Chapter Seven
Bastian smiles gratefully, reaches into his satchel, and pulls out the grimoire, setting it on the coffee table, and we both scoot closer together so that René is happily squashed between us.
The book is astonishing close up, the cover embossed with what seems like years and years of markings and the leather worn down and soft at the spine.
I tentatively open the pages, inhaling that musty, sweet antique scent.
“This is all spells?” I ask.
“No, not just, look—” Bastian points to a part that looks like it’s written in French. “This is a recipe for soap.”
“Why?”
“Lots of witches throughout history used grimoires like journals, you know?” Bastian says, flipping the pages back to the beginning. “Recipes, gramarye, spells, family trees, shopping lists…”
“Shopping lists?”
“Uh-huh.” Bastian frowns and runs his finger down the page. “I read one from the 1500s that included a list of what type of buttons she wanted to buy.”
“So what family had this one?”
“No one knows. Sometimes family names are inscribed in the leather, but not this one.”
“How can that be possible?” I stare at all of this history, so rare and wonderful, and the authors of it all lost to the sands of time.
“I guess you go back far enough in history, one life looks very much like another,” Bastian muses, turning the page.
“So we’re all boring in death?” I say, stroking René’s ears.
“You’re a morbid person, you know that?”
“I do, yes.” It is one thing I know to be definitely true. “But then how can you know it’s a shapeshifter grimoire?”
“Lucky guess.” Bastian’s voice is evasive. I wonder if I should press him, but does it matter how he came to his “lucky guess”? After all, I’m just here for the results. On the other hand, does blindly trusting him make me the careless idiot my parents always thought I was? “Here it is.”
I’m distracted from my conflicted thoughts by my first look at the resurrection spell. The page is etched with complicated symbology and text, and Bastian’s face takes on an eager quality as he looks it over.
“So this is all normal, all expected gramarye.”
“Is it?” I say dryly, looking at the complicated notations that look like music, indicating hand movements and hints of ancient languages that I can only understand about 2 percent of.
Gramarye, the act of writing or creating spells, is one of my worst subjects.
This is what comes from only taking one practical witchcraft module a semester.
Bastian is glaring at the page, tracing his fingers over every word, as if expecting something to jump out at him.
“If this is all of it, why didn’t it…?” he mutters.
“Why didn’t it what?”
He turns the page. The next doesn’t look like the others. It’s completely dark, as if it’s been dipped in blood.
“Is it a replacement page?” He turns it and then, seeing only blank pages after it, says, “Fuck.”
“So it’s incomplete? We can’t do the spell?
” I ask. Bastian doesn’t answer. He looks thoroughly pissed off, biting his bottom lip.
I feel a confusing mix of things: relief, then creeping disappointment.
This has been a scary, thrilling day but at least it’s been different.
Now it’ll just be more of the same—days at college, nights at Beryl’s, the rest of my life spent missing Elizabeth.
“Maybe it’s not a replacement page,” I say, trying to find something to hold on to. “Maybe they dipped it in a different color to hide it, maybe there’s a way we can … I don’t know, lift the dye off it?”
I touch it and, oddly, it’s warm. When my fingers meet the dry, slightly textured surface, the red dye shimmers. It wiggles, as if hundreds of wood lice are trapped underneath it. Bastian sucks in a breath of surprise. I withdraw my hand sharply.
“Whoa,” I say shakily. I wasn’t expecting that.
“Yeah, whoa.” Bastian hesitates and then touches it, too. Nothing happens. “Why would it work for you and not for me?”
I frown. I have no idea, but having such an old book in my hands makes me think of my father’s own collection, of the ancient tomes smelling sweetly of dust, some locked with spells so intense only he can unravel them. I remember him standing over one, pressing a bloody fingerprint into the cover.
“Could it be blood-locked?” I ask hesitantly. I’m sure Bastian’s thought of it already, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. “Shapeshifters in the past sometimes used blood locks.”
“Really?” He looks up at me, eyes bright with excitement again. “Witches haven’t used them for hundreds of years, but shapeshifters still can?”
“Yeah.” I’m weirdly nervous. This would definitely fall into the category of a secret my father would hate me to repeat. I even imagine the angry furrow of his brows.
“It’s a good idea.” He’s immediately rifling in his bag and pulling out a penknife. “Try it.”
