But as I got toward the last shelf in the room, my heart instantly leapt into my throat.
My wand was glowing faint blue.
My heart hammered, thundering in my chest. I slid my wand into my pocket, and carefully pulled the book from that bottom shelf.
Almost all the books in the Foster room were Latin. But Latin was my major and what I’d been working on since I was twelve.
There was no title on the cover, but I still ran my hand over it anyway, feeling a shiver working its way up and down my spine.
Gently, I pulled the cover open, and my eyes scanned the page.
It talked about weapons. As I flipped through the pages, I found illustrations to go with the words. Swords and whips and knives and arrows.
It talked about how to enchant them with magic to make them even more powerful than their natural selves. It talked about how to hide them in everyday objects, like rings or cloaks.
My eyes lifted from the book and drifted around the room.
This was great. Any discovery was priceless.
But this wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind. I wasn’t planning on getting into any battles any time soon. I was sure hoping to not have to defend my life or anyone else’s.
Maybe that would come in handy at some point. Maybe if the other mages in the past had known how to enchant weapons, they wouldn’t have been hunted to extinction.
But maybe they did. Maybe taking up arms put bigger targets on their backs.
I told myself to just be grateful, and I slid the book into my bag. I grabbed the wand again, and I continued scanning along the shelves.
I finished in the Foster room and moved on to the Weir room before making my way to the last room, the McCallum.
Such a strange room. It was tiny, barely even a room. But it was packed, stuffed to the brim with such an odd assortment of books. I wondered what its history was and vowed to ask Nathaniel later. Surely he would know, and if he didn’t, he could find out.
Book after book, I scanned, running the eraser along the spines. And I was just finishing when Borden stepped inside, and I looked at the time.
9:02.
“Anything?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Nothing. And I got through the entire fiction section, both downstairs and up.”
Disappointment filled my chest, but I didn’t get a chance to respond, because Mary-Beth walked in just then, and my heart flew when she was wearing a brilliant smile.
“You found something?” the words breathed out of me.
She nodded her head, hardly able to contain her excitement.
Nathaniel walked in just then, and from the look on his face, I knew he hadn’t found anything.
“Come on,” I said, withdrawing the key from my bag. “We need to get out of earshot.”
I unlocked the bookshelf, and we swung it open, revealing the spiral staircase. “We need to check these books as well,” I said as Borden pulled the bookcase closed after us.
I’d thought about these books before, and we’d even looked through some of them. None had seemed promising.
But as we trailed our wands along the spines, I really, actually paid attention to them.
These were rare books. Valuable. They were first editions and lost books.
This was a treasure trove.
“These books…” Nathaniel said, letting out a breath. “I can’t believe I never bothered to go through them more, but…”
“Some of these are probably worth thousands of dollars,” Mary-Beth said. “And none of them are catalogued into the school’s system.”
“Dad said Mom was bringing home a lot of books,” I said as I ran my fingers down the spine of a book I knew had to be worth at least ten thousand dollars. “She was looking for magical books, but she must have come upon a lot of other valuable ones. This…” I looked around, wondering in awe that I hadn’t really paid attention before. “This was her retirement. This…this is a fortune in here.”
“Yet it feels like a sin to sell any one of these,” Nathaniel said. “These are the kinds of books people pay professionals to track down. They pay hundreds, thousands for these titles. This…Margot, your mother collected treasure here.”
I shook my head in wonder.
I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know what to do with them.
But this felt like as much of a legacy as what we were doing up in her office. This felt like an echo of my mother’s voice, almost as if it were whispered directly in my ear.
“Anyone finding anything?” I asked, moving on.
