The Book of Blood and Shadow (4 page)

“Nora, right?” he said.

I nodded. His eyes were a deep brown, several shades darker than his face, and I suspected they’d be well suited to the purpose of gazing lovingly, if, hypothetically, such a need ever came up.

“Andrew Kane’s sister?”

I stopped smiling.

“Chris.” He tapped his chest, then waited, as if he’d forgotten his line and was expecting me to fill it in for him. When I didn’t, he added, “Chris Moore? JFK Middle? I was in sixth when you were in fifth.” He paused again. “Andy helped coach my soccer team.”

I made a noise, a
hmm
or an
um
, and wondered how long I could keep from having to respond. I remembered him now, dimly, as one of the many to make out with Jenna Li behind the cafeteria, and it seemed suddenly possible that she’d spread her minions across the globe—or at least the town—with orders to deliver her revenge.

“He was cool,” Chris said. Then, “Sorry. About what happened. That must have sucked.”

Another
hmm
.

“I moved cross town that year,” he said. “That’s probably why
you don’t remember me. Been at Prep ever since. So what do you think of it so far?”

I shrugged.

“Hey. Listen. It’s probably none of my business, but …”

I steeled myself.

“I heard what you said to Julianne.” He must have caught my brow furrow at the name. “In chem class?” he added. “When she asked about brothers or sisters? That’s when I recognized you. And you told her …” He hesitated, picking at the stiff cuff of his button-down shirt, preppy even for Prep. “Actually, I was right the first time. None of my business.” He reached out a hand. “Better idea. New school, new start, right? Meeting again for the first time. Chris Moore.”

I took his hand, shaking it firmly. “Nora Kane.”

We were still locked together when a ridiculously pretty girl—long black hair, almond-shaped eyes, long legs jutting from a short skirt, the works—danced through the door, dropped to her knees before us, and propped her elbows on Chris’s desk. “So, what are we talking about?”

“Filling New Girl in on the highs and lows of life at Prep,” Chris said. I realized I’d been holding my breath. But he passed the test. “I warned her there’s still time to go back where she came from, but she refuses to listen. You want to tell her?”

The girl laughed. “I think you’ve just met the low.” She gave Chris the kind of light shove you deploy when you’re looking for an excuse to touch someone. “Now meet the high.”

I’d never understood girls like her—as in, literally couldn’t comprehend how they achieved perfection by seven a.m., hair sleek and dry, lip gloss and mascara and foundation and the variety of cosmetics of whose existence I remained unaware masterfully applied, accessories matched to sartorial selection matched to freshly polished nails. Whereas I inevitably showed up to school late, with
tangled, wet, and, several months of the year, frozen hair tucked into a lopsided bun, my socks mismatched, and, on truly special occasions, some hastily applied drugstore foundation that couldn’t disguise the fact that my nose was slightly too big for my face. My mother had once thought it would be comforting to explain that beauty—and the grace and confidence that nurture it—requires money. She added no maternal assurances about natural beauty, true beauty, or inner beauty and which, if any, I might possess, while I elected not to point out that money wasn’t the only thing I didn’t have. A mother who bothered to show me how to put on eye shadow might also have come in handy.

“Adriane Ames,” Chris said as the remaining two students filtered into the classroom and grabbed seats. “Feel free to disregard ninety percent of everything she says.”

“And the other ten?” I asked.

“Pure genius. Or so she tells me.”

“I also tell him to get a haircut,” she said, brushing manicured fingers across the tight curls that were blossoming into an Afro. “But does he listen?”

I liked his hair. “Clearly that fell into the ninety percent,” I said. “The odds really aren’t in your favor.”

She laughed again, a surprisingly abrasive sound for such a delicate frame. Her voice was musical, but her laugh was pure noise. “She’s cute,” Adriane said. “Can we keep her?”

They could; they did.

7

Chris never told anyone about Andy, and neither did I. As if knowing that he knew meant I could pretend it had never happened, because it wasn’t really lying if Chris knew the truth.