I look between the sharp edge of the pale knife and the deep red of the page.
I swallow in trepidation. Gingerly, I take the penknife.
I try not to remember the bathroom, focusing hard instead on the feeling of a French bulldog panting beside me.
Mouth dry, I dig the tip of the knife into the bulbous pad of my finger, gritting my teeth against the sting.
I wipe my bloody finger over the ancient page.
I hold my breath as my fingerprint sinks into an ocean of blood, losing itself.
Then, the wriggling begins again, intensifying, splitting like curdled milk.
“It’s working.” Bastian’s eyes are wide with astonishment. “Whoa.”
Unlike the notations I’ve seen in college, the words are written in script that circles the page in a strange pattern, too small to even make out. When I look closer, it seems like the page shifts, or the words do, impossible to catch. “Wait, is it seeping through?”
I hastily flick the page and we watch, captivated, as more words, not spells, spill out across the pages. It’s as if the words are water: they’re soaking through from the spell all the way to the back page and then spreading out in a weird, unsettling revelation.
“It’s a diary section,” Bastian says. “I told you, some grimoires are like journals.”
We flip back through so many different diary entries to where it starts and I read the first entry.
December 31, 1878. Today is my seventeenth birthday. Father has given me the care of the family grimoire. I have decided to use this book to mark my most important moments, to tell the tale of my shifts …
“They were a shapeshifter!” I say. There’s something about the handwriting that’s appealing to me. “You were right!”
I look at Bastian’s face and it is split in a wide, enthusiastic smile.
“No, you were right,” he says. “Now let’s look at this spell properly.”
He flicks back to the resurrection spell page, the tiny writing formed out of blood. Bastian reaches underneath the coffee table to the shelf covered in magazines and pulls out a magnifying glass. I wonder who on earth just has a magnifying glass lying around in their house, like Sherlock Holmes?
“These words are in Latin, I’m pretty sure,” Bastian mutters.
“Okay. Read it.”
“You think I read Latin?” Bastian looks at me in amusement.
“I mean, yeah, you’re rich and cultured and you’re named after a fantasy character—”
“Yeah, and I have access to the internet.” Bastian pulls out his phone. “Let’s look at this.…”
He pulls out a notebook and begins to write things down, muttering to himself as I suck the tip of my finger to get rid of the blood, my tongue full of its metallic taste.
“Okay, I’ve got it.”
He shows me the words he’s written down in his notebook and I read them aloud:
“In Boggart Hole Clough the demon’s name
Kilgrimol bones underneath the waves
Hair of the Black Shuck that stalks holy ground
Earth from the grave of the lost love
Blood of the shifter.
Hand on the stone of the wizard.
“That makes no sense,” I say.
“Yeah, well, maybe my translation isn’t perfect.
” Bastian scowls. “Also, it’s an ingredients list, it’s not poetry.
This is the secret of the resurrection spell, that it needs tokens and ingredients to work and then”—he points to a tiny fleck of a notation between the fifth and sixth line—“an instruction for the spellcrafting.”
“So the ingredients are…” I squint as I look at it again. “The name of a boggart, a bone from Kilgrimol, hair from the Black Shuck, and dirt from Elizabeth’s grave?”
“And your blood,” Bastian says. “Don’t worry, we only need some blood, not all of it. Looking at the equations here, like maybe a pint and a half?”
“A pint and a half?” It’s an astonishing amount of blood for a spell.
I learned about this kind of thing in some of my Roman history modules where they used slave blood for spells, but the slaves always died.
I look down at my arm and wonder how many pints I have in me.
Then I think of the bathroom, of Elizabeth in the cave, and the hair at the back of my neck stands up.
I try to push it away but the elation I felt when the blood lock unlocked is rapidly twisting into anxiety.
“The rest is all spellwork, but…”
“Bastian…” He looks up at me as I swallow the taste of my own blood in my mouth. “This isn’t a normal spell, is it?”
“It’s a resurrection spell,” he says slowly. “I mean, what did you expect?”
I immediately feel foolish. Of course it’s dangerous. I might not be the best at witchcraft but I know that an ancient spell like this, something crafted for permanence, requires a heavy sacrifice. It’s not like Bastian has lied to me.
“What happens if someone finds out we’ve done it?”