‘I’m sorry to hear that. Perhaps it’s because your magic was so strong it will take longer to come back. Elnora told me you were a talented witch before the illness.’

Illness?

‘I’m hoping that’s the case,’ she said.

‘Such a shame; I was hoping that attack would have forced the magic to return out of instinct,’ Julius muttered, as if saying it to himself.

Ursula had told them the car was out front.

chapter sixteen

bethan kore

it was dark when bethan got home. The first thing she did was storm past Elnora, who sat on their couch. She didn’t explain herself; she abandoned Kellan in the hall. He tried to say something, but she didn’t want to hear it.

Something else had consumed her thoughts.

An image of a burnt corpse scorched in her mind. It would be there for the rest of her life.

She hadn’t forgotten what Lenovik told her earlier that day.

About his papers.

The Antiphonus.

She was tired of being useless. She needed to find the grimoire.

‘It’s not here,’ she yelled, tipping over the crate of papers onto her bed.

That was the second box of Dana’s research she had rummaged and sorted, with no sign of the papers Lenovik had mentioned.

She couldn’t comprehend why a paper on the Antiphonus could be helpful. Kurai was the black sheep of the Rennigan family. He was not credible. How would he know where the grimoire was? Besides, the Antiphonus had been locked up in the museum since the Blood Plague. Historians have read over it hundreds of times; if there was a clue to the grimoire there, it would have been found.

‘Hells, I thought my room was bad.’ Elnora’s voice appeared behind her.

She whirled to her friend, leaning on her doorframe. She thought she had left the door closed. She must have opened the door while Bethan dug through the thousands of papers strewn all over her entire bedroom.

‘You can’t even see Poe sleeping on your bed,’ she said.

Papers covered Poe, not that the black cat seemed to care. She was surprised she hadn’t noticed her familiar; the cat seemed to prefer to spend its day sneaking into Kellan’s apartment and tormenting poor Lupo.

‘Do you need a hand? Julius told me what happened.’

Bethan chuckled. ‘Have you seen any papers lying around to do with the Antiphonus?’

Elnora shook her head. ‘I can’t say I have.’

‘You look like you crawled out of a dimension of the Hells,’ Elnora said.

‘I have been through a lot today.’

‘Tell me.’ Elnora crouched next to her. ‘You’re spiralling.’

‘Is Agatha and Circe here?’

‘No, they’re out at dinner,’ Elnora murmured.

Bethan nodded, and she told her everything. Her mind drifted to her dark-haired fae, who had awakened a new sense of fear within her. She wasn’t sure how she could carry on.

‘I don’t know how I can trust him,’ Bethan said. ‘That man died because of me.’