Page 15 of Blood of Night (The Thorne Hill)

“Though he wasn’t exactly forthcoming,” I say, flipping Juliet so I’m holding her with my other arm. She nurses while I look through another book, jotting down messy notes. It’s not easy to write and hold a baby at the same time.

Two hours and three diaper changes later, I’m losing focus and starting to feel tired. I spread a blanket on the floor and put Juliet down for tummy time. I lay down next to her, looking into her pretty blue eyes. I never knew I could feel so much love for someone I just met before, and I used to think babies were kinda cute but ultimately annoying little poop machines, yet here I am.

“All right,” I sigh and sit up so I can grab my Book of Shadows. I blink several times, trying to will myself awake, and randomly flip to a spell that Kristy and I got in trouble for using back in our senior year at Grim Gate Academy. We argued it technically wasn’t cheating, since all this spell did was make us hyper focused and wide awake for twelve hours so we could study, but it still wasn’t allowed. It’s been so long since I’ve cast this spell, I forgot about it. Randomly opening the book to this page has to be fate.

“You’re coming with me.” I pick up Juliet, go upstairs to get the baby sling, and strap her to my chest. I haven’t worn her yet and it takes me a while to get used to moving with a two-week old baby attached to my body.

Back in the library, I get rosemary and cloves, grind them up, and then sprinkle the mixture on a yellow candle. “Elementals lend your power, keep me awake until the twelfth hour. Clarity of the sun, I bring you to me, keep me focused, so mote it be.”

I feel the spell take over and get to my feet, pulling down books and cross-referencing what I can online. An hour later and I’ve actually made headway. Thanks to the spell, I’m able to focus on one thing at a time and I started with trying to figure out what Julian meant by the oracle. I tear out my pages of notes and tape them along the wall, needing to see them at once.

Standing back, I keep one hand on Juliet’s head and whisper different theories out loud to myself. “Okay, so the missing part of the scroll gives us a big clue to what this oracle is,” I start, biting my lip as I use magic to unroll the scroll and have it hover in the air above me. This thing is ancient and probably worth a decent amount of money. “A museum would kill to have—” I stop with a gasp. “Museum.” I hurry back to the coffee table and sort through random notes and crumble pieces of paper for my phone. The Field Museum in Chicago has an ancient Egypt exhibit, and Lucas was talking to someone who had expertise in that area.

Rushing through the house, I go into his office and open his laptop. “Fuck,” I say when the bar to enter the password pops up. I know the passcode for his phone but never had a reason to ask what it is for his computer. Trusting him completely, I didn’t feel the slightest need to look through his files or anything of the sort.

I try the same numbers he uses on his phone—the date we met—but it’s not it. “What else? MaybeI love Callie?” I ask as a joke and try it.

It’s not it either.

Lucas wouldn’t pick something obvious, though at the same time, he didn’t think anyone would break into his office and try to get onto his computer. Several passwords later, I’m locked out for a minute. I rifle through his desk as I wait, hoping to find some sort of clue.

And I do, well, sort of. He printed out an email correspondence between himself and an Egyptologist. The date of the last email was the day Julian died, and if anything else was said after that…I need to get into his email.

I speed upstairs and take his phone off the charger. There’s a notification on the screen from a baby development app Lucas downloaded. If I wasn’t hyper focused thanks to the spell, this would have caused me to break down. I swipe it away and open his email as I walk back to the office. He has several different email accounts and one of his business accounts already has a ton of emails. I’d love to help try and answer, but I’ll just end up making a bigger mess to deal with in the end, I’m sure. I’m business savvy enough to own my own bookstore but know nothing when it comes to buying and selling real estate.

I’m back in the library by the time I find the email thread from the Egyptologist. Her last email was sent three days ago, along with an apology for the delay, but it took a while to track down someone who could help translate.

“Translate?” Madly scrolling back in the email, I see that Lucas sent several pictures. One is of the scroll, and another looks like a page out of the book. As a human, Lucas wasn’t allowed to learn how to read or write. When he became a vampire, he made it a point to learn as many languages as he could so he’d be able to read anything. But hieroglyphs weren’t on the top of his list, and I remember him saying something about translating a translation and things getting lost along the way.

“Holy shit,” I say as I speed read through the rest of the emails. Springing back into action, I write down more notes, taping them to the wall along with all the emails. Not stopping, I keep magically flipping through pages while I feed and change Juliet, and then lay her down for another five minutes of tummy-time while I flip through a book Julian had been looking at.

Once Juliet is back in the sling, I go over to my wall of notes and magically swap some around, finally coming to a plausible conclusion. A smile breaks out on my face right as the library doors open.

“What the bloody hell is going on here?” Eliza asks, stopping short before entering the room.

“Research. Lots and lots of research,” I say quickly. “And I made a breakthrough. You gotta follow the notes and the pictures. They’re not good pictures because I’m not an artist but you’ll see. Come here.”

Eliza doesn’t move but instead narrows her eyes at me. “How much coffee have you had?”

“Hmm…” I look at my cup. “I didn’t even finish one cup.”

“You look like you’re tweaking.” Eliza’s brows go up.

“I’m not, but it doesn’t matter, because I think oracle was a translation issue.”

“Come again?”

I rapidly shake my head, swaying side to side to keep Juliet asleep. “Julian was looking for some sort of oracle. Typically, oracles are people, but the way he talked about it made it sound like an object. But it’s both!”

“What?”

“Both. In Egyptian mythology, an oracle was more so a request to have a question answered, not a person with the gift of sight. That’s where the translation issue started. But then it goes on and that’s why I think it’s a person and an object in a way.” I raise my eyebrows, expecting her to understand, but to be honest, I don’t really understand it quite either. “Remember the night War attacked Chicago?”

“Kinda hard to forget that.”

“Melinda met me at the bar because she found a magical object and was worried it was cursed. It wasn’t, but it was still creepy, and I think this oracle is kinda like that.”

“What’s the creepy object, Callie?”

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