Chapter 13
Jess’ fingers were still too stiff to manage the key, so I took it from her and let us in.
We tiptoed through Priscilla’s doily-covered sitting room and up to Jess’ room on the second floor.
I winced at every creak of the antique staircase, and almost cried when I saw there was a beaded curtain hung in the doorway at the top, but no one came out to investigate.
With the massive influx of October tourists, Priscilla must be used to the sounds of constant coming and going, even late at night.
The sign outside had announced there was no vacancy, as was usually the case all through the summer and fall, until after Halloween.
The longer she walked, the better control Jess seemed to get of her own limbs, but she was still shaking and shuddering like mad, and so I unlocked her room and let us all in.
The place was a mess. The bed was rumpled and unmade.
A pair of pajama pants hung over the back of a chair.
At least six half-drunk iced coffees crowded the bedside table, along with an unopened bottle of water.
She hadn’t bothered to unpack her suitcase—it lay open on the window seat with a jumble of wrinkled clothes piled on top of it.
“Look, I know I owe you an explanation, but I’m still teetering on the verge of hypothermia here. I’m going to take a hot shower. Can you wait here for me?” Jess asked.
“We can wait,” I told her. We watched her scuttle around, grab a bathrobe, the pajamas from the back of the chair, her cell phone, and a toothbrush. She shuffled out the door to the hallway bathroom she shared with the other guests on the second floor. When the door shut, Nova rounded on me.
“Wren, what the actual fuck is happening?” Nova hissed. “We’ve got her back in her body, so it’s time for answers. Who is this woman?”
“I told you, I don’t really know. She just showed up on our doorstep and handed me the lost Vesper family grimoire.”
“But who is she? She’s not a Vesper too, is she?”
“No. She says she’s not a witch, but if that’s true, I’d like to know exactly what she is.”
“Oh, come on. She’s got to be! How can she possibly explain tonight if there wasn’t magic involved?”
“She didn’t say there wasn’t magic involved. In fact, she mentioned a “Casting”, which sounds like spellwork to me. But if she’s a witch, why wouldn’t she just say that? I mean, she’s in a town full of witches. Where better to tell the truth?”
“But that’s just it, Wren,” Nova said, and she dropped her voice even lower, so that I had to lean forward to hear her. “This could be the most dangerous place for her to tell the truth.”
“You lost me,” I said.
“Look, you already know about the Kildare Coven. They were banished forever from Sedgwick Cove because of the kind of magic they practiced. And as for my family, well…” Nova made a face.
“We easily could have been booted as well, if they hadn’t determined Sarah was the exception instead of the rule.
But what we saw tonight?” Nova shook her head.
“That kind of death magic is dark shit, Wren. Seriously dark shit.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t seem scared while you were watching it. If anything, you seemed… hyped.”
Nova shrugged. “Well, yeah, it might be dark as fuck, but it was still awesome.”
“Look, she said she was going to explain, so maybe we should just let her do that.”
“Yeah, or maybe we should bounce before she unleashes some more unhinged death magic on us.”
“Nova, I told you. Asteria told me I need to trust her.”
Nova looked like she was battling with the impulse to argue with me, and I was pleasantly surprised when she swallowed her questions and shoved her curiosity down with an impressively unbothered shrug.
“Fine. But we still need to understand what the hell happened tonight.”
“Agreed.”
Nova looked around furtively. “Do you think we should try to search the room while she’s gone?”
“And look for what?” I asked.
“I dunno,” Nova shrugged. “Weapons? Additional dead bodies?”
I gazed around skeptically. “I don’t know, Nova. It looks like it’s mostly dirty clothes and leftover iced coffee in here.”
Nova rolled her eyes. “We’re not looking for the obvious, Wren. We’re looking for what’s hidden.”
As much as I trusted Asteria, she was only human, living or dead, and therefore must be susceptible to the same weaknesses as the rest of us.
So, I agreed that we should probably do just a bare minimum of snooping.
Jess could still be hiding something—from Asteria and from us.
Better to have as much information as possible when confronting her. `
Nova and I started on opposite sides of the room, opening drawers, feeling under the mattress and between the dresser and the wall.
We moved as quickly as we could, knowing Jess could be back any second, and praying that she was taking her time defrosting her recently reacquired body so that we wouldn’t be caught.
I dug quickly through her suitcase while Nova stuck her hands into a pair of battered Doc Martins and the pockets of two oversized flannel shirts hanging on the back of the door.
