Grimoires and Where to Find Them by Raconteur, Honor (best affordable ebook reader .TXT) 📗

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