He took the book to his desk and opened it. It was a grimoire with all the usual, meaningless spells: beauty, love, health. Nothing to catch his eye.
And yet, Tess could go into the stacks whenever she wanted, pull whatever she wanted, read whatever she wanted. He tasted bitterness in his mouth and realized that it was jealousy. She had so much freedom here and she didn’t even know it.
Eliot’s father would never allow him to work in the library or hold a job—apparently, it was below his class. Eliot suspected it was more about the library’s contents than anything else.
His father knew what Eliot had inherited from his mother, and it wasn’t just his nose. There was a reason her grimoires and crystals and herbs and other necessities were locked away, where Eliot’s father could not find them. And a reason why he hated Eliot spending so much time in Jessop, when they both knew what sorts of books were shelved there.
He called his mother. Thousands of miles away, a voice said, “Hello?” It wasn’t his mother, but her caretaker, and Eliot’s heart fell a little bit.
“Josie. Hi, it’s Eliot.”
“Eliot dear.” Josie’s northern accent warmed immediately. “How was your trip back?”
“Good,” Eliot said, drawing circles on the page of the grimoire with the tip of his finger. “Or, bearable, at least.”
“And you got home safely?”
“I did, thank you. Is Mum awake?”
There was a hesitation, and Eliot read a thousand things into that pause: his mother was worse, they were at the hospital, his mother was dying, his father had served divorce papers after all.
Josie said, “She’s awake, but she had a rough night.”
Eliot closed his eyes and released a breath. He could deal with bad days as long as they were days. “I’d like to talk to her for a little, if I could.”
There was a shuffling noise and then the sound of labored breathing, and then someone said, “Eli. Baby. How are the stars there?”
This was his mother, all breathy-voiced and velvety. He tilted his head back to the window and looked at the swollen, yellow moon.
“Oh, they’re there,” Eliot said. He cleared his throat. It was odd to talk at full volume here in Jessop at night, when he was so accustomed to silence. “Light pollution from the city makes them difficult to see.”
“Ah,” his mother breathed. Eliot glanced at his watch. It was nearly 2:00 here, so it was 7:00 in the morning there.
“Have you eaten?” Eliot asked.
“I can’t stomach it,” his mother said. “Josie is cooking something, aren’t you, Josie? It smells wonderful, but I can’t bear the idea of it.”
“You should eat.”
No answer. Eliot thought, for a moment, that she’d hung up. He checked the screen. She was still there.
“When are you coming home, Eli?”
He sighed. “As soon as I can, Mum,” which was the closest to a truth he could come.
“But I haven’t seen you in so long, darling,” she said, like she’d completely forgotten that Eliot was home only days ago. Which she probably had. “I want you to come home.”
“I want to come home, too,” Eliot said.
“How is school?”
Eliot frowned. School was out, and had been for weeks. “I’m done for the summer, Mum,” Eliot said, and his mother’s withering sigh on the other line made him wish that he hadn’t.
“I want you to come home,” she said again. “I miss you so much.” There was an edge of tears to her voice, and Eliot had to take a moment to get himself under control so she couldn’t hear the agony in his own voice.
“If it was my choice, I’d be there already.”
Thin and frail, she called, “Josie? When is Eli coming home?”
In the background, Josie answered, “He was just here, Miss Caroline.”
“Did I miss him?” And then, louder, into the phone, “Eli. Did I miss you? When you were here?” Like he was a ghost, able to appear and disappear at will without an eight-hour flight and connections, as if he’d passed through the walls like air.
“You saw me,” Eliot said, and he regretted this phone call. Was it possible to grieve someone who was still alive? Because he did. He grieved the soft curve of her hands on the grand piano in the living room and the bubbling sound of her laugh. He grieved the woman he’d known his entire life, who taught him everything he’d ever known, who’d given him her magic, because she would never be that woman again. She had moments of clarity, here and there, but they were becoming few and far between.
