Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
Leo looks up from Browne’s journal. “It’s a bracelet.” He pops the last bite of his donut in his mouth and dusts the strawberry icing off his fingers. “Look.”
Avery sits beside him, oblivious to the pink flakes fluttering down on her sofa.
She was the first up this morning, eager to decipher Browne’s code.
By the time everyone else was awake, she’d determined that the alphabet was Enochian and had found a website with a key.
It isn’t exactly a straightforward letter-to-letter code, but fortunately, nearly eighty percent of the journal is in English, enabling us to corroborate details.
She leans closer to see the page Leo’s pointing to. “He’s right. The macguffin’s not a ring, it’s a bracelet.”
Aaron shrugs. “So basically just a really big ring.”
“Is that why it’s so powerful?” I ask, licking a blob of vanilla creme filling from the corner of my mouth.
Leo shakes his head. “The ring’s size doesn’t matter, it’s—”
Rime blurts, “‘That’s what she said!’” He grins proudly as we all groan. Topaz shoves a donut in his mouth.
Fighting a smirk, Leo goes on, “It’s whatever Ember put in the bracelet that makes it so powerful.”
I huff out a sigh. “And that’s the one piece of information no one seems to have.” We can’t even make an educated guess. Nothing in nature is that pernicious or self-destructive. Nature seeks to right itself, not hurt itself. Even when it’s destructive, it maintains balance.
“Well, I can tell you one thing—” Rime stands, stretches, and starts gathering dirty coffee mugs. “We now know more about it than Burdock and his cronies do.”
Avery springs to her feet. “My turn for the bathroom!” As if anyone would argue with her when we’ve all invaded her home. She curls her lip at the journal as she squeezes past Leo. “Seems like Browne was a much better scryer than he was an alchemist.”
Chuckling, Leo flips page after page. “June eleventh, fail. June sixteenth, fail. June twenty-ninth, fail. He never gets past the ‘Separation’ stage.” He goes back to poring over the journal while the rest of us clean up the donut boxes and argue over who gets the bathroom after Avery.
“Betts! Aaron!” he gasps a minute later, eyes flashing up from the book. “You two were right. Browne says two of the Englishmen who came west with him were killed by ‘Indians’ on the banks of the river.”
“Really?” In disbelief, I raise an eyebrow at Aaron. He laughs and shrugs, looking as surprised as I am.
Topaz asks, “Were any of the Indigenous people killed?”
Leo scans the pages and shakes his head. “He doesn’t say.”
“Considering I heard gunfire,” Aaron muses, “probably, yeah.”
I explain to Liv what Aaron and I experienced down by the river. She looks at me like I’ve grown two heads—not because she doesn’t believe me, but because she does.
Topaz nudges Aaron. “Have you checked that crime report thing this morning?”
He opens his phone and soon he’s breathlessly reading aloud: “‘Two suspects evaded arrest last night when area police were called to the Brownhill College library at 8:56 p.m. after an apparent forced entry triggered the library’s alarm. The building’s basement and grounds sustained damage, but the main floors were left unharmed.
No items were reported stolen. Police describe the suspects as two white males, age 20-30, one approximately 5’10’’ with dark brown hair, and the other approximately 6’3’’ with blond hair.
Anyone with information yada yada yada…’” Dazed, he rests the phone on his knee.
“Holy crap,” I mutter.
“Yeah, holy crap.”
Topaz drums her fingers on her chin. “Juniper must’ve glamoured herself in time.”
I feel bad for the poor cops. They’re used to breaking up rowdy frat parties, not apprehending evil fae. What a sight they must’ve beheld in that basement: dangling tree roots, straggling rats and snakes, and two threatening figures that were there one moment and gone the next.
Dishtowel in hand, Rime appears in the kitchen doorway and signals to Topaz with a nod. It must be time for a scouting mission. “I need to counteract Burdock’s birds,” he tells her as he tosses the towel on the counter and stalks across the living room.
She meets him at the front door. “And I’ll check out their apartment.”
While she grabs her jacket and heads out into the cold, Rime turns back to the rest of us. “Does anyone know anything about the birds of prey in this region?”
Leo and I point to Liv.
Rime’s blue eyes widen. “You do?” He seems more pleased than shocked.
