Page 148 of First Ritual

With those words said, he departed.

Spyne just made it to my favorite person’s list. Rooke was the only other name on there.

Grabbing the quill, I tickled the titles of the next four books listed and listened to their thump of arrival. I sat and flicked through the pages, quickly finding that my grandmother was featured in the game highlights nearly every week. My grandfather not so much, but Spyne’s words made sense. My grandmother was never soft unless doting on me and Syera. Never, unless she spoke of her partner in life that she’d left behind with Rooke’s father while she left the coven with my pregnant mother.

She’d described my grandfather as a person so damn decent she couldn’t say no in the end. Then she’d sniff and get teary-eyed before barking orders at us all day.

I paused on an entry in Caves 1972-73.

Team: Vero

Mission: Seize two territories

Outcome: Success

Highlights: Tridbert Haern charmed a monstrous being formed of the poisonous contents of the apothecary learning center to rampage through the northeast territory.

Rowaness Corentine depleted her magical reserves fighting two proven and two novices, then defeated a third proven by striking him across the head with a rock.

I laughed. “Such a scrapper.”

Grandmother was the kind to throw dirt in your eyes and bite your fingers. You never turned your back on Rowaness. Unless you were my mother, and then you did it as part of your master plan.

I returned to the library system and ordered more books. Mother appeared on the fighting scene in the mideighties, and seeing the contrast of how she played to how Grandmother had played spoke so strongly for who they’d been in life.

Team: Fertim

Mission: Destroy weapon stores

Outcome: Fail

Highlights: Hazeluna Corentine charmed a paradigm into existence for her opponent which they expended all their magic trying to escape. She then strangled them to unconsciousness using their hair.

Grandmother, the scrapper. Mother, the poetic fighter. I’d watched humans underestimate my mother time and again in my life. My grandmother might as well have come with a neon stamp on her forehead reading, Warning. Mother had always flown under the radar. Yet there was a savagery and wickedness to the way her mind worked that, in some respects, made her far more dangerous than Rowaness. My grandmother was a fighter who never gave up. With my mother… it was the planning and forethought. Her creativity.

And they’d ensured I had the best of both of them.

Spyne was right in his observation. I was fucking proud of my ancestors. My family.

I hadn’t been doing right by them lately. Nor in a long time. My fear had steered me from connecting with them. When I got rid of this demon. When I cut the tether, then I’d complete a series of journeys to strengthen my bonds with them in death and with those who’d come before them. I should honor my divination affinity, even if it held so much pain for me.

I worked through to the 2000s, and briefly after my mother was highlighted for aiding in a two-territory success against Vero, my grandmother and mother disappeared from the Caves record books. About when they’d left the coven.

I closed the book and stared at the piles of game records. As the seconds ticked by, a question that hadn’t ever meant much to me started to mean more.

“Why did you leave?” I asked them.

Standing, I stretched, then approached the library system again. Picking up the quill, I dipped it in the gold ink and scratched on the blank pages. Rowaness Corentine. Books borrowed. Might as well take a page out of the quad’s book and do some snooping.

Grandmother hadn’t borrowed many books considering she spent most of a lifetime here. Then again, she’d hated books. Said they didn’t even burn well because the paper stuck together.

I snorted at the first title.

The Art of Inflicting Pain. She’d checked it out at ten years old.

Inducing Sustained Misery. Fourteen years old.

Running through to the end, I felt my brows draw together at the last two titles Grandmother read before leaving with Mother.

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