too, was in the dark, and for a moment I hesitated, the primitive part of my mind refusing to march blindly into what felt like certain danger.
My foot had just hit the first stair when a noise behind me startled me, causing me to simultaneously gasp and spin around, one hand clutching the penlight, the other groping the journal as it pressed against my skin.
A face loomed suddenly out of the darkness. My skin crawled in horror for a moment, my body giving in to the flight instinct. I stepped backward and plummeted down the staircase into the inky blackness below.
CHAPTER 13
The pain caught my attention first. It was sharp and hot, radiating out from a spot on the side of my head, dull waves of agony that brought the rest of my awareness to me.
“Unh?” I said, my tongue seemingly made of lead as I blinked my eyes, trying to shake off the last shreds of oblivion that clung to the edges of my mind. “Hrng?”
“Are you awake? How do you feel?”
I blinked a couple more times. Light and shadows flashed on my face, blurred into fleeting shapes that seemed to rush past me.
“Boo?” I asked, trying to adjust my position, and wincing at the pain in my head that followed the movement. “Ow. What the hell?”
The man’s voice was a pleasant baritone with a slight German accent, sophisticated and sexy. “You hit your head on the banister when you fell. I caught you before you tumbled down the stairs, so you should be fine. Immortality is just one of the perks of being a Beloved.”
Carefully I turned my head to look in the direction of the voice, my eyes still not focusing too well. Slowly, a
