“Scions Thorn, Blackmoore, and Harlow,” she knelled, the air in my ears trembling with the force of her voice. Delilah’s timbre was deeper than mine, and in the Arbiter’s register it came across as a basso profundo that you could feel down to your bones. “The wreath awaits you, but it must be assembled. To gather up its pieces, you must find the remnants the founders left behind—Elias’s word, Caelia’s dream, Alastair’s heart, Margarita’s eye. And the soul that lies in the center of what they made together.”

Hey, silver linings: at least we seemed to be done with the shitty poetry.

As she finished speaking, banners of light streamed from the Grimoire and over to the three of us, winding around our bodies—just as they had done to transport Gareth, Rowan, and Talia to their respective orchard battlegrounds.

I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting to be whisked away—but when I opened them again, I still stood exactly where I’d been; bookended by Gareth and Rowan, the ropes of light shimmering around me with pearly iridescence.

“Alastair’s heart,” Rowan was mumbling under his breath, musing to himself. “Could that be . . .”

He closed his eyes to complete the thought, and in the next moment he was gone. So, this was a portal spell, but one controllable by the bearer—which meant I was supposed to determine where I wanted it to take me, like a self-guided scavenger hunt.

“Caelia’s dream!” Gareth burst out, as something dawned on him, too. Then he vanished as well, leaving me to eat their collective dust.

Every competitive instinct inside me—and I had quite the collection of them, to be sure—roared to kicking and screaming life. This arrangement, in which I was the last one standing ignorant, was not going to fly.

“Caelia’s dream, Elias’s word, Alastair’s heart, Margarita’s eye,” I chanted to myself, palms slicking with impatience. I assumed the Grimoire didn’t mean the founders’ literal body parts; as far as I knew, no one was keeping Alastair’s heart or Margarita’s eyeballs preserved in a pickling jar—though with the Avramovs, who ever really knew for sure. But in any case, the dream and the word were abstract concepts . . .

And then, with a sudden bolt of inspiration, I knew exactly where to look first.

Tomes & Omens, I thought to myself, closing my eyes. Tomes & Omens. With a stomach-dropping lurch like falling in place, the world shifted around me—then I could smell dust and ink and dry, papery decay, a bell tinkling out warning of my arrival though there was no one else to hear it.

I opened my eyes to my father’s darkened bookshop, waiting until my vision adjusted enough to let me make out the bookshelves’ silhouettes before I went pelting toward the attic stairs.

“Let me be right, let me be right,” I whispered to myself as I clattered up.

As soon as I flung open the door, I knew that I was; the attic glowed an unearthly, vaporous blue, the same light that always emanated from the Grimoire. I dashed toward its source, a glass display case in the Harlow section of the archive—where we kept the owl-feather quill with which Elias Harlow had written the original spellbook.