“What’s this?” Nova asked suddenly. She had opened a drawer in the bedside table, and pulled out a small leatherbound book.
“I don’t know, a Bible? Isn’t that what they usually put in hotel bedrooms?” I suggested.
Nova snorted. “Not in Sedgwick Cove. No, it’s old, Wren. Like, really old.”
I hurried over to join her. The book was made of battered, ancient leather, and the words inside were in a language I’d never seen before—neither of us could make sense of any of it.
“Any ideas?” Nova asked, after we’d closed it again.
“Not really,” I said. “I know it’s not French or Spanish.”
“Or Italian,” Nova added.
“It’s… do you feel something strange when you touch it? A sort of… energy?” I whispered.
Nova nodded. “Yeah. This definitely isn’t a normal book. It might be…”
“A grimoire?” I asked, the word falling easily from my lips, even as Nova seemed about to say it.
She nodded. “Witch or not, this is a spellbook of some kind, I’m sure of it.”
We heard footsteps in the hallway, and Nova lunged for the bedside table, stashing the book back in the drawer, and sliding it carefully shut.
But then the footsteps stopped, and we heard a muffled voice out in the hallway.
Nova and I traded one silent look, and then both tiptoed over to the bedroom door and put our ears against it, listening.
I recognized Jess’ voice right away, and the long pauses between her words meant that she was talking to someone we couldn’t hear. Then I remembered she’d taken her cell phone along, and realized we were eavesdropping on her half of a phone conversation.
“I know. I guess this is going to be more complicated than I expected,” she said with a sigh. “I know. I know. And you’re sure it’s not anywhere on our map? That’s so weird. Yeah, I’m sure. Oh, come on, Cat, do you seriously think I can’t tell?”
Nova and I looked at each other, but I could tell from the expression on her face that she was as mystified as I was. Without hearing the other side of the conversation, it was almost impossible to understand what Jess was talking about. Still, we kept listening.
“I don’t know, I’ll have to try again, but it will be tricky,” Jess went on.
“I may need to enlist the girl’s help, and to do that I’m going to have to tell her at least part of the truth.
Of course I won’t. Fine. Will you please just let me handle it?
I can slip under the radar much easier if it’s just me. Yes, I’ll keep you posted. Bye.”
We heard Jess end the call and the footsteps started again.
Nova and I scrambled as silently as we could back across the room, and just managed to resume our seats as the door opened and Jess appeared, clad in oversized pajamas, with her masses of dark hair damp and piled on top of her head in a messy bun that was still dripping onto her shoulders, leaving wet spots on her gray t-shirt.
“You two done tearing my room apart?” she asked, smirking. “Because I can go dry my hair, too, if you need more time.”
I suddenly felt as though I had an obstruction in my throat. I threw a panicked look at Nova, whose usually bored expression harbored just an edge of anxiety.
“I… we didn’t—” I began, but Jess cut me off with a casual flick of her hand.
“Please. I would have done the same thing. In fact, if you hadn’t had a good snoop around, I would have written you both off as idiots,” she said, throwing herself onto the bed and looking through her beverages for something she could still drink. “Find anything good?”
Again, Nova and I just looked at each other. Then Nova pointed to the drawer in the bedside table. “We found a book. A really old one.”
Jess glanced at the drawer and nodded. “Thorough. I’m impressed.”
She didn’t seem angry, so I added, “We couldn’t figure out what language it was in.”
Jess laughed. “I’ve been studying it for years, and I still suck at it. It’s Gaelic. Irish, mostly, though it’s all antiquated, and so there’s some Scottish Gaelic and old Britannic mixed in as well. I doubt anyone could read it who wasn’t—” She cut herself off.
“Who wasn’t what?” I asked eagerly.
Jess sighed, and took a long sip from the one iced coffee that still had any lingering fragments of ice in it. She seemed to be considering me, choosing her next words very carefully. Finally, she put the cup down with a sigh of resignation.
“What about her?” she asked, pointing at Nova.
“What about me?” Nova asked, bristling.
Jess ignored her, still staring intently right at me. “Do you trust her?”
I shot a glance at Nova, whose face was twisted with defiance and—more surprisingly—nerves. I realized that she wasn’t sure of my answer. As for me, after everything Nova and I had been through together since I came to Sedgwick Cove, I was sure.