“But I didn’t, Eli,” she said. “I didn’t see you. Where have you gone? Why aren’t you back? It’s nearly bedtime, Eli, and you shouldn’t be out past curfew.”
He closed his eyes, recognizing the slip in her memory, yet another side effect. There was no way to explain to her that he wasn’t coming back anytime soon, that he might never see her again. His voice was ragged when he said, “I’ll be home before you know it, Mum. Can you get Josie for me?”
Almost immediately, like she was waiting, Josie’s voice took over. “I’m sorry, Eliot,” she said. “I told you it wasn’t a good day.”
“It’s okay,” Eliot said, even though it very much wasn’t. He rubbed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. “What did the doctor say when you went yesterday?”
“It’s not looking any better,” Josie said. “The medicine keeps her from feeling too much pain, but it’s not helping her mind. You’re certain you can’t come back this summer?”
Eliot wanted to spend the whole summer with his mother, but there was nothing he could do when his father insisted he be here. And the thought of his father, at home with his girlfriend, Lucille, made Eliot’s blood boil.
But maybe. Maybe, he could beg, bargain to have the summer. Maybe. But he who paid for the treatments controlled wherever Eliot was at any given moment, and his father liked Eliot within reaching distance at all times.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Eliot said. He’d never felt so powerless.
“And I’ll call you if anything changes,” Josie said.
They hung up. Eliot leaned back, back, back in his chair, until the window was upside down in his view and the moon hung heavy in the sky.
Once, at the beginning of it all, he’d asked his mother about her magic. They’d been sitting at the hospital for her treatment. She was flipping through a magazine on knitting and Eliot was curled into the corner, reading a book he’d found in the back of Harrow’s library, covered in dust. He kept getting distracted by the constant beeping and the squeak of nurse’s shoes in the hallway. And by his mother: her bony fingers, looking more frail by the day; the way her hair was becoming brittle and thin.
“Mum?”
She’d barely looked up from her reading. “Eliot?”
“Why don’t you heal yourself?”
She didn’t look at him, but her eyes stopped traveling over the page. She let out a long breath, and after a moment, set the magazine aside. “That’s not how it works, love,” she said. “Come here.”
Even though he was too old to be cuddled against her, Eliot crawled into the hospital bed beside his mother. Her bony hip pressed into his side. She took his hand and placed it on her head, over the place where the tumor grew. “I can’t heal this,” she said. “It’s too big. It’s too much. My own magic won’t work to heal something so significant in my own body.”
Eliot took his hand back and laced his fingers through his mother’s. Her hands were so, so cold. “What if I did it?” Eliot asked. “Would my magic work?”
“My sweet boy.” She kissed his knuckles, like she used to when they were playing together in the yard when he was much younger. “I don’t have the spells for something this big, Eli. I don’t know where to begin looking. And it would take so much energy … I can’t ask that of you.”
But Eliot knew what she really meant. That she didn’t have the spells because his father had purged their home of anything magic related, and he wou
ldn’t be able to access any grimoires elsewhere without his mother’s guidance. And if he tried and wasn’t able to save her, she didn’t want him to live with the guilt of failure.
Except Eliot knew where to look. And worse, he knew that the guilt of failing to save her would not be as bad as the guilt of not trying at all.
These grimoires were useless. His father was useless. For his mother, even modern medicine was useless. And when he took stock of his life here, the only one person he could find who was not useless was Tess Matheson. Eliot wasn’t at all sure how he felt about that.
ten
Tess
EVEN THOUGH SHE KNEW SHE WAS WANTED, KNOCKING ON the door to Eliot’s office seemed forbidden. Tess hesitated outside, fiddling with the edge of her sweater. Every day after Tess or Regina closed the doors to the library to the public, Mathilde took a short break to get coffee. It gave the girls time to shelve the remaining books without worrying about watching the reading room or patrons before Mathilde came back to complete a final walk-through of the stacks and lock up for the night. For now, the library was hers and hers alone. Well, and Eliot’s.
