Page 27

Lydia felt a rush of euphoria as the realization swept over her, and the power of the book seemed to bloom inside her mind.

It felt like she was breathing magic, like the book was infusing itself into her bloodstream.

The characters remained as foreign to her as ever, and still, somehow, she knew every syllable.

Each spell seemed to unravel before her like spools of ribbon: Spells for bringing plague.

Spells for blighting crops and killing livestock.

Spells to snuff out joy, and bring despair and madness.

One particularly grisly spell that promised to unmake the spellcaster’s enemies, consuming them from the inside out and leaving nothing but ash in its wake.

Lydia knelt there on the farmhouse floor, listening to the song of the book, feeling its warmth under her hands, until something, a voice, pulled her back.

“Lydia.”

She looked up, and for a moment she couldn’t see Rebecca’s face.

It was like she’d been veiled under a teeming mass of insects, pulsing and writhing around her.

It was horrifying, as if Rebecca had been replaced by something inhuman.

Lydia nearly screamed, but then her eyes cleared, and Rebecca was as she had always been.

Lydia lifted her fingers from the page. The voices subsided.

“Look,” Rebecca said softly.

Lydia went to the window where Rebecca stood. In the distance, she could just make out Henry, hunched under the old oak tree, a shovel in his hand.

Lydia walked out of the house and across the field, clutching the Grimorium Bellum to her chest. She stopped a short distance from where Henry stood.

“René?” she asked.

Henry nodded tightly.

“I’m so sorry.” She cast her gaze toward the road. No one coming yet. “What happened?”

Henry took a piece of paper from his pocket. “He said I was right about the book. That it was talking to him. Telling him to… do things. To himself. And other people.” He rubbed his thumb along the yellowed scrap of paper in a movement that seemed to be unconscious.

The book had spoken to René? Lydia’s mind reeled with possibilities. Maybe there had been some witch blood in his family, buried so deep even René himself didn’t know. It would explain why he hadn’t felt the book’s influence until he’d had it for some time, while Henry had felt it right away.

Or perhaps…

Or perhaps the book’s influence was so strong that given enough time it could be felt by anyone, witch or no. Lydia looked down at the thing in her hands and shuddered.

“He rolled the truck into a ravine behind the barn.” Henry glanced over his shoulder.

“I think he was trying to make sure he couldn’t leave.

He wanted it to stop, so he…” His voice failed him as he gestured toward the place where René had spent his final moments.

Lydia saw what looked like an amber pill bottle lying in the grass.

“His family?” Rebecca asked. Lydia hadn’t heard her approach.

Henry looked at the piece of paper in his hand. “They were taken to Drancy before he arrived.”

Rebecca lowered her head.

“What’s in Drancy?” Lydia asked.

“A transit camp.” Rebecca said the words without looking up. “Last stop before deportation.”

Deportation. Lydia thought again of René’s nephew, Jean-Luc. About the cat he’d drawn, his name printed so proudly below it.

The swell of despair she felt was too heavy to hold—she had to let go or drown. She glanced back toward the road, snaking like a river through the fog.

“Henry? We can’t stay here. We have to go.”

“I can’t leave him.” Henry went back to his work.

Lydia could have screamed, but she steadied herself and tried again. “The Germans are coming. It’s a miracle they’re not here already.”

“I have to take care of him.” He said it simply, no anger, just a fact. A task that must be done.

“Henry—”

“I’ll help,” Rebecca said. She strode toward the barn and returned a moment later with a shovel in her hand. Lydia stood back for a moment, the need to flee making her frantic. She watched as they dug side by side, and realized that neither would be moved. Not until the job was done.

She made her way to the barn, holding the Grimorium Bellum against her like an infant.

It was dark inside, barely lit by the soft gray light pouring in from the open door.

She smelled hay, and dirt, and animals, now long gone.

It was very still inside, and quiet, as if the fog had built an impenetrable wall between herself and the rest of the world. Like she had disappeared.

There was a spade by the door. She returned to the tree and reluctantly set the Grimorium Bellum in the grass. Henry looked up briefly from his work and nodded. Lydia started digging.

···

It was growing dark by the time they finished the grave and maneuvered René’s body into its final resting place. Henry had placed René onto a canvas tarp before covering him, which made things easier. Lydia never saw his face.

They stood by the grave in silence. Lydia looked at Henry.

“I feel like I’m supposed to say something, but I don’t—” He made a low, strangled sound.

“It’s all right,” she said. “He knows.”

