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

continued, Elias’s words reminding Alex of Derhin’s panicked, last-ditch attempt to survive by using life magic.

“So, what is this ‘great evil,’ then, if it is not the hatred between Mages and Spellbreakers?” pressed Alex, returning to his previous train of thought.

“There you go again, always wanting things on a silver platter! Such a shame… I thought we’d made progress,” snapped Elias suddenly, his mood shifting in an instant. “I have spoiled you with my gifts. Well, no more. I have already done and said more than I should have, to help you. How can you learn if I lay it all out for you so easily? If you are so desperate, perhaps you should seek out the Head—he has plenty of the answers you seek.”

Elias’s figure twisted in the air, shifting smoothly into the form of a cat. Alex only caught the glint of sorrow for the briefest moment, but it was long enough for it to trouble him.

“What happened to you?” Alex called, but the shadow-cat was already gone, lost once more to the depths of the manor, leaving Alex with the worrying feeling that his secret guide was never coming back.

Chapter 18

Elias’s words stuck with Alex as the day wore on, leaving him distracted and unfocused in classes and snappy during breaks. The shadow-man had made him feel inferior, and Alex didn’t like it. Also, despite the questions he had been able to ask, Alex had come away from the encounter feeling as if he had even more that needed answering.

In the evening hours, Jari and Natalie were once more absent from his company. Natalie had brushed him off, saying she had an extra session to get to, and Jari had made an excuse about wanting to look over some ideas he’d had. Alex hated to admit it, but he was feeling a little put out by their continued absence. Besides, there were things he wanted to ask them, in the wake of Elias’s revelations. He was worried, and he couldn’t even tell them. Natalie concerned him the most, as he wondered what dark and dangerous arts she was getting into, exactly. He hoped she had been telling him the truth when she’d said she wouldn’t be stupid enough to dabble with life magic, but there was a gnawing doubt in his stomach.

Jari, too, so fixated on his scheme that he seemed not to notice anything else going on around him—not seeing that Alex also needed his help. Even if it was just the willingness to spare an hour to listen to the insanity of what had been going on lately in the ever-developing strangeness of Alex’s world.

He wasn’t ashamed to admit he missed them. The manor could be a lonely place.

Equally pressing was the idea that he was falling behind in some intangible way. With an hour on his hands and Jari absent from the dorm, Alex pulled the notebook back out from its hiding place and scanned the pages. It was a code—he knew that. He just had to figure it out. Surely, that would be easy?

Alex looked across the sketched symbols, seeing no continuity or repetition in any of them. Had he expected the answer to jump out from the page, just because he was a Spellbreaker? No matter which way he turned the book or looked at the inked markings, no epiphany came.

He lay his hand over one of the pages and brought the tendrils of his anti-magic creeping out onto the yellowing paper. It did nothing but dampen the fragile page ever so slightly. Perplexed, he tried uttering random words like “Spellbreaker,” “Leander,” and even “open sesame,” in case a password unlocked the code. The symbols remained exactly as they were.

Frustrated, Alex lay back on his bed with the notebook open on his chest and stared up at the sky, just visible through the curtains, as he tried to come up with something useful. It reminded him of rainy days when he was a kid, the heavy droplets pattering softly against the window as he would pull a box full of jigsaws and puzzle books from beneath his bed. His grandmother had taught him how to do the ones where you had to unfocus your eyes to see a shape beneath a pattern.

He tried it with the notebook, crossing his eyes slightly. It just made him feel stupid, squinting cross-eyed at the pages.

He racked his brain, trying to think of other solutions to puzzles from his childhood. Jigsaws were easy; they just required the missing pieces. But as far as Alex could tell, there were no pieces to be found here. There had been crosswords and code words, but he had tried those already with the book. The symbols didn’t seem to represent letters or characters of any sort. They were just randomly spaced on the paper, each one different.

What else? What am I missing? Alex thought, frustrated by the shapes on the page.

An image of Christmas Day flickered into his memory. He couldn’t have been older than seven or eight, wearing a bright orange paper hat as he sat at the dinner table with his mother and his grandparents, from her side of the family. They had never had any of his father’s side around the dinner table, from what he could remember. His grandparents were dead now, but he could picture them vividly, laughing and smiling as his grandmother served the Christmas meal that sat in the center of the table, a Santa hat on her head. He watched the scene as if it were playing on an old reel. His grandfather reaching over with a dark green package, spotted with golden snowflakes, wiggling it in front of the younger Alex for him to open. Little Alex grasped the wrapped parcel eagerly and began to tear into the wrapping paper, opening the present quickly to see what was inside. A small booklet fell from within the package, followed swiftly by a small magnifying glass made of