“Too far back,” I said, turning back to the table. “Back to the Egregore page.” I paged through the book until I reached the now-familiar globe, spark, and people, and stared at it, willing insight to come.
I started at the top of the page, working my way line by line toward the bottom. And my gaze nearly passed over what I found there—the pale, faint lines at the bottom of the page.
“Huh,” I said, and flipped to the page before, and then the page afterward. Nothing on either about the Egregore, or anything else.
“What are you seeing?”
“I’m not sure. I need a magnifying glass,” I said, and rose, went to Ethan’s desk. We might have been in a digital age, but Ethan liked his old-fashioned tools. His fountain pens and letter opener—and the large tortoiseshell magnifying glass beside them.
“Here we go,” I said, moving back and centering the circle of glass over the fuzzy lines I’d seen at the bottom of the page. “What does this look like to you?”
Mallory leaned in, frowned. “It looks like the bottom of the page was folded up.” Like I’d done, she flipped back and forth. “But I don’t see any continued pages here. Hmm,” she said, and slid over a tablet, pressed keys. She read the information on the screen, then flipped to the front of the book, checked the title page.
“Damn it,” she said, and looked up at me. “The manuscript has foldout pages—bigger sheets of illustrations that were folded up to fit into the manuscript. Like you might find for advertisements in a magazine. But they were removed from the original manuscript so they could be sold separately. They weren’t found until 1987, which is more than a hundred years after this particular copy of the Danzig was printed.”
“Which explains why they aren’t in there. Do we know what was on them?”
She looked at the screen again, shook her head. “They haven’t been digitized.” A slow smile spread across her face. “And you are not going to believe where they are.” She looked up at me. “They’re at the University of freaking Chicago.”
The U of C was my almost alma mater, the place where I’d been working on my Ph.D. in English literature the night I’d been attacked. The night I’d been made a vampire.
“Probably in the Special Collections Research Center. It’s where they keep the old stuff.”
She checked the tablet again, nodded. “You’re right. How do we get a look at it?”
“Normally,” I said, thinking back to my grad school days, “we’d make a formal request to the center to view the documents. We show up with ID, and a staff member brings it out. But even assuming the library’s still open given the evacuation, that would take time.” And require daylight.
Mallory swore. “So that’s it? We’re out of luck?”
No, I thought. Not if I was willing to go back there. Not if I was willing to open the door I’d closed more than a year ago, and hadn’t reopened since then. But what choice did I have?
“No,” I said, and pushed back my chair. “We’re not out of luck. Not yet.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
TRIPLICATE
I told Mallory where I was going, asked her to let the others know. I needed to do this, and I was afraid I’d lose my nerve if I talked to Ethan first. If I acknowledged the fear I’d have to face down.
This would be a homecoming, and not an altogether good one. I’d come face-to-face with Logan Hill only a few months ago. And even though the university was barely a mile from the House, I hadn’t so much as walked into the library where I’d spent so many nights a single time since my attack. I hadn’t talked to my professors, my advisers. Hadn’t talked to my friends in the English department. I’d needed a clean break.
That didn’t keep guilt from forming a hard, cold weight in my chest.
The man, tall and thin, with dark skin and short hair, was waiting in front of the library’s entrance, its imposing concrete walls rising on either side of us. “Merit,” he said with a smile. “Long time no see.”
“Hey, Pax.”
Paxton Leonard hadn’t been a colleague; not exactly. He’d been a gatekeeper, one of the few men and women trusted with the literal keys to the most precious documents at the University of Chicago. I’d spent enough time in the center reviewing manuscripts for my dissertation that we’d become friendly.