Grimoires and Where to Find Them

by Raconteur, Honor

  “Oh, so you’re one of the people gifted a grimoire.”

  “I am.” Jere stroked a hand over his chin. “If you can call it that, in my case. Not many were gifted. The family sold as many as they could, but Lady Radman wanted three specific grimoires to go to certain people, so she put her foot down and got her way. I’m honestly glad. Mine is a treasure, and I’d never have been able to afford it on my own.”

  Jamie was busy taking notes, leaving me free to ask questions.

  “Was that the plan all along? You took the job as a trade?”

  “That’s how strapped she was for cash. I didn’t realize until later how invaluable the set was. But I didn’t even dream of trying to renegotiate the deal for cash instead, despite how lopsided it sounds. I earned every copper, I promise you. The grimoires, when handed over to me, where in a bad state. They’d been put in protective boxes, but when sealed into the wall, the outer brick’s mortar had failed. The boxes were damp and falling apart when discovered. They were bleeding into each other on various levels.”

  I winced at this description. “Great magic. How bad was it?”

  “Ever see wooden beams trying to grow into each other?” Jere returned, his voice full of dark humor. “Whole back end of the house looked like an elvish shire, but a warped one, with the beams thinking they were trees and the brickwork going back to nature. Craziest thing I’d ever seen, and the air itself was horrible. Thick and stagnant with warped magic. Made me ill, walking in, and that was with a protective ward on me. It took two magical specialists to get them safely out of the building. And then they wrapped them up in binding cloths with hexes to protect the grimoires until boxes could be made. Which wasn’t all that effective, truth be told. I had to put them in staging boxes as soon as I got them here. It was a nightmare.”

  “I’m sorry.” I had to interrupt to make sure I knew what he meant. “Staging boxes?”

  “I’ve got ready-made boxes that have very powerful sealing wards on them,” he explained. “They’re what I use in a pinch. I imagine your compartments at the police evidence room have something similar, something that can contain powerful magic in a one-size-fits-all sort of way.”

  “We do, indeed. Pray continue.”

  “Lady Radman was adamant about preserving the covers and restoring the grimoires to their original state. I agreed because it would impact the value of the set if I messed with them too much, but the covers were leather and in a right mess. I had a devil of a time restoring them. And the protections I had to put up until I could get the boxes made—argh, it gives me a headache just remembering it all. With everything going on, it took a year for me to complete boxes for the full set.”

  I didn’t like the sound of this.

  “The grimoires are that magically potent individually?”

  Jere waffled a hand back and forth, making a face.

  “Depends on the volume. Some of them, no, not so much. Leor’s, for instance. His barely gives off a magical aura, as only a few of the spells were written with magical ink. Most of it was quite normal, more a notebook than a grimoire. Thank anything you care to name. I had the hardest time beating it into his head that he should put the book back in the box after he was done reading it.”

  Knowing Leor, I believed that wholeheartedly.

  “And the one you have?”

  “Also not as magically potent. Mine deals more with crafting things, including the best way to bind a new grimoire. Which is ironic, since the author failed to take his own advice for most of the set. But I kept that book for a reason. I can make you a full list, if you’d like. Rank them on a scale of most dangerous to least.”

  “That would be supremely helpful.” He might be the only one able to give us that information.

  Jere pursed his lips in thought. “You say the fourth one was also stolen?”

  “Yes,” Jamie confirmed, looking up briefly from her notebook.

  “That’s really not good. It wasn’t the most potent of the lot, but it definitely had some power to it.”

  I almost didn’t tell him. In the end, I felt it only fair to warn him. “That volume was stolen without the box.”

  Jere stared at me, a man waiting for the punch line of a joke in poor taste. “Come again?”

  “The grimoire was taken out of the box at the faire,” Jamie reiterated, also sounding pained.

  Jere dramatically flopped onto the table. “Nooooo. That absolute moron!”

  “We have the box in Evidence Lockup.” Jamie glanced at me, and I shrugged in response. “I think it might need a looking over? We can try to put it back in if we can figure out where the book has gotten off to.”