“Um, yeah… I… well…” Pink blooms on her cheeks and neck.
“She’s an Environmental Science major,” I offer up.
“Really?” His smile has even my heart fluttering. “Do you know which species are the most aggressive?”
She answers confidently, like a kid who knows she’s about to nail the spelling bee. “Either the great horned owl or the red-tailed hawk.”
His grin grows crooked as he considers her.
Giddy and flustered, she adds, “The owls can be pretty brutal, but it’s the hawks that are really territorial.”
“Yes! Territorial!” He pauses to point at her as he shrugs into his jacket. “That’s what I need. Do you know where to find them?”
She gulps as he sheaths his dagger. “Yeah.”
“Are you willing to come with me?”
Interestingly, it’s Leo’s assurance she seeks. At his nod of endorsement, she stands. “Yeah, okay.”
I beam like a proud mother. She’s not good enough for Kappa Phi Theta or Braden McCormick? Please. She’s helping a warrior faerie save his realm. Eat your heart out, Lara and Peyton.
“She’s safe,” Leo tells me the moment the door shuts behind them.
“I know.” I join him on the couch and lay my head on his shoulder. “He wouldn’t let anything happen to her.”
Leo stretches an arm around me and fiddles with my hair as he idly flips through entry after entry of failed alchemy experiments.
“Wait.” I sit up straight. “Go back.” I gesture for him to turn the pages. “Keep going, keep going…. stop! Look. Did you see this?”
“No. What?”
I point to the top of the page: Souls Contacted.
He squints. “How did I miss that?”
Together we scan the list: English names, Indigenous names, several unknowns simply labelled man, woman, or child—all listed with dates.
Leo lets out a low whistle. “Browne was using scrying to talk to the dead.”
“Are these the dates they died?”
“No, I think these are the dates when he contacted them.”
“Wow.”
Turning ahead, we find another entry from about a month later. Several names on this list were on the first one, and in between are pages and pages of what the dearly departed had communicated to Browne.
“You’re right, Aaron,” I say.
Aaron jolts in the armchair, making me suspect he’d fallen asleep. “Of course I’m right.” He removes his glasses and passes a hand over his eyes. “About what?”
“Thomas Smart shot and killed one of the Indigenous Americans right before another one put a spear through his heart.”
“Thomas Smart’s?”
“Yup. According to his spirit.”
Avery emerges from the bedroom. “What’s this about spirits?”
When we fill her in, she waves us excitedly to the table and opens her laptop. “Let’s get back to decoding.”
While she brings up the Enochian alphabet key, I ask Leo, “Do you think that’s why I felt that icky hubris in his forge? Because he was talking with the dead?”
“I doubt it. Yes, alchemy and necromancy were considered blasphemy, but they were common.”
Avery agrees. “You’ve contacted the dead yourself, witchling.”
True. And both times it was potent and creepy as hell.
Ten minutes later, we’re all scowling at the journal, and Avery is rubbing her forehead. “This doesn’t make sense,” she whines.
“Maybe that’s supposed to be an I instead of a Y,” I say. That sloppy molly-wrench-looking squiggle could also be a J, as could the fishhook-y mark.
“Here’s an idea, scryer morons,” she grumbles. “One symbol per letter!”
“Hey, it’s not their fault,” Aaron laughs. “The angels made up the alphabet.”
She rolls her eyes. “Like hell they did.”
Amid our snickering, Leo blurts, “Holy shit.” But I’m too caught off guard by his sudden burst of emotion to praise him for swearing. “Browne tried to break down the bracelet,” he says, furiously scouring the yellowed page. “He wanted to get to the source of its power.”
“Hubris,” I breathe.
“Hubris,” he agrees, his eyes meeting mine. “Big time.”
The four of us scramble to translate the next several sentences, and the results leave us staring at one another in horror.
Apparently, Browne set out to dissolve, separate, and distill the bracelet into the Philosopher’s Stone, but never made it past step one.
He got his bloomery furnace hot enough to melt the bracelet, but, in his own words, “dashed the cursed thing away before a single drop fell into the crucible.” The earth shook, and the fumes sent him into “paroxysms of ague” that pitched him to the floor.
The same horrifying paroxysms that nearly knocked me out in the forge.
