Page 35

THE IMMORTAL LIbrARY

E ira 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 were young. 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, not like magic. 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.

“And through these experiments, the Immortals created the first vampires, witches, changelings, genies, and all of the other sixteen supernaturals,” Jiro said.

“But the original supernaturals were not like those you know today,” Eva added.

“How so?” I asked.

“They weren’t human in form,” she said. “They were beasts.”

I frowned. “That’s…weird.”

Eva shrugged. “Not really. Those Immortal scientists didn’t want humanity to get in the way of studying the raw magic. That’s why they made them beasts.”

“So beasts were the original supernaturals.” Damiel rubbed his chin. “Fascinating.”

“Beasts…” My mind raced, rewinding back, back, back. “A beast.” I snapped out of my flashback. “That’s what I fought in the Treasury four years ago: an original supernatural.”

“But what was the beast doing in that Treasury?” Eira asked.

No one knew the answer to that question.

“On which world was this Treasury?” Jiro asked me.

“Palak,” I replied. “Do you know it?”

“Yes.” Jiro traced his finger across my sketch. “And which of these rings did you find there?”

I frowned at the picture. “Aren’t they all the same?”

“No.” He smiled. “You drew them. You know that.”

“She was half in a trance when she drew them,” Cadence told him.

“Well, in that case,” he said, tapping the page, “look closely.”

So I did. And he was right. The rings were almost identical, but only almost . There were slight variations in the thickness, smoothness, color. And the text on them was completely different.

“That one.” I pointed. “That’s the one we found on Palak. That’s the ring the djinn stole from the Legion and sent to that creepy old Treasury.”

“Its original home,” Jiro said.

“What? Really?”

“Yes. The ring you found was the ring for Psychic’s Spell, the ring of telekinesis.” He turned a few pages to a picture of a very familiar Treasury. “And Palak is its origin world. The origin world of all psychics.”

“Someone brought that ring back to its origin world,” Damiel said. “It stands to reason that they would do the same for the other fifteen rings. Which means we will find them on their origin worlds.”

“Yes,” Jiro agreed.

“Then let’s go. Let’s get them.”

Damiel caught my arm as I turned to go. “Not so fast, Sierra. The last time you went after one of the rings, a beast was guarding it.”

“And I took care of it.” I shrugged off his hand. “I handled it.”

“Yes, you are very impressive, but how about we learn more about what’s going on before we charge in?” he said with a half-smile.

“Fine.” I looked at Jiro. “Tell me about these beasts, these original supernaturals.”

“They’re strong. And powerful.”

“Yes, I remember. So if they’re so much more powerful than normal supernaturals, why didn’t the Immortals make more of them?”

“The beasts are difficult to control and quite violent. I suppose they got all they wanted out of those experiments, so they decided to move on. It was always the Immortals’ goal to create magical beings in human form, in our form.

They made gods, demons, Guardians, eidolons, spirits.

And all the supernaturals we know today.

” He closed the book. “And by then, they weren’t using the rings anymore. ”

“Why did they stop using the rings?” I asked.

“The rings turned out to be a bit too random, too finicky,” Eva said. “They didn’t always work. Half of the time, they made beasts with no magic, which the Immortals had to kill. It wasn’t efficient. They came up with better methods, methods with a higher success rate.”

“The rings don’t even work properly?” I frowned. “This makes even less sense. Why would anyone want to steal something that’s defective?”

Eva chuckled. “Oh, the rings aren’t entirely defective, young one. They just didn’t work well enough for the Immortals’ experiments. The rings still make very good magic converters.”

“Magic converters?”

“They take someone’s own magic and convert it into other types of magic,” she explained.

“In this way, someone can use magic they do not possess. For example, a vampire’s natural magic could be converted into, say, shifter powers that the vampire could then use.

Or a djinn wearing the ring could have their magic converted into phoenix magic. ”

“So with these rings, someone could wield all sixteen kinds of magic?” I asked. “Just like an Immortal.”

“Yes,” said Eva.

I swallowed. “That sounds very powerful.”

“But it’s not so simple,” Jiro told me. “A person has only a given amount of magic. The ring doesn’t increase your magic; it just converts your magic into other kinds of magic you might want to use.

The ring won’t turn a witch into an angel, even if it allows the witch to choose from all of those powers.

An angel simply has more magic than a witch.

So even with the ring, the witch is no match for an angel. Or a god, for that matter.”

“What about if someone had all sixteen rings?” I asked. “Would that make a difference?”

Eva shook her head. “No. Not really. It doesn’t matter if you wear one ring, two, or even all sixteen. They can’t increase your power. Your power level remains the same.”

“So why did the thief collect all sixteen?” I asked. “And why send them away to different worlds? Would the rings being on those worlds maybe increase their power?”

“The rings are already made,” said Eva. “It’s done. According to the book, their power cannot be increased.”

I sighed. “Then none of this makes sense.”

We tried brainstorming for a while longer, but neither Eva nor Jiro had any insights. They had no idea what the thief was up to. Jiro and Eva were Immortals, thousands of years old. If this had them stumped, then I didn’t know where else to turn.