Chapter 45
Chapter Forty-Five
Selene
It was late that same night. I couldn’t sleep. Sydney couldn’t sleep. And Ender hadn’t wanted to see me tonight. So I opted to skim through the dark grimoire.
The moment I had partially uncovered the grimoire, Chaos’s scales rose along his long neck, steam emitting from his mouth as he hissed.
The book radiated a sickly feeling to the point that Sydney had retrieved a thick cloth for preserving books.
It didn’t just preserve books. It dulled the effects of this one.
“It’s okay, Chaos,” I said in a soothing voice. “It gives us the creeps too, but I need to read it to help find the dark mage clan that killed my mom and is after me.”
Sydney finally knew about Mom. I just had finished telling her a brief summary of how we ended up here.
After Ender and I got back from Singapore, I had told her John was my father, but I didn’t indulge in the exact how we got here and our upbringing, just that we lost our mom and he had found us.
She had sat there and listened… and it appeared Chaos had also.
The little dragon hunkered down, and I wondered if he was more sensitive to the effects of the grimoire.
“I agree, Chaos,” Sydney said from her desk. “I don’t like that big black book either.” Her gaze shifted to me. “Should I take him for another walk?”
“I think he would like that.” Even though I had just taken him for a short stroll through the woods, he always had energy.
And this late, even the stragglers I’d seen wouldn’t be out.
This tiny dorm room wasn’t doing him any good.
I’d have to figure out something soon. “But he might need some convincing to go.”
Chaos was still hunkered down, his eyes in narrow slits as his glare pierced the book.
After some convincing—and potato chips—Chaos left with Sydney.
Finally free of hot dragon breath and death glares, I opened the grimoire, immediately becoming entranced by its contents.
Its pages were thick but fragile, with a little amount of dust coating the edges.
I frowned. The basement had a preservation spell to protect its belongings.
I imagined the dust had to have come with the book prior to its arrival at the academy.
Viv would’ve made some comment regarding how old this dust must have been if she were with me.
But she didn’t need to touch or be near this book. I didn’t even let Sydney get close to it.
The majority of the grimoire was in a language I didn’t recognize, which was upsetting.
After flipping through some pages, I found a couple words in Latin that stuck out.
Circulus obscurus. The Dark Circle. Translating took some time, as I wasn’t as fluent in Latin as I was French or Spanish.
And I really hoped I wouldn’t have to speak any of this.
A section on the first page had a few Latin words with reference to a clan called The Dark Circle.
Its members wore a dark circle on their palm, indicating some sort of link between them.
The clan leader’s name wasn’t mentioned, just that they had been powerful and had been a level four ether mage in their previous life.
My dorm room door flew open, Chaos barging in with Sydney pressed against the doorframe, her hand resting on the handle. He jumped into the air, using his back claws to grab the grimoire from my hand. The grimoire dropped to the floor and fire spewed out of Chaos’s mouth at the leather-bound book.
“Chaos!” I shouted, jumping off my bed. “What are you doing?”
I spared a glance at Sydney, but she just shrugged. “He was very adamant about coming back.”
The flames disappeared, leaving a burnt circle around the unharmed grimoire. The smell of burnt fibers filled the room, leaving me astonished that an alarm hadn’t gone off. I grabbed the cloth and tossed it over the book, not wanting to grab it until it cooled off.
Chaos growled at the book, but I was able to coax him away now that the cloth was over it. Once enough time had passed that I felt the book was no longer scalding, I tucked it safely away under my bed. Surprisingly, the fibers of the cloth had not been singed. The book was truly evil.