The next morning, Browne found dead birds scattered on the ground as if they’d dropped out of the sky.
It was September, but the plants were leafless and their branches grotesquely contorted.
Browne’s “pup” barked and growled at unseen threats, and the air reeked of “sulfur and blood.” These horrors occurred in a circle nearly a mile in diameter, with Browne’s house and forge at its center.
Aaron chimes in, “That’s what they were talking about at bingo, remember? That stuff about trees growing sideways and fish with no eyes?”
Leo nods, his gaze distant. “Has to be. Horrors like that are the stuff of legends. Literally.”
“So then Brownhill is built on Browne’s Hill,” I realize aloud. “It was all the stuff he was doing in that forge that made it legendary.” Alchemy, necromancy, melting down faerie jewelry. No wonder people called it the Crossroads or the Pit of Hell.
On the very next page, Browne wrote that, because the bracelet’s “poison” was unleashed by the furnace, his only recourse was to bury it as the “Man of The Folk” had originally commanded.
“But where?” Avery snarls to herself. Her eyes flit back and forth between the key and the journal. “He says here he made a lead box.” She slides the book to Leo. “Did I get that right?”
“For the bracelet?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“It’s First Matter,” Leo mumbles as he reads. “It makes perfect sense.”
Aaron chuckles. “It might, but you don’t.”
“In alchemy, lead is the basest metal, therefore it’s neutral,” Leo explains.
Avery bounces excitedly. “And would neutralize energies!”
The gold in Leo’s eyes glimmers. “The lead box was Browne’s way of containing the bracelet’s power.”
“Um.” I hate to be a wet blanket, but they’re not seeing what I am. “But then doesn’t that mean that there’s no… supernatural way of finding it?”
Avery drops her head back and moans, “Fuuuuck.”
“I might not even be able to feel it.”
Leo taps his chin with his pen. “I think you will,” he tells me. “Assuming the lead box is even still intact, it would only neutralize the bracelet’s magic; it shouldn’t have any effect on emotional energy.”
“But if it is intact, there won’t be any signs in nature,” Aaron reminds us.
“Which is why we need Betts even more,” Leo reluctantly admits.
I look away. He doesn’t need to apologize, not even with his eyes. I chose to be here.
“So it looks like the box was just Browne’s first line of defense,” Avery says, back to decoding. “Because he also built a little stone house in the ground to put it in.”
“That might actually make it easier to find and dig up,” Aaron surmises.
Easier for us? Or for Brier’s team?
Determined to work faster, I turn my attention back to the code, only to be distracted by the front door flying open. Topaz trudges in, eyes hard and mouth in a flat line.
“What happened?” I ask, heart plummeting to my stomach.
She goes still, hands on her hips and eyes averted.
I may be imagining it, but she seems close to tears.
With a blink, she snaps out of it, kicking the door closed behind her and stripping off her jacket.
“Three canines dead. Two by copperhead bite, one by my dagger.” Propping herself against the door, she yanks off her muddy boots. “They were following me in the woods.”
River’s scouts.
“What kind of canines?” I ask.
She shrugs like she doesn’t care. All the more evidence that she does. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen this kind before.”
“Coyotes,” Avery supplies. For better or worse, there are no wolves in the southern Appalachians.
Topaz slaps her sheathed dagger onto the bookshelf.
“And then a mutt followed me into town. Thank the gods I was able to convince a stranger he was a stray. She said she’d take him home with her and put up Lost Dog signs.
” She huffs and her expression goes blank again. “Avery, do you have any bandages?”
Avery pales. “Bandages?”
Shit, can faeries get rabies? I ask, “You didn’t get bitten, did you?”
Topaz merely shakes her head.
“There’s a first aid kit under the bathroom sink,” Avery tells her.
With a stiff nod, Topaz disappears into the bedroom and shuts the door.
When Avery rises to go after her, Leo stops her with a hand on her arm. “Give her a few minutes.”
I wring my hands and fight for a deep breath, the urgency I felt a few minutes ago reaching fever pitch.
I sense it coming off Avery, Aaron, and Leo, too.
Whatever lead we’ve had, we’ve lost. River, Burdock, and Juniper aren’t just searching for the bracelet, they’re actively thwarting us.
If we get to it first, we’ve only won half the battle.