Lord Loss (The Demonata 1)

“You're sure?”

“Dervish taught me that spell years ago. He updates it every so often, when he alters the protective spells of the house. It'll probably be one of the first spells he teaches you when he decides you're ready to learn.”

I feel uncomfortable, especially since I promised Dervish that I wouldn't come in here without him. But there's no stopping Bill-E, and I'm too curious to back out now.

“What are we looking for?” I ask, following him to one of the bookshelves. He came here directly from the clearing, without saying anything more about the dead animals he'd collected.

“This,” Bill-E says, lifting a large, untitled book down from one of the shelves over Dervish's PC. He lays it on the desk but doesn't open it.

“Demons killed your parents and sister,” he murmurs. My insides freeze. He looks up. “We inhabit a world of magic. My proposal would make an ordinary person laugh scornfully. But we're not ordinary. We're Gradys, descendants of the magician Bartholomew Garadex. Remember that.”

He opens the book. Creamy, crinkled pages. Handwriting. I try reading a few paragraphs but the letters are indecipherable — squiggles and swirls.

“Is that Latin, Greek, one of those old languages?” I ask.

“It's English,” Bill-E says.

“Coded?”

He half-smiles. “Kind of. Dervish cast a reading spell on it. The words are written clearly, but we can't interpret them without unraveling the spell.”

Bill-E turns to the first page and runs a finger over the title at the top. “Lycanthropy through the ages,” he intones.

“How do you know that if you can't break the spell?” I challenge him.

“Dervish read it out to me once.” He looks at me archly. “Do you know what ‘lycanthropy’ means?”

“Of course!” I huff. “I've seen werewolf movies!”

Bill-E nods. “Dervish read bits of it to me. They were all to do with werewolf legends and rules. He's fascinated by werewolves — lots of his books focus on shape-changers.”

Bill-E flicks to near the end of the book, scans the pages, flicks over a few more. Finds what he's searching for and lays a finger on a photograph. “I discovered this a year or so ago,” he says softly. “Didn't think anything of it then. But when I saw Dervish removing the bodies of the animals a few months ago, and found others ripped to pieces … always close to a full moon …”

“I don't believe where you're going with this,” I grumble.

“Remember the demons,” he says, and turns the book around so that I can see the face in the photo.

A young man, maybe sixteen or seventeen. Troubled-looking. Thin. His face is distorted — lots of hair, a blunt jaw, sharp teeth, yellow eyes. There's something familiar about the face, but it takes me a few seconds to place it. Then it clicks — it reminds me of one of the faces from the hall of portraits. One that hangs close to Dad and Gret's photos.

“Steven Groarke,” Bill-E says. “A cousin. Died seven or eight years ago.”

“I met him once,” I whisper. “But I was very young. I don't remember much about him. Except he didn't have hair or teeth like that.”

Bill-E flicks the pages backwards. Comes to rest on a page with another photo from the hall of portraits, this time a young girl. “Kim Reynolds. Ten years old when she died — supposedly in a fire.”

>

He flicks back further, almost to the start of the book. Stops at a rough hand-drawing of a naked, excessively hairy man, hunched over on all fours like a dog — or a wolf. Razor-sharp teeth. Claws. An elongated head. Yellow, savage eyes.

“That's not a human,” I mumble, my mouth dry.

“I think it is — or was,” Bill-E contradicts me. “I can't be sure, but I've compared it to a drawing of Abraham Garadex — one of old Bartholomew's sons — and I'd swear that they're one and the same.”

I reach out with trembling fingers and gently close the book. “Say it,” I croak. “Say what you brought me here to tell me.”

“I'm not saying this to shock you,” Bill-E begins. “I wouldn't say it to anyone else. But you were honest enough to tell me about the demons, so I think —”

“Just say it!” I snap.