She had to get this over with. They had to be out of the stacks before Mathilde came back. Tess knocked.
Almost immediately, as if he’d been waiting just on the other side, Eliot opened the door. “Tess,” he said. “Are you ready?”
She didn’t like the way he said it, like they were going on some sort of life-changing adventure when really, they were just going down a few flights of stairs.
“Of course,” Tess said, plastering on a fake smile. He had that confidence again, the brand that was missing when he’d spoken to her at Emiliano’s. It was clear that this—libraries, academia, the book- and paper-filled office—was Eliot’s domain. Maybe Falk in its entirety. She idly wondered if he was self-possessed in his own home, or in a park, or a grocery store, or if he was tight-shouldered and uncertain.
“Come into my office,” Eliot said. “I’ll explain what I’m looking for.”
Tess followed him inside. The office was small but felt enormous, as if the books around the walls were layers and layers deep. To her vague annoyance, the room reminded her of her father’s office.
Eliot gestured to the chair across from him and she sunk down into it. His office smelled of leather, paper, and vanilla; he had a candle burning near the window, which accounted for the vanilla. Part of her realized she could scold him for this, since candles were strictly forbidden, but it seemed like a petty and vindictive thing to do after he hadn’t reported her.
“You might’ve noticed,” Eliot said, “that I’m doing my research on the occult.”
Of course she’d noticed. Tess took another look around the room, taking in the bundles of herbs on the bookshelves, the crystals that lined his desk, the smudges of a chalk pentagram partially obscured by the rug.
“You’re in a good place to do it,” she observed. Before, she’d just thought that Eliot was preparing some sort of academic takedown of the language of occult books, or some other dry and boring research paper that would get him good grades and scholarships and be unendurably dull to everyone else. But here in his office, she couldn’t fight the sense that he was actually practicing the magic. She didn’t believe in magic—couldn’t believe in magic—but the bizarre things scattered around Eliot’s office gave her the impression that he did.
Eliot inclined his head. “Exactly. But none of the books I requested have what I’m looking for, and I imagine the ones that do are meant to be kept under lock and key, out of the records, and I haven’t the foggiest idea of how to get them.”
Which meant that all the books he’d requested were useless, and she’d done all that work for no reason. Tess bit the inside of her cheek to keep any scathing words from leaving her mouth. “What are you looking for?”
“Do you know what a grimoire is?”
She did, and not because she had any personal interest in the occult. The rumors of ghosts in Jessop Library didn’t exist just because the library was old and creepy at night. Jessop held a massive collection of occult manuscripts. Grimoires, satanic texts, wiccan books, voodoo guides—all were accounted for. So Tess had seen more than her fair share of grimoires: magic books containing spells, charms, and instructions on how to summon demons and the like. In fact, it was a running joke for students to find the most graphic spells in the Jessop grimoires and attempt to perform them in their dorm rooms.
If any of them worked, Tess was pretty sure she would’ve heard about it.
“I do,” she said. “I saw you requested quite a few already.”
Eliot nodded. “Yes, but they’re all too … light for my project.”
Tess thought of commenting on this—after all, if spell books were too light for what he was trying to do, what the hell was he looking for? And also, why was she getting herself involved? If he burnt Jessop down trying to do some ridiculous, impossible spell and Tess had something to do with it, Mathilde would be pissed.
But. There was also a sort of odd, distant curiosity. She didn’t believe in magic, not in the same way she believed in ghosts. Perhaps that was just because she’d never seen magic with her own eyes. At least for ghosts, she could claim the proof of the specters that floated from room to room in her family’s farmhouse, cold spots that showed up without warning and vanished a few minutes later.
Maybe magic was a little bit like that. And maybe, Tess thought dangerously, she wanted to see what Eliot Birch was planning to do, if only to see him fail catastrophically.
