Chapter 26
While the library is a dark academia wet dream, replete with antique windows and creaking wooden desks, the archives might actually be where all the fun is found.
The Harker archives are housed in the same building as the library, Mortimer Tower, but on the second floor from the top, just below the planetarium, which Peter has told me twice now is the highest point on campus.
The view of Harker from the archives is nothing short of breathtaking.
On a dreary, mist-shrouded autumn afternoon such as this one, I can see the heavy clouds as they roll in, casting long shadows over trees as they shed copper leaves onto the quad.
The thought of torrential rain sends my heart sailing. A much-needed cleanse.
And maybe a good omen for the quest at hand.
“You stole a professor’s key card?” Peter hisses as Elliot shuts the archive doors behind us. His voice is hushed even though we’re the only people in here.
“Borrowed,” I correct as we push past cluttered bookcases and shelves stuffed to the gills.
Locked file cabinets and encoded books press up against wood-paneled walls under a low aged-brass chandelier.
Its candles are coated in the same dust that pumps in through the vents with the heat.
An antique carpet stretches underfoot. Something about the design—black and cream and winged—is both comforting and haunting.
Sophia drags a finger across a dust-caked tome on a shelf beside her head. “Who’d you swipe the key card from?”
“Reid.” Something about saying his name twists my stomach, but I bypass the emotion. There’s too much at stake right now for me to feel guilty about taking advantage of our charged moment this morning.
“My spooky little thief.” When I look up, Sophia’s gaze sparkles with mischief. “He’s going to be livid.”
“He’s not going to find out.”
“Maybe he’ll spank you. He seems like the spanking type, doesn’t he?”
Elliot snorts.
“Sophia. Focus. We’re here to look into a stolen Harker antique.” I brace myself to tell them the last piece of the puzzle. But the thought of hurting Peter…
“Why’d you take it off Graveheart?” Elliot asks, opening a closet to peer inside. “Class was before we learned about the missing dagger.”
“Look who’s Sherlock now,” Sophia says, impressed.
“I wanted to know more about my dad. About his death.” I take a seat at a wooden desk that’s been shoved into the corner—the only furniture in the room.
All that sits atop it are a quill, a crystal inkwell, and an antique leatherbound book with embossed golden filigree but no lettering. Inside, all the pages are blank.
When I turn to face the three of them, my palms are sweaty on the back of the ornate desk chair.
“It’s kind of the only reason I agreed to come to school here.
My first week, I found out he changed his name to Abbot after graduating from Harker.
I took the key card to search the Citadel’s records for his real name.
But now…” I steel myself. This is why I brought them here.
Peter needs to know. “The armorer told me the Aeon’s Dagger was checked out the night of the zombie spell.
And the person listed as borrowing it…was Kitty. ”
A breath rushes out of Sophia.
Peter goes chillingly still. “But she was—”
“Gone then. Yeah. The armorer didn’t even see her. He assumed a faculty member opened the case for her.”
“I told you,” Peter says, shaking his head.
“Something happened to her.” Sophia opens her mouth to argue, but he continues undeterred.
“The blade went missing on Friday, right? The day of the attack on the lacrosse game. And Kitty wasn’t seen after the wraiths broke in…
What if both incidents were actually distractions?
Orchestrated so nobody was in the dorm to see Kitty disappear or at the armory when the blade was taken? ”
“That’s sort of what I was thinking.” I swallow hard. “That’s why I thought this”—I wave the key card—“might be helpful. Maybe we can look into what someone might want with both Kitty and the dagger?”
“Unless Kitty’s the one who stole the dagger,” Elliot muses.
All three of us cut our eyes to him.
“I’m just saying what we’re all thinking. Maybe she faked leaving school, broke into the armory case with a teacher’s key like you broke into the archives…”
“Then she would have put a lot more effort into making her ‘disappearance’ look legitimate,” I say. “Starting with answering Peter’s calls.”
Peter nods. “Her roommate’s missing shoes, the imperfect handwriting…”
“I guess you’re right.” Sophia perches on the side of the desk.
