Page 56 of The Healing Dragon
“Can I trust you two to help me?” Matias looks between Santiago and me.
Our gazes lock as we both nod.
“All these secrets are going to give me an ulcer.” Santiago grunts dramatically.
“How can we know for certain if the Red Book is the voice I hear?” Matias asks, rolling the sleeves on his shirt.
“I now think you were right.” Santiago gestures in my direction changing the topic of conversation. “Checking out the cursed book can’t hurt. We need to cover all our bases.”
“I think we should ask Calaca,” I say to Matias’ question.
“The thing that followed you two here?” Santiago’s face pales at the thought.
“She’s not that bad,” Matias defends.
“It’s not a girl.” I roll my eyes. “Can you call it?” I ask Matias.
He nods in confirmation.
“Perhaps that is something we will do tomorrow, during daylight.” Santiago clears his throat. “It’s dark now and more than one guard will be alerted to our movements in the forest.”
Matias appears ready to object when I add, “Brandon will be notified within minutes.”
This revelation causes him to close his mouth.
“Tomorrow it is.” I knock on the table with my fist and I get to my feet, intending to leave, but Santiago raises one hand, stopping me.
He goes to his desk and returns with something in his hands. “I guess we can start here.” He pushes a black book in my direction.
I take the infamous cursed book I have been hearing so much about. The material feels so fragile. Easy to erase from existence. The notion that the information on these pages has been relentlessly pursued to a lethal degree is preposterous.
“What are you doing?” Santiago looks at my hands.
I flex them, letting go of the cover I had been bending. I open the book to the first page and trace my fingerover the name written on the top. “Klause P.” I look at Santiago. “Do you know what P stands for?”
“His last name?” Matias asks.
We both turn our heads and give him a perplexed look.
“I’m not sure what it stands for.” Santiago looks through the pages of the journal, but we all know it’s unlikely he spelled out his full name on a journal entry.
“I know this might not mean much, but If we find his family tree, we could find more information linked to their disappearance and the Red Book.”
He nods. He gets up and gestures for us to follow him. We walk a few rolls down, then he leads the way into a tall bookshelf.
“This is all the information we got,” Santiago says. “Perhaps looking into him while we wait to talk to the creature is what we should do.”
“Calaca,” Matias whispers behind me, but not loud enough for Santiago to hear. “Where do we start?” he asks, looking at the impossible number of texts on the shelf.
The description on the row reads ‘autobiographies.’
I look at the shelf and think about all the moving pieces. We might not know exactly what we need, but learning as much information about the topic will only help clarify the image. If I have learned anything from my father, it is that learning all you can about your enemy is essential to know how they would act.
Klause is not our enemy, but the answers to a lot of our questions lie around him and the time he spent in Puerto Quinn.
“I think we should split into two tasks.” I gesture to one section of the shelf containing the autobiographies. “People like Klause don’t go through life unnoticed. His peers musthave written about him. The time frame is between one hundred and fifty and two hundred years ago.”
Santiago walks over to the autobiographies. “Anything between that fifty-year gap?”