He ruffled through the pages on his desk, uncovering a slim notebook. Eliot flipped through the pages to a list of crossed-off titles. But no—when he passed it to her, she saw that a few were missing strikethroughs.
The Book of Shadows. Death Spells. Secrets of the Undying. The Glencoe Grimoire. Margaret’s Spells. The Book of Truths.
“Oh, I’ve definitely seen some of these before,” Tess said. “In the basement cage.”
“That’s what I suspected,” Eliot said.
“But when we talked, you only asked for one book?”
Eliot didn’t meet her eyes. “This is a general list, but I doubt we have all of them here. I only expect we have one or two.”
She could’ve argued the point further, but that would only prolong her interaction with Eliot. He was still a bastard, and she was still breaking the rules. The longer they sat, the more likely they were to be caught.
She’d brought the keys to the stacks with her. Going back through the main reading room made her nervous. What if Mathilde forgot something and came back just in time to catch Tess taking Eliot through the offices to the stacks? But there was another way through the lounge on this level.
“Come with me,” she said.
She led the way through the lounge and the locked door to the stacks, past the dumbwaiter to the stairs, down to the basement floor. This floor was different from the rest of the stacks: colder, mustier. Older, too, if the rumors she’d heard were true: Jessop was built on top of a university building that had been damaged in a bizarre fire. Casualties unknown. Half of the basement was set aside for the sprawling special collections cage, and shelves and boxes climbed the walls. She used the smaller key to unlock the cage and pulled open the creaky grated door to let them in. Eliot watched with silent fascination.
“What?” she asked, feeling self-conscious under his gaze.
“There’s just so much protection for these,” he said, running a finger down the side of the cage. “For books.”
Tess shrugged. “They’re dangerous, apparently,” she said. Out of the corner of her eye, she barely saw Eliot grimace.
Eliot followed her inside. He’d brought the notebook with the titles on it, and they both set to looking for the grimoires.
“So, how long have you been working here?” Eliot asked suddenly, startling Tess out of the silence.
“Uh, a couple of months. Since spring break.” And then, because she felt like she h
ad to tell him, she said, “Mathilde—Ms. Matheson—is my great aunt. That’s, uh, one of the reasons I go here.” It was a simplification, but she wasn’t turning out secrets unprompted.
“Ah,” Eliot said, but something about the way he shaped the word made her feel like he’d already known. “She seems … dedicated.”
That was one way to put it.
“And what exactly is your project on?” Tess asked.
Eliot’s smile thinned to a line, and the fact that she noted it made Tess register that she was spending more time examining his face than she was examining the shelves. As if he came to the same conclusion, Eliot looked away quickly. “I’ve always been fascinated by the occult—ghosts and witches and magic and all.”
He was leaving something out, she could tell, but just as she wasn’t telling him her secrets, she didn’t expect him to tell her his.
To her surprise, he continued. “This,” he said, sweeping a hand towards the books, or maybe the entire library itself, “almost makes Falk bearable.” He wasn’t even pretending to look for the books anymore, so Tess gave up the charade as well, and leaned against a shelf with her arms crossed.
“And it wouldn’t be otherwise?” Tess asked.
“I hardly think being close to my father is a comfort,” Eliot said quickly, and that blush immediately crept up his neck to his ears and over his cheeks. “I’m sorry. It doesn’t matter.”
“No, it’s okay,” Tess said, looking away from him. It made her feel odd to fully meet his eye. “So you’re not here for your father then.”
“I’m not here for him,” Eliot agreed, “but that doesn’t mean I’m not here because of him.”
“At least the grimoires are here,” Tess said, because she had to say something.
Eliot nodded. “To answer your question,” he said, “I’m doing my research on death and resurrection and magic.” He caught her eye for a moment too long.
What the fuck, Tess thought, but she had the sense not to say it out loud. And then, Am I about to be murdered by Eliot Birch?
The Devil Makes Three Page 6