  “Trust me on this.” Jere lifted his head to give us a stern look. “Keep the box with you. You’ll want to immediately put the grimoire back in it. That one, especially, loved to give me trouble. It was constantly bleeding over into surrounding books and making weird things happen.”

  I winced. “Noted.”

  “Jere…” Jamie tapped her finger to the table’s surface to draw his attention to her. “Can you tell me where your volume is?”

  “Oh, I keep mine in the house.” Jere indicated the modest house behind the barn, which had once been the farmhouse. “I can’t leave it in the workshop, too many potential disasters.”

  I felt the precaution was wise.

  Jamie asked hopefully, “Do you mind if we look at yours? We’ve yet to see a volume from this set. I don’t even know what it looks like.”

  Jere seemed to think this was reasonable, as he popped up. “Sure, come in. All of the grimoires are a bit different from each other, but they’re also similar. Radman liked to use dark leather for the covers, and cream paper, so it’s easy to tell if a book is part of the set at a glance.”

  Good to know. I had a physical description of the fourth grimoire, and Leor’s, but I hadn’t been sure if they all looked precisely the same.

  We followed him down a path lined with stepping-stones. Jere had manicured the area with flowers and trees, making it very appealing to the eye. The house itself was a two-story with a front porch just wide enough for a small table and brace of chairs. We stepped up onto it, entering the white-washed house. It smelled of baking bread, which didn’t surprise me, as Jere had a bread addiction.

  We didn’t go far, just through the foyer and to the right, into what was likely his formal sitting parlor.

  “I keep it in here,” Jere informed us, moving past the silk-covered couch and chairs, towards the back wall. A china cabinet hugged one corner, the top displaying breakable figurines, while the bottom was a closed and apparently locked cabinet.

  “Wait.” Clint darted ahead, then lifted onto his back paws, resting one lightly against the cabinet so he could put himself at eye-level with the small lock.

  I knew this behavior all too well and mentally braced myself.

  Jamie leaned over him to get her own look. “What is it, bud?”

  “Broken lock,” Clint pronounced firmly. His whiskers quivered, nose twitching. “Nothing magical here.”

  Jere swore and lunged for the cabinet, only to be checked firmly by Jamie with a hand against his chest.

  “Wait, Jere. This might have just become a crime scene. I really need you to not touch anything until I can figure this out. Henri, do you have gloves on you?”

  “I do.” I fished mine out of an outside pocket and handed them over. Then, I caught Jere’s arm and eased him back.

  Jere watched with open dismay as my partner donned the gloves and opened the door, drawing it down to rest on its hinges.

  Nothing was inside.

  “It should be there,” he whispered, expression horrified. “I never take it out of this room. I always put it back after I read it. Is the lock really broken?”

  “Smashed pretty good,” Jamie informed him, eyeing the lock critically from the back side. “My guess is someone took a screwdriver to this. Jere, when was the last time you saw the book?”

  “I—
I don’t—I don’t know?” Jere shook his head, the shock of the theft rattling him. “It’s been a few weeks, I think. Henri, what am I supposed to do?”

  I clapped him on the shoulder, trying to brace him. “We’ll find it.”

  I hoped.

  With Jere’s theft occurring who-knows-when, I had to treat it like an active crime scene and hope this hadn’t occurred a month ago. Like Leor, Jere couldn’t actually remember when he’d seen his grimoire last, and let me tell you, I wasn’t happy about not having a real timeline to work from. I like timelines. We’re friends.

  I really hoped my pessimistic thought that the theft might have occurred a month ago wasn’t accurate. Talk about a trail long gone cold if that was the case. Henri sat with his friend, trying to pinpoint the last time Jere had actually handled the book. Jere was too upset to think clearly at the moment—not that I blamed him.

  Me, I stepped out onto the porch and called in Niamh. The other two were fine doing what they were doing, but Niamh had been brought into the kingsmen for a reason. Her tracking skills were something else. If anyone had a chance of picking up a possible trail, it would be her.

