The Secret of Spellshadow Manor 2 by Bella Forrest (top ten ebook reader .TXT) 📗

this. A rare thing.” Elias handed Alex another book. This one was a notebook, slim and black, with barely any pages inside and no title embossed on the front to hint at what was held within. “You might find this useful.” Elias smirked.

“What is it?” Alex asked, opening the middle of the notebook to find a scramble of symbols scattered across the thin paper, browning at the edges.

“A thing that took me great pains to acquire for you. A fitting payment for a job well done, ridding the manor of that hideous creature,” murmured Elias, a note of unexpected sincerity in his voice.

“You’re a veritable library of stolen goods,” joked Alex, turning the slender notebook in his hands.

“And who says they are stolen? The ingratitude! Anyway, you cannot steal something which already belongs to you,” said Elias.

“These are yours?” Alex frowned, perplexed.

“In a sense. Ownership is a vague principle when you can melt through walls.” Elias cackled, grasping the fluid bottom of his twinkling ribcage and pulling upward sharply, his flowing form folding back in on itself, imploding in a mist of eerie darkness.

“Elias?” called Alex, but the shadow-man was gone.

Each time Elias appeared to him, Alex grew more and more aware of how little he knew about the spectral shadow creature who was always slipping into the darkness, appearing as he pleased. It was hard to imagine Elias as anything other than a fluid being, and yet there was a humanity to him, albeit buried deep in the peculiar galaxy of his strange, shapeshifting body. When Elias had said ‘you cannot steal something which already belongs to you,’ Alex had believed him, picturing a human version of the slippery shadow holding those books in hands of flesh and blood.

The thought made Alex curious. What had Elias been before he was a shadow-man?

Sitting alone in the empty room, Alex flipped through the Great Battles book with some interest, but his eye was continually drawn to the slender notebook. Opening it up to the first page, the paper yellowing with age and worn by time, Alex saw nothing written there except a small signature in the bottom right corner, the ink faded… It read Leander W. He couldn’t stop looking at the signature, running his finger over it, feeling for any residual magic, but there was nothing. Pausing with the half-moon of his thumbnail beneath the W, Alex wondered if it was merely hope that made him think twice about the letter, or if it meant something much closer to home. Could it be? Leander W. Leander W…That W antagonized him, toying with him, as he read it over and over.

Desperately, he flicked through to the next page, only to find the same smattering of jumbled symbols, too small to be diagrams but not neatly placed enough to be sentences. He didn’t recognize the symbols as any language he knew, and, as he flipped through the rest of the notebook, he realized the whole thing was made up of these doodles; there was no other complete word within the book that he recognized, save for that first page with that infuriating name on it.

Alex knew Elias had given it to him for a reason. There was a purpose to everything Elias did, even if it took a while for that purpose to become clear. A chill shivered through Alex as he thought of the shadow-creature. He knew how Elias worked. These weren’t gifts with no strings attached. There was a price for every prize.

Chapter 14

With the new restrictions keeping a tight leash on the students, there was little sanctuary to be found within the walls of the manor. One of those fleeting moments of refuge was in the lessons of Professor Gaze, a curious woman of undetermined age, who moved swiftly despite her bony limbs and hunched back. Her slim, craggy face was framed by tendrils of curling silver locks that shot out wildly in places from beneath a moth-eaten beret of black wool.

Alex had not had Professor Gaze as a teacher for very long, but had taken an instant liking to the crooked old woman and her mischievous grin. She was an affable sort, with a cheerful laugh and a natural way with the students that bordered on the maternal. There was an undeniable, deep wisdom about her that drew people in—something in the strange quality of her eyes and her voice that commanded attention. During class, she would zip between the desks, robe swishing, and rush to the aid of whoever was struggling with a spell, crying out good-naturedly at the royal mess they had made of it.

Gaze’s classes and manner were unlike any of the other professors’, in that they lacked the undercurrent of anxiety. Alex never felt as if there were eyes on him, sizing him up for an imagined duel in the near future, nor did he feel pressure to achieve, which took the strain off Natalie somewhat. They could all relax a bit in her lessons. It was easy to warm to the old woman; her lessons were useful and to the point, never trying to trip anybody up, but they were also filled with laughter and jokes and stories of her youth.

Everyone, Alex included, would listen, enthralled, as she spoke of herself as a young wizard, struggling with spells and the nonsense she and her friends would get up to inside the manor walls. Once, she even spoke of a roasting summer day spent on a riverbank, splashing and swimming in the deepest parts until a current snatched at the legs of a friend, forcing Gaze to perform a daring rescue mission. After Gaze had hauled her friend safely onto the bank, they shared a bottle of cold ginger beer and ate cupcakes from a wicker picnic basket she had been given as a present, with red-spotted napkins and real silverware to eat with. It dawned on Alex that this particular story was from before; before Malachi Grey had