The fog seemed to thicken, enveloping them. The silence deepened, draping itself over them like heavy blankets soaked with seawater. And there, rumbling low and sinister in the air around them, the Grimorium Bellum whispered in a thousand voices, like swarms of insects only Lydia could hear.

Just when Lydia thought she could no longer bear it—the silence, the sadness, the incessant, relentless chatter of the book—Rebecca took an audible breath.

She looked like perhaps she wasn’t sure what she’d wanted to say.

Then she began to speak. The words were rhythmic like a poem, but Lydia couldn’t understand their meaning.

Rebecca closed her eyes and called out the words into the fog:

Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba

b’alma di-v’ra chirutei, v’yamlich malchutei

b’chayeichon uvyomeichon uvchayei d’chol beit yisrael,

ba’agala uvizman kariv, v’im’ru. Amen…

Y’hei sh’mei raba m’varach l’alam ul’almei almaya.

Yitbarach v’yishtabach, v’yitpa’ar v’yitromam v’yitnaseh,

v’yithadar v’yit’aleh v’yit’halal

sh’mei d’kud’sha, b’rich hu,

l’eila min-kol-birchata v’shirata,

tushb’chata v’nechemata da’amiran b’alma

v’im’ru. Amen.

Y’hei shlama raba min-sh’maya v’chayim aleinu v’al-kol-yisrael,

v’im’ru. Amen.

Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu v’al kol-yisrael,

v’imru. Amen.

Rebecca carried on until the syllables seemed to run out, and then there was quiet once again. The book lay at Lydia’s feet, silent as a stone.

“Amen,” Henry said. His face was streaked with tears. Lydia looked at Rebecca and saw that she was crying as well.

They drove back without speaking.

···

It was night by the time they reached the chateau. The morning’s fog had dissipated, replaced by a sharp-toothed wind that bit into Lydia’s skin through her thin coat. A delicate frost blanketed the ground, and moonlight illuminated the icy crystals, making the grass glitter in the dark.

Henry collected some pillows and blankets for Rebecca, then disappeared without a word.

Lydia studied Rebecca’s face as she eased herself into a kitchen chair.

Her skin was streaked with dirt. Yellow bruises still mottled the skin around her eye and mouth, and there were black crescents of dirt under her nails.

Two days ago, Lydia had thought of Rebecca as thin, perhaps a little too thin. Now she looked gaunt.

“You’re leaving us?”

Rebecca nodded. “Tomorrow.”

Lydia considered her bloody, blistered palms, but couldn’t seem to gather the energy needed to heal them. The Grimorium Bellum sat heavy in her lap.

“Those words you spoke. At the grave. It was a prayer?”

Rebecca stared at the table. “The Mourner’s Kaddish. It shouldn’t have been me. There should have been a minyan, but…” She shook her head.

“You’re Jewish.” Lydia watched Rebecca’s face for some reaction. “I didn’t know.”

“I didn’t want you to.”

She wondered why she’d never considered it before. “Is your family…” Lydia didn’t know how to finish the question.

Rebecca exhaled. “My father was taken away by the police two years ago. Then, last July, they came back and took my mother, and my little sister, Noémie. They took them to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, along with everyone else they could round up.

Then to Drancy. Then…” She didn’t need to say it.

Lydia knew. Deportation. Poland. Rebecca glanced at Lydia, then away again. “I wasn’t home when it happened.”

The pitch of the grimoire’s incessant humming seemed to heighten.

Lydia looked down and saw that her palms had left streaks of reddish-brown blood on the cracked leather of the book, and now it was practically vibrating.

She wiped her palms on her skirt, trying to make it stop, but it only seemed to become more agitated.

“Have you decided what you’re going to do with that?” Rebecca glanced at the grimoire.

Lydia looked down at the book in her hands. She shook her head.

“Not so sure about taking it back to your academy?”

The academy. She knew she should have been gone already. She should have called for her Traveler and been back in London the second she laid her hands on the Grimorium Bellum . It would be safe there, she told herself. It had to be.

But when she closed her eyes, she could still see the shredded doorway in the warding, just as clearly as she had on that Samhain night.

She imagined a shadowy figure, blade in hand, standing before that tattered portal.

Even though she could not see the figure’s face, she was sure she knew who it was, just the same.

Vivian.

“I saw you, you know,” Rebecca said. “At the farmhouse. I saw what that thing did to you.”

Lydia looked into Rebecca’s knowing face.