He wasn’t with Adriane, not then. But he was at the top of her
agenda and, as quickly became clear, items on the agenda never lay fallow for long. It turned out he was the reason she’d taken advanced Latin in the first place; I was the reason she passed it. That’s where it happened, somewhere in between declensions and Lucretian soliloquies and cheesy “Ancient Romans Go to Market” skits, Chris and I fell in like, and Chris and Adriane—with my Cyranoesque assistance—fell in love. So I had a best friend and soon, by virtue of the transitive property of social addition (girl has best friend plus best friend has new girlfriend equals girl has new best friend,
quod erat demonstrandum
), I had two. Chris and I got Adriane through advanced Latin, Adriane and I got Chris through remedial chem, the two of them got me through the new-girl phase with a minimum of muss and fuss, and for two years we were, if no happier than the average high school student juggling APs and SATs and extracurriculars and defective parents, at least not miserable, and not alone. Then Chris went to college (albeit, via the path of least resistance, down the street), I found Max, we all found the Book, and everything went to hell.

8

E. I. Westonia, Ioanni Francisco Westonio, fratri suo germano S.P.D
., the first letter began.
E. J. Weston, to her brother John Francis Weston, greetings
. There were about thirty of them, crumbling parchment pages bound together with fraying twine. They were in random order, some dated, some not, all to the same person. I wondered if he was the one who’d given her the dusty edition of Petrarch’s
Il Canzoniere
that had been stored with the letters, rotting in some Boston attic for a century and presumably a European attic for the centuries before that. It was the first time I’d ever seen anything so old, much less been allowed to touch it. The paper was rough under my finger, but delicate, and I realized how easily I could tear it—or
crush it or burn it; I could destroy it in any number of ways. I’d felt a similar rush at the Grand Canyon—the first and last time we’d attempted a family vacation in our newly diminished family form—standing at the edge of nothing, knowing what would happen if I took one more step. Not that I was tempted, but there was power in the possibility. It’s not often that you get the opportunity to casually destroy something of value. When you’re a kid, there’s always a new tower of blocks to knock over, another Barbie to microwave. When you grow up, they take away your toys.

It turned out Elizabeth Weston was seventeen years old in 1598, when she’d written most of the letters—already more than halfway through her life. She’d lost her father when she was a baby and gained a new one in Edward Kelley, alchemist, scholar, charlatan, and all-around ne’er-do-well. He dragged her from England to Prague, treated her to a few years of luxury and frolic at the imperial court, then screwed over the wrong person and got himself walled up in a middle-of-nowhere stone tower for the brief rest of his life—and once again, lucky Elizabeth came along for the ride. She whiled away the rest of her childhood in a crappy house near the foot of the prison tower, ferrying messages, gifts, and presumably the occasional filial affection to her imprisoned stepfather.

The whole affair had an appealing air of gothic intrigue, with all the makings of a Shakespearean tragedy or at least—if you threw in a lonely stable boy or trustworthy prison guard—a trashy romance novel. But it didn’t change the fact that, as far as the Hoff was concerned, she was a nonentity, which made my translations busywork, leaving me somewhat less than eager to, as he put it, drown myself in history.

But I did what I was there to do. I followed protocol with the letters, touching them as infrequently as possible to preserve them from my skin’s oils, careful never to bend or fold or wrinkle, locking them away each night in the Hoff’s private safe, six inches
of steel protecting them from evil librarians, or whatever other nemeses he imagined lurking beyond his walls. And one
mi frater
and
magnifico Parente
at a time, I translated.

Greetings. I fear my letters of late have been too full of heartache and grievance. But these months have been hard, dearest brother. Harder than I allowed you to know. You will think it strange that I miss such a hostile home, our Father’s tower, dark and dank, and its outbuildings, the walls so thin I feared my blood would turn to ice. But even a prison can be a home, when there is food, when there are walls to guard against the night, when there is a father like our Father watching over us. Now he is gone, and with him, our sorry home. Though it may be madness, I miss them both
.