“What are the odds that the same night wraiths get into Harker, Kitty decides to flee the school and nobody can reach her in any capacity…and then, while a psychotic spell is cast on the lacrosse game, your grandmother’s rare antique weapon is taken and destroyed and Kitty’s listed as the one to check it out? ”
My jaw tenses. “I’d say zero.”
“You really think someone kidnapped Kitty?” A little trepidation has snuck into Elliot’s voice. “Who would do that?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “But to use Kitty as a scapegoat in the armory log…Someone must know she isn’t here anymore.”
“Should we not go to, like…” Elliot scratches his neck. “The dean or something?”
“Not if someone really did take the dagger and forge Kitty’s name,” Peter says. “Only professors have the keys to the cases, like you said. If someone who teaches here is in on it…”
He doesn’t have to say the rest out loud. If Kitty can be made to disappear, so can every one of us.
“How does this thing work?” I ask Peter, motioning down to the book with empty pages.
“It’s a compendium.”
All three of us stare at him expectantly.
Peter sighs. “An enchanted search engine. Write what you’re looking for and it’ll direct you to a section, shelf, or drawer in the room.”
I lift the quill from the ink and stare at the blank page.
“What are you going to search?” Sophia asks, hovering above me. “Who kidnapped Kitty Briggs? Where’s my dad’s aeon dagger? It’s a filing system, not a crystal ball.”
“But that’s not a bad place to start.” I write Aeon’s Dagger and watch as the ink fades away like drying water.
On the other page, cursive begins to scrawl on its own, naming hundreds and hundreds of files and books across the room.
I shake my head and try uses for the Aeon’s Dagger instead and am met with the same result.
Still too wide a net. I drum my fingers on the desk.
“You said the blades got hot, right?” Peter asks, coming to stand behind me. “Try melted Aeon’s Dagger alloy.”
Fifteen results etch themselves onto the page. Bingo.
“You genius,” Sophia breathes. Peter grins beside her.
We divvy up the hits among the four of us and pick through the room. Peter decides an article from a 1948 issue of the Harker Herald is a good place to start. The paper is filed somewhere between spools of film marked Chaplin Original, 1914 and a demonic text that looks older than Stonehenge.
After he insists we put on the gloves used to handle antiquities—a man after Fiona’s heart—we open the newspaper clipping titled Harker’s Penchant for Rare Goods, which describes the long list of collectors’ weapons, rare books, and restricted potions found on Harker’s campus.
Everything from the Tang dynasty wallpaper in the third years’ housing foyer to the medieval wand framed in Dawnmere’s classroom is mentioned in the piece.
“Here,” Sophia says after a minute. “Found it.”
She points to a paragraph and begins to read aloud.
“ ‘There were never many aeons to begin with. By the turn of the century only four bloodlines remained in the Citadel’s records. So it’s no shock these Aeon’s Daggers have great financial value.
Even more so when the complete set, including the Lymantrian and Deviant daggers, is intact.
However, the Aeon’s Dagger is not merely a valuable collector’s item.
Centuries of being wielded by the deadliest hunters in existence mean the weapon is imbued with the spirit of great battles, kills, and triumphs.
When the blade is smelted, the remaining alloy can be used in many dark rituals and spells.
’ So someone on campus is really trying to ace Rituals and Exorcisms? ”
I stare at a shelf stuffed with paper thin enough to be tissue. The wheels in my mind are turning so hard I can feel them. Dark rituals and spells.
Peter and I look up and lock eyes.
He hurries over to the desk and writes across the page, syrabraxa ingredients.
Elliot hovers over his shoulder beside me. “The spell you were just telling us about?”
Only one result appears in that fine, enchanted cursive. An old grimoire, kept in the far corner of the room. Peter stands, sliding his gloves back on. “Let’s just see.”
But unease has spread through my limbs. That uncanny feeling of being on the precipice of something you know you’ll regret. Opening up WebMD when your head has hurt for four days straight. Downing the final drink you know will seal your fate hurling your guts up the rest of the night.
And clearly I’m a glutton for punishment. I follow behind Peter and help him pull the decrepit book from the tallest shelf. The scent of decaying paper fills my nose with each turn of the page. We find the syrabraxa section quickly. It’s been marked by three different CLASSIFIED stamps.
The first passage only tells us what Peter already has—