“Store?” I ask. “How?”

“Think of this less as a journal and more as a link to another dimension,” Elaine says. “You’re connected.” She stops on a page with a detailed drawing of an amulet. There’s a sprawling, thick-rooted tree carved into it.

“Dad brought one of those home once!” Anna exclaims. “He said they let people with magic cross the Shield into the Otherworld.”

“And it’s…inside the journal?” I ask uncertainly. It still feels strange to talk about this stuff as though it’s real, and not out of a book.

“Yep.” Elaine practically beams with excitement. “You just have to reach in and grab it.”

“What?”

“Reach in and grab it,” Elaine repeats, as if it’s that simple and above all, normal.

I look between her and Roy’s expectant expressions. They haven’t led me wrong yet, so I do as they say and reach toward the page.

My fingers go straight through the paper, deeper than the depth of the journal, and I jerk away with a yelp.

Anna peers closer. “What? Did it bite?”

“No,” I reply warily, still spooked by the empty space my hand found on the other side. “I just wasn’t prepared for that.”

“Try again!”

I reach in quicker this time, my fingers cutting through empty space to knock into something solid. Seizing it, I withdraw a smooth oak pendant, the symbol of the tree of life burned into the wood. We both gape at it, and I turn it over wonderingly in my hand.

“To return it, you just do the reverse.” Elaine holds up the journal for me, where a blank space now waits. I place the amulet inside, and when I remove my hand, the drawing reappears on the page.

Anna grins. “That is so cool!” She snatches the journal out of Elaine’s hand, flipping furiously through the pages. “What else is in here?”

“A lot, I’d wager,” Roy says. “Like Elaine said, these journals are passed down within families, gathering power and magic the older they get. When two Ravens get married, they often combine their journals, so you’re looking at the product of two powerful ancient lines: the Pierces and the O’Donnells. All the information they’ve gathered, all the supernatural creatures they’ve encountered, histories of their hunts, magical objects—it’s in there. And we’re going to walk you through it.”

An entire history of my family, answers to questions I never knew to ask, and more information and research than I can imagine. Anna makes a face at the idea of walking through it all, but I can’t wait to sit down and scan each page.

“Where do we start?” I ask with a grin.

Chapter 12: Anna