And adding insult to the whole thing, wolves could learn some magic, but mostly we were just…wolves. Our teeth and claws were excellent weapons against ordinary humans, unskilled wizards, and most low demons…but beyond that, we were disadvantaged when the magical races went to war.
So we didn’t stir up anything.
“Hel might be in trouble,” I said. I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to think about it. But the idea of something happening to that girl…
“Yeah…we knew there was something about that house. She gets in over her head anyway.”
“‘A great treasure of Sinistral’ sounds like either nonsense, or something that would attract the councils and put a lot of people in danger.”
“It’s gotta be nonsense,” Jake said. “What could be that important?”
Really, Jake? “A lot of things!” I said. “Remember when somebody bought a wizard house in Europe and found that crazy healing crystal that sold for twenty million dollars?”
“Hmm. But we’re not going to profit off this. Not our house. Not our business.” He scratched his unshaven chin. “But you really do like Hel, don’t you?”
“You really like her too.”
“I’ve come to my senses since that night. I guess the heady smell of bowling shoes got me feeling amorous.”
“Maybe we should just check on her,” I said.
“Dad’s birthday party is next week,” Jake said. “If we skip out instead of helping Mom set it up, we’ll have to actually tell her what we’re doing.”
“Oh yeah…” The great thing about our close-knit families is that we always had each other’s backs in a magical world that didn’t trust us. The bad thing was, we always had stuff going on, plus nosy aunts, nosy cousins, you name it.
Jake tapped randomly on the steering wheel like he was listening to music, but we were silent. It was driving me nuts.
“She’s a blue blooded witch,” Jake said. “If she gets into deep shit with the council, her family wouldn’t let her die.”
“I guess…”
“Right?”
“I try not to pay attention to wizard life, but they’ve had a lot of scandals and murders in recent years. I’m not sure anyone is safe if they get on the wrong side of something.”
“What could this shit be? The Holy Grail? What would we do if we found something like that in a house we were working on? You can’t just sell it, you can’t just hide it…kind of a nightmare, really.” He fiddled with the radio dials, trying to find something out here that wasn’t terrible. “And we wouldn’t even profit from it, so we really better leave it alone.”
“Yeah.”
The truck hit the main road, accelerating in speed as the countryside whisked by the dusty windows—this thing needed to be washed, that was for sure. The fall colors were bright in the trees, and my eyes glazed over a blur of yellow and red. I kept thinking about Helena, how good it felt to work with her, the confident way she teased us back when we teased her, her ass in jeans…and that kiss.
“We’re going back to Pennsylvania, aren’t we?” Jake asked.
“I know I am,” I said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
HELENA
“I CAN SEE I made a huge mistake in not buying a second bottle of wine,” Graham said, as he gave Byron another once over. “So is that what I’m supposed to really look like?”
“If you could come to Sinistral, then yes, you could manifest a similar form,” Byron said. “It also works in parallels.”
“He doesn’t know what those are either,” I told Byron. “But yeah, there are spots where the two worlds meet.”
“So you’re Byron.” Graham kept looking at the bottom of his wine glass wistfully, twirling it and letting cut glass cast rainbows on the table in the library. “You were one of my grandfather’s close friends.”
“Yes.”
“They said you were a librarian.”
“That’s right. In the Great Library of Sinistral.”
“Do you recognize these books?” Graham unwrapped the three Arcana again, and I felt another little spark of attraction to him because he didn’t stay shocked for long by Byron’s appearance, but moved straight on to the detective work. Whatever he might tell me about how he needed to get back to his career, he was already in deep with all this.
“Yes,” Byron said.
“What are they?”
“They date back to the 11th century,” Byron said. “And are written in a lost language called Cyprium which was once a trade language between the magical realms. I can tell you that much.”
“Oh really?” I asked, wracking my brain. I’d never heard of a trade language between the magical realms, since they didn’t usually want much to do with one another. “11th century…that’s old.” Yes, I was really adding a lot to the conversation with my amazing powers of deduction.
“Why are they here?” Graham asked. “What are they trying to tell us? And why did my grandfather have them?”
“My lips are sewn shut,” Byron said.
“They look fine to me.”
“He means, um…the lips of his corpse are sewn shut,” I said.
“Can we unsew them?”
“You want to dig up his corpse!?” I cried.
“Right. I guess since you had some sort of ghost sex, you don’t want to see that,” Graham said.
“I’m just not very casual about digging up corpses under any circumstances,” I said, standing up to pace. I needed to pace. I was getting restless. I definitely did not ever want to see the remains of someone I had