That much should have taken me less than an hour, including the twenty minutes needed to transcribe the Latin into my notebook and mark unfamiliar words and confounding verb forms—the dull but soothing warm-up to translation itself, like practicing scales on the piano before moving on to Mozart. But the transcription took two hours, and the single paragraph another two after that. I blamed Chris and his attention deficit disaster, but admittedly, no one forced me to help him cheat at solitaire or plot out a senior-class prank or remember the words to all the theme songs to the Friday-night TV lineup of our youth.

“The thumb wars were
your
idea,” he pointed out when I called him a bad influence. “And what about now? I’m sitting here, hard at work, and you’re the one distracting
me
with these ridiculous complaints about—”

“Hard at work?” I peered over his hunched shoulders. “You’re making paper airplanes.”

He shrugged. “It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.”

The Hoff’s office was nothing like the beige oversized cubicle my father had once inhabited in the humanities building across the quad. The Hoff’s tenure meant the school could never fire him, but they could and did usher him into emeritus status and strip him of luxuries like photocopiers, Wi-Fi connections, and doors. As penance for his encroaching senility, they’d stuck him in a side chapel of the decaying Trinity Cathedral, which had been out of use since the modern and airy egalitarian church was erected on the other side of the main quad. Now Trinity’s nave and quire were used for the occasional Phi Beta Kappa induction or faculty tea party, while its ancillary chapels had been divided up into professorial overflow offices. So far, it seemed, the Hoff was the only overflow.

Our work space was a large mahogany table in the center of the room, only a few feet away from the Hoff’s usually abandoned desk, stacked high with teetering towers of journals, conference papers, and departmental memos that inevitably went unread. There was no door, just a long, narrow tunnel that led into the main worship area. The Elizabeth and Kelley letters, along with a collection of materials the Hoff had “liberated” from the library and its barbarian overseers, were housed in a large safe in the far corner, to which Chris had somehow charmed him into giving us the combination. Beside the safe was a fraying gray couch with sagging cushions and a faint smell of dog, and this was where the Hoff, when he showed up at all, usually took his seat and then, promptly, his nap. In the Hoff’s frequent absence, Chris claimed possession, often paying tribute with a nap of his own.

But that first day, Chris managed to stay awake for the duration, distracting me and drawing occasional disapproving looks from Max, who sat at the end of the table, shoulders bowed, eyes squinted behind the wire-rimmed glasses, index finger tracing line after line of cramped alchemical gibberish. He stopped short of shushing us, but otherwise, the punctilious librarian imitation
was complete. I caught a distinct sigh of relief when Adriane showed up to drag Chris away, ostensibly to work on her college essay but presumably to take more interesting advantage of his empty dorm room.

“Pencils down, time up,” Chris said, shutting my notebook for me. “You’re coming, too.”

I shook my head. “Not tonight.”

“You have a better offer?”

“Oh, let’s see, a glamorous and exotic evening chez Kane, complete with calculus, physics, and some thrilling adventures in Latin translation, because thanks to someone, this afternoon was a complete waste of my time.”

“ ‘Someone’ sounds dastardly. Point me toward him, I’ll beat him up for you.”

“He’s not so bad,” I said.

Chris batted his eyes.

“Though rearranging his face might improve things a bit, so if you think we should give punching a try …”

He turned to Adriane. “Do you hear how she talks to me? Can I help it that I’m handsome and charming and irresistible and no girl can say no to me?”

“Nora doesn’t seem to have a problem with it,” Adriane said. Then kissed him, full on, rising on her toes and kicking up her leg like a black-and-white-movie damsel in desire. “Lucky for me.”

“Let’s test it out,” I said. “No, I am not hanging out with you tonight.” I paused to take stock. “That wasn’t particularly traumatic. Think it was a fluke? No, no, no thank you, no. Easy enough.”

Chris grabbed me around the waist, plucking me effortlessly out of the chair and off my feet. He spun me around as I kicked and flailed and shook with laughter. “Help me show this one the error of her ways,” he told Adriane.

“Chris, let her be. If she wants to go home …”

“How could she want to go home when she’s got such a better option?” He was still dangling me a few inches above the ground, despite my halfhearted efforts to extricate myself. I was laughing too hard to be of much use. “Come on, you grab her legs, we’ll carry her back with us.”

Adriane didn’t move.