Page 113 of An Inheritance of Monsters

A chill rippled over me. The tension in the room seemed to shift at her words. “No. The page Eloise had was the last I’ve seen of it.”

She twisted her lips in a moue. “Fuck. We need to create a back-up for this episode, then. I was going to use it, if you didn’t mind.”

I was really far more concerned that one of these people had likely read my account of the Void and my monsters, but either way, we both had reasons to get it back.

And Sierra’s absolute, genuine annoyance made me believe she was not the one who’d stolen it.

Only two left.

I watched Carson as he slid from the counter, not missing how closely he stood next to Sierra, his arm brushing hers.

“We’ve got an extra notebook you could use,” he said. “We can bulk it up and distress the cover a little. It’s already black.”

She looked up at him with such gratitude in her eyes, it made me a little sick.

I wondered if she would look at him that way if she’d seen how he’d sneered at the back of her head while he fucked her.

“Well, I’m going to go continue my research,” I said brightly, wanting to get away from them all.

And check a calendar. Clearly I was no longer to be mentally trusted with keeping my days straight.

Nobody stopped me from leaving, but Carson watched me go with that little smirk intact.

I dashed back up to my room and powered on my phone, wasting precious battery for the sake of pulling up the calendar.

They were right.

The Fuseli Comet’s arrival was only a day away, the cause of that faint pinkish light in the sky.

How had I lost so much time?

I powered off my phone again and put it down, leaning back against my bed.

Without my Black Book to scribble in and sort my thoughts on paper, my mind was turning into a jumble.

Puzzle pieces whirled around, teasing me with glimpses of an overarching answer—and while I believed I was right about many of my suspicions, I still had no solid proof.

The one thing I did know was that if I wanted to keep my monsters, I needed to figure out exactly what was going to happen when the comet arrived.

I had done my best to bind myself to them, to draw all of us closer… but that invisible force keeping my monsters quiet about what to expect made me nervous.

I braced my arms on my knees and rubbed my temples. I needed my damn notebook back.

And then I stood up and snatched my flashlight from my backpack. I was going to go look for it. It would take the work of moments to slip into Carson and Jack’s room and at least give it a cursory glance.

I was probably overreacting. If someone had read that far into the Black Book and had said nothing about the contents in the back, maybe the thief just thought I was a little loopy.

Or that I was planning on writing a smutty, panty-dropping monster novel. Everything I’d written could easily be construed as fiction.

There was a good chance I was worrying about nothing at all… but I also wasn’t inclined to let the thief take off with the years of work I’d put into that book.

I opened my door and paused, listening intently, but heard no voices. The carpet muffled my footsteps as I crept down the hall and reached out to test their door…

And it swung open.

I exhaled slowly and slid inside, clicking the flashlight on, and wrinkled my nose immediately.

It seemed that neither Carson nor Jack had outgrown the stench of teenage boy. Walking in here was like being assailed in the face with stiff socks and stale Doritos.

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