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“They have books from before the time of the Immortals?” I spooned fresh whipped cream all over my pancakes. “What was there before the Immortals?”

“No one is quite sure,” said Cadence. “There are all these myths, but who knows which are true and which are just crazy stories.”

“A trip to the library with my girls.” Damiel licked the batter off his fingers. “How exciting!”

“Let’s hope it’s nottooexciting,” Cadence said.

“It’s just a library, my love. What could possibly go wrong in a library?”

CHAPTER 3

THE IMMORTAL LIBRARY

Eira and I joined her parents for a trip to the library. This wasn’t just any library, however. It was the library of Jiro and Eva, two really ancient—and really weird—Immortals. Eva was my father’s mother’s mother’s sister, or whatever that made her to me.

“I think this place is haunted,” Eira whispered to me as we followed her parents, Eva, and Jiro down the long library aisle between bookcases.

I eyed the shuddering books on the shelves with suspicion. As we passed them, their pages began to flutter. And the spines were rumbling.

Jiro glanced back at us. “Don’t worry. None of the books have eaten anyone in ages.” He didn’t laugh, didn’t wink, didn’t even cough. He actually looked completely serious.

Which only freaked me out even more.

We came to an open area with several tables. Cadence set the pages of the ancient writing scribbles I’d made onto one of them.

“Do you recognize this language?” she asked the Immortals.

“Yes. It’s an ancient language, from before my time,” Eva replied. “It comes from the early days, when the Immortals wereyoung. From what I understand, those appear to be laboratory notes.”

“Laboratory notes?” I squinted at the funny symbols on the page, but I still couldn’t read them.

“Yes.” Eva nodded. “From our early magical experiments. I believe we have a copy of the book those notes come from.” She snapped her fingers, and a book appeared in her hand. “Yes, this is the one.”

I recognized the book’s dark blue cover and silver foil lettering. The unreadable symbols were familiar too.

“This book is quite old.” Eva set the book on the table. “Very few copies of it remain. In fact, I thought our copy was the last one.”

“Is there anything about the rings in there?” I asked.

Eva’s brows squeezed together. “Rings?”

“I had a vision of sixteen gold rings.” I flipped through the pages of my scribblings until I found a drawing of the rings. “They look like these.” I tapped the picture.

“I believe so.” Jiro picked up the book, and, like magic, opened it to a page with a very similar drawing of sixteen rings. No, notlikemagic. It was magic. “Many millennia ago, the early Immortals created sixteen magic rings.”

“What do they do?” I asked him.

“They created them to separate and sort magic.”

I looked at Eira, who shrugged. She obviously didn’t understand what he meant any more than I did. And neither did her parents.

“What do you mean by ’separate and sort magic’?” Cadence asked.

“When they put those sixteen rings onto a test subject who possessed all sixteen powers, that one person became sixteen individuals, each one possessing one of the sixteen powers,” Jiro explained.

“Why would they want to do a crazy thing like that?” I asked.

“So they could study each power in isolation,” said Eva.