Page 81 of Girl, Unseen

Display cases dotted the space between shelves. One held what looked like scrolls sealed in climate-controlled boxes. Another contained loose pages covered in illustrations that might have been astronomical charts or the ravings of medieval mystics or anything in between.

He started with the wall-mounted cabinets first. The gloves made his fingers clumsy as he noted titles.Picatrix. The Key of Solomon. Arbatel de magia veterum.Nothing close to what he needed.

The freestanding shelves came next. Here the books showed their age more openly - cracked spines, foxed pages, smoothed corners. The organization system seemed to follow some arcane logic that escapedhim. Latin texts neighbored Greek translations, which butted up against volumes in languages he couldn't even identify.

Luca worked methodically, shelf by shelf, section by section. He lost himself to the search and soon found his neck aching from craning at spines. Some volumes were bound in materials he didn't want to think about. Others bore strange symbols embossed in their covers - pentagrams, astrological signs, geometric patterns. He found entire shelves dedicated to alchemy, but the books were arranged by date rather than author.

Twenty minutes in and his optimism began to fade. He'd covered maybe a third of the collection. The texts blurred together into an alphabet soup of mysticism and metaphysics.Theatrum Chemicum. Splendor Solis. Mutus Liber.Fancy titles that meant nothing to his modern eyes.

Luca could feel precious minutes slipping by as he pored over page after musty page. Somewhere out there, a killer was preparing the final phase of their transformation and here he was, elbow-deep in the Ivy League version of a remainder bin.

Frustration mounted with each empty shelf. He'd pulled dozens of promising volumes, leafed through incomprehensible passages, then returned each one exactly as he'd found it.

The next section dealt with Eastern mysticism. Sanskrit texts that might have held the secrets of the universe, if only he could read them. Translations of Chinese alchemical works. Japanese scrolls in sealed cases.

A whole shelf of books on ceremonial magic yielded nothing but frustration. Next came the astronomical texts – star charts and planetary tables that made his head spin. The zodiac section could have stocked an astrologer's library.

His back screamed. His neck felt like concrete. The fluorescent lights had burned afterimages into his retinas. But he kept going, because what else could he do? Go back to Ella empty-handed?

There was no signal down here, but the time on his phone said 4:47 PM. Somewhere out there, a killer was probably selecting their next victim, and here he was playing librarian. There must have been 3,000 books here, so he'd probably find what he was looking for somewhere around Christmas.

Think, Hawkins. What would Ella do?

His partner had a knack for finding clues in the most innocuous places – a stray hair, a scuff of dirt, a crumpled receipt. She'd say every scene held a story; you just had to learn how to read it.

Except this wasn’t a crime scene. It was just a huge room full of books.

Ella would have torn through these shelves in minutes. She had this trick – something about letting her subconscious do the heavy lifting. Luca remembered fragments of her explanation, caught between case files and coffee runs. The conscious mind could only process about forty bits of information per second, but the subconscious churned through millions.

He'd watched her do it a hundred times. Her finger trailing across words like a divining rod, information flowing straight past her conscious mind into that steel trap memory of hers. She'd tried explaining it once - something about occupying the analytical part of the brain so the pattern-recognition systems could work unimpeded.

‘Just let your finger do the thinking,’ she'd said. Back then, he'd been too busy admiring her silken locks to really pay attention.

Luca felt idiotic as he pressed his gloved finger to the spines. Like a kid learning to read. But he traced along the row anyway, letting the titles flow past his eyes without trying to analyze them.

One shelf. Then another.

God damn. It worked. Or maybe he was just paying closer attention, and this was some placebo effect. Either way, the names registered faster now, his brain assembling them into categories without conscious effort. Latin manifestos. Greek commentaries. Arabic translations. His finger moved faster, drawing him deeper into the stacks.

Then his heart stopped.

The spine was plain black leather, no gilt or decoration. But the words sent electricity through his nervous system.

Corpus Hermeticum: The Divine Pymander of Hermes Trismegistus.

His pulse hammered in his throat as he eased the volume from its resting place. The same book. The exact same book they'd found at the cult meeting. But this one bore a small sticker:NYU Restricted Collection - English Translation.

Luca laid the book on a nearby reading desk, his hands trembling despite the cotton gloves. The leather felt alive under his fingers, like it contained some remnant of the knowledge inside. He opened to the introduction, employed Ella's trick again. Let his finger do the work while his subconscious absorbed the words.

He read it again. Then a third time.

Luca's heart slammed against his ribs like it wanted out. The blood in his veins felt carbonated, fizzing with adrenaline as the words burned themselves into his brain.

I, Hermes, once deformed and shunned, have used the primal elements to transform my wretched flesh. Through ritual and sacrifice, I have transcended this imperfect form and achieved the true Magnum Opus - the purification of both body and soul. Just as a base metal can be transmuted into purest gold, so too can the human vessel be reforged into a more exalted state.

Luca didn’t know if it was his conscious or subconscious doing the work, but it didn’t matter.

Because he suddenly knew exactly who this killer was.

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