Neck red, he didn’t say anything, finally turning to pull a few sheets from Ivy’s printer. “Pretty much,” he said as he took a pen from his pocket and began to sketch a pentagram as I might draw a smiley face. “The original soul must be forcibly ripped away and the old soul fixed into its place. Most times, the recipient became psychotic, which only added to the mystique of being a high priest back then, I suppose.” He looked up, reading my disgust. “I did say there’s no record of this charm being performed for several thousand years.”

“But you still know how to do it,” I accused.

“Aren’t you lucky for that,” he shot back. “You can’t get a soul to spontaneously attach itself and hope it sticks, even if it’s his own soul and his own body. It left once, it will again.”

He was right, and I tried not to look so pensive. The thought occurred to me that he might be giving me a black charm in the hopes of damning me with it. It wasn’t illegal to know black magic, just to do it. And destroying the soul of a newborn so an old man might live again was about as black as it got. “No wonder the demons hate you,” I said under my breath.

“Oh, are we going to compare past atrocities now?” he said even as he began writing a list of ingredients beside the pentagram.

I cocked my hip and watched him; his penmanship was as precise as his dress. “Stealing healthy babies and substituting your own failing infants is pretty nasty.”

“So is a thousand years of slavery. Or creating a species for your own pleasure, one that necessitates acts of perverted brutality to survive, acts committed on the people you love.”

He was talking about the vampires. “No worse than destroying your enemy by attacking their unborn children.”

Landon stopped writing. “They did it first.”

But who really knew the truth? I couldn’t solve a puzzle two thousand years dead.

His motion cocky, Landon spun the paper to me. Listed was a mix of plants, objects, and ley line equipment designed to sympathetically harness intent: blood, hummingbird egg white, sunrise spider silk, aspen sap, a copper Möbius strip, silk scarf, salt—probably to scribe the pentagram with—and a familiar phrase of Latin. Tislan, tislan. Ta na shay cooreen na da.

My lips parted and a wave of disconnection flooded me as the words rose from my mind. “That’s the phrase Trent used to move my soul,” I said, my voice sounding hollow, as if from outside myself.

Landon frowned, actually doing a double take as I blinked to find myself. “Trent has done this? Are you kidding me?”

“Not this one,” I reassured him. “But he held my soul in a bottle for three days while my aura replenished itself. I remember the words.”