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Mr. Reid nodded to Owen. “Take them down to the room. It’s open.”

Owen took us back out of their ritual room and into the kitchen where the stairs to the basement were. We stepped down it and I got the sick feeling I usually did about this room. There was just something not right about it. Owen opened the door wide for us and Travis and Gabe walked in. I stopped next to him. “You’ll tell everyone you know, too, right?”

He nodded. “Of course.”

I slipped past him and walked into the room. Like before, it all seemed so overwhelming. There were so many books and Liam was really the only one of us who had the patience for this stuff. But because we didn’t know what to do and wanted to do something, we sat down and pulled books off the shelf, leafing through them. I read passage after passage, scanning for the word demon until my eyes were tired and dry.

Owen turned when footsteps sounded on the stairs. Ren, in all his slimy glory, ducked into the room. “Hello there.”

We all just looked at him and then looked back to what we were doing.

“Rude,” Ren muttered. I still ignored him, but then he said Randy’s name. “Randy called me. He said Liam would like to see the book that Dean ripped the page out of for the familiar spell you did. Since I happened to be here when he did it, I figured I’d come down and look myself.”

I looked back at him, surprise registering on my face.

“Don’t look that way, I’ve always been a team player.”

I bit my lip to keep from laughing. Whatever got him through the days, I’d let him believe.

“Well, good,” Travis said, closing his book and putting it down on a nearby table. “We’ll let you get to it then.”

It wasn’t that I disliked Ren, he was almost on the same par with the Reid’s. They weren’t bad people, but they weren’t good people either. They had some form of conscience, but it wasn’t as strong as ours.

Ren twisted to make what was sure a sarcastic remark, but he did a double-take. He moved over to the stack of books that Gabe had looked at and picked up one. “This is it.”

“I already thumbed through that one,” Gabe said.

Ren shrugged. “I’m telling you I recognize it from that day where Dean ripped a page out of it. This is the one Liam wants.”

It made sense to me that whatever help we were going to find would be in the same book that had helped us before. I held my hand out for the book. Ren hesitated-briefly. But then he smiled and placed it in my hands.

“Are you going to the Equinox celebration?” I asked.

“I use whatever excuse to party,” he said, his brows furrowing. “That doesn’t seem like your scene though.”

“We’re getting the word out about Jax,” Gabe said, moving up behind me. “We all need to be cautious, and we’re spreading the word there.”

He nodded. “I’ll see you there then, I suppose.”

Gabe and Travis turned and were already making their way out of the room. “Thank you,” I said to Ren, motioning to the book. We could have been down there for several more hours and never found anything useful.

I followed the guys out, but Owen stopped me by the door. “I’m glad to see that you’re okay.”

I smiled at him. “Same to you.”

Ren rolled his eyes. “You know she already has four boyfriends. It would be impossible to add another one.”

“Thanks, Owen,” I said, trying to talk over Ren. “That was nice of you.”

Travis and Gabe each had shit-eating grins on their faces when I walked into the main room. I gave them a look, and they began climbing up the stairs. What was I going to do with these guys?

Travis’s phone started to ring, and he fished it out of his pocket as he climbed. “Yeah? What’s up?”

He stopped dead in his tracks. “What?”

Alarm spread through me. Whatever news Travis was just given didn’t sound good.

“Son of a bitch!” He pushed past Gabe and ran through the house.