  She answered her pad cautiously, with the air of someone who was still getting a grasp on this new-fangled device. “Hello, Detective?”

  “Hi, Niamh. I could use you over here at Jere Mortimer’s place. Turns out he had a grimoire, and his was stolen as well.”

  She sucked in a sharp, startled breath. “When?”

  “We have only a rough idea at the moment. He’s trying to remember the last time he handled it. But the lock on the cabinet he kept it in has clearly been forced open, so this isn’t a case of him misplacing it.”

  “I understand. I’ll be right there. What’s the address?”

  “I’ll text it to you. See you soon.”

  I ended the call and sent her the address. Even as I did so, I wondered if I should be using that terminology. Texting someone with the pad didn’t jibe quite right. It wasn’t like I was pushing many buttons.

  Ah, well. They didn’t have a term for it anyway, right? Might as well go with what I was comfortable using.

  Some etymologist in the future was going to have a field day with this. I could see it now.

  With Niamh dispatched, I retreated back inside. Jere still looked like he was torn between wanting to murder the thief with his own hands and reeling in shock that it had been stolen at all. Clint was draped across his lap like an emotional support animal, and Jere was absently petting him even as he stared hard at the cabinet.

  My other furballs sniffed about the room, probably trying to pick up on something out of the ordinary. I wished them luck. For all that it looked like a normal farmhouse, the scent of magic was very strong here. It wasn’t that it carried over from the nearby workhouse, but rather that Jere’s very being imbued magic into the surroundings. It would mask a lot of scents.

  I came around and sat in the empty chair next to him, sharing a look with Henri. Henri was upset, too, both outraged at the theft and worried about his friend. He’s a softie, my Henri. I knew he wouldn’t take this well.

  But if we were going to do anything useful, I had to get these two back on track.

  “Jere? I have about a dozen questions for you, if you don’t mind.”

  Jere blinked, as if he were switching mental tracks to process my words. He blinked again, expression clearing before he responded.

  “Oh. Yes, I’m sorry. I’m still trying to remember when I last had it.”

  “We’ll get to that in a minute. First question. You don’t have wards up?”

  “I have so many visitors, clients, and delivery men that come in and out, it makes it impossible to maintain a ward,” he explained sadly. “And there’s never any theft in this neighborhood. It’s astonishingly safe. I never felt the need for one.”

  “Gotcha. Something you said earlier didn’t make sense to me. I’m sure it did to Henri, but explain it for us ordinary folk, would you? Why are grimoires so volatile? You said spells are written in the pages, but a written spell doesn’t have a life of its own, does it?”

  “It does and doesn’t.” Jere took in a breath, visibly settling himself enough to answer me. “The recipe for a spell, especially one meant to be verbally cast, doesn’t have power when recorded. But most spells aren’t cast. I would say roughly seventy-five percent are either brewed up as potions, crafted into hexes, or designed as charms.”

  “Practical magic,” I responded, encouraging him.

  “Correct. And grimoires, especially personal use ones, have a great many hexes and charms. Predominantly hexes. We get very tired of drawing them out over and over again. They’re complicated and tedious to craft. It’s easier to draw them out once in our grimoire, and then activate them when we need to.”

  Henri picked up the thread for me in his calm, smooth voice. “Magical ink is used to record the charms and hexes in grimoires. That’s so they can be activated and used at will. It’s also why a sealing hex is drawn into the signature page of the book. It keeps the magic inside properly in place so it doesn’t blend untowardly.”

  Henri had explained this before, but it begged a question. “So, why didn’t the man who wrote this series do that? Put in protective hexes?”

  “My guess is, he was very good at theorizing, not so good at the practice.” Jere gave a brief smile, a flash that was there and gone in a blink. “The design—one of them, I should say—for protective hexes in crafting grimoires was the very design he used on the grimoire’s original boxes. With it created on the page like that, he could easily burn the design from page to box in a second. Faster than transcribing it onto a page with magical ink.”

  “Ahhh. Got it. But he couldn’t burn the design into a book’s page?”

  “It would threaten the integrity of the paper and the book itself. Transferring hexes like that requires a certain power, and delicate surfaces can’t handle it.”

  He was the expert. I trusted he knew what he was talking about. I pulled out my notebook and jotted some of this down, just in case it became relevant later.

  “And the magical ink in the book doesn’t bleed into the other pages? It stays properly in place?”

  Jere grimaced at the question. “Yes and no. Like all things, magical ink does have a shelf life and will break down eventually. It holds out much longer than normal ink, granted. In theory, the hex inscribed in the book is not only meant to contain the magic, but to preserve the ink.”

  The way he reacted gave me a clue. “How much work did the Reaper’s Set take, anyway?”

  “More than I bargained for. I had to restore several pages in my volume alone. It was dangerous to leave it as it was.” Jere passed a hand over his face, and I noticed it shook a little. “I really do not like the idea of mine out in the world with some idiot who doesn’t understand how to handle it. Worse, the fourth volume, with no box at all.”

  Growing wood and upheaved bricks, he’d said. The estate housing the volumes had been growing and merging into itself by the time they were discovered. Yikes, who wants a warped house going back to nature?

  Jere’s head abruptly jerked up. “I need a calendar. Perhaps if I had my planner, I could work through it backwards and figure it out.”

  “No harm trying,” Henri agreed.

  Jere, funnily enough, took Clint with him as he left the room, hurrying through to what looked like a den. Clint went along for the ride, amenable to being carried about. He was a lazy kitty sometimes.

  With Jere out of the room, I dared to ask Henri in a low voice, “Is Jere prone to overreacting or being dramatic?”

  Henri shook his head before I could trot the whole question out. “Not at all. He’s the least prone to do so out of my friends. The fact that he’s this rattled tells a story in and of itself.”

  “That’s kinda what I’d thought you’d say.”

  Houston, we may be in trouble. Because if the expert who worked on this set was paranoid about the books bein
g loose? Then I should be, too.

  Jere came back with the planner in both hands, Clint now riding like a parrot on his shoulder, looking victorious.

  “I think I have it narrowed down. I had two projects back-to-back that kept me working late hours, so I can confidently say I haven’t handled it since then. I was out of town for several days before that. I think it’s been anywhere from twenty-eight to thirty days since I last saw it.”

  I mentally groaned. Crap, that wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

  “Okay. At least we have a time frame to work with. That helps. Jere, sit with me. Some obvious questions are lacking answers. First, who all knew you had a grimoire?”

  “It wasn’t a secret. When the sale of the Reaper’s Set was first announced, I was featured in the newspaper as the crafter of the boxes.” Jere passed a hand over his face, letting the planner relax in one hand. “It brought a lot of good business to my door.”

  I bet it had.

  “Okay. Has anyone recently come to talk to you about it? I’m trying to figure out how the thief knew it was here.”

  “Oh. Oh, you’re right, that is a good question.” Jere sat still for a moment, brow furrowed as he thought hard. “I had a book broker, a man named Walcott, come and see me about possibly selling the grimoire. I honestly didn’t pay him much attention, as I was buried in a project at the time. He called again, I want to say a week later? Offered me a higher price than before. I told him no, and I haven’t heard from him since. Let’s see…I can’t think of anyone else. Not recently.”

  I noted the name down with interest. The same broker Leor had spoken with. Interesting, and not that surprising. We definitely needed to talk to the man.

  “Is there a record somewhere of who has each grimoire?”

  “I think Lady Radman would have such a list. Oh, no, I think quite a few people were listed in the newspaper. It was a big story at the time because the grimoires are so expensive. Not everyone was named, mind you. Some people asked to be anonymous. But I want to say over half the owners were listed in the article. And, of course, I have a list of who has each one. If there’s ever an issue with a box, they’re to come to me for maintenance.”