"But it must be different for humans." I flinched at the word. I still hated to think of myself as somehow apart from my birth species. "They have souls."

"Do you think we don't have souls, Carrie?" Nathan asked softly, putting his hands on my shoulders. "Do you think you don't have a soul?"

"That's not what I meant. Not a soul in the philosophical sense. I meant in the Judeo-Christian sense. That there's something in a person that goes to heaven. Obviously, we don't go there. We go to the weird blue shadow world." I shuddered at the thought of it. Drifting with no sense of time or identity, and worse, not caring that you were.

"Well, I won't argue. But wherever he was expected after death, Clarence didn't go. Oh, we made a great game of cornering him in the dining room and chasing him around the table. He even did that feint where it seemed he'd go one way, but then turned and went another." Cyrus smiled, lost in reminiscing, and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. He looked first at me, then Nathan, and a guilty expression came over his face. "Well, at any rate, Geoffrey caught him, drained him and left his corpse on the floor. Father was livid. You know how they say it's hard to find good help? The same was true then. He was raving, ranting, tearing through his parlor like a man possessed—you remember the parlor in my suite, Carrie?—until he finally calmed down enough to kill Geoffrey as punishment. Imagine his surprise when, just as Geoffrey's body burned down to ash, Clarence walked in and politely asked if we required him to clean up the mess!"

As neither Nathan nor I were laughing, Cyrus wisely swallowed his amusement.

"What I don't understand is, if Clarence is tied to the house, and he's working for the owner, how was he able to help me against you and Dahlia?" I tapped the nail of my index finger on my teeth as I stared at the book.

"Well, Dahlia and I didn't own the house. My father's name has always been on the deed, in one form or another." He turned another page and started reading. "So, my father wanted me dead, and wanted you to find this."

"But why?" As I pondered the question silently, Cyrus turned back to the spell book, apparently unconcerned with the fact his father had wanted to kill him. It seemed so bizarre, to want to kill your own flesh and blood. And Dahlia… she'd been human once. What would the Soul Eater want with her?

"Oh, God." I heard Nathan's quiet exclamation and looked up. Cyrus had pulled his hands back from the book as if it had burned him. I turned to Nathan. He stared, wide-eyed in horror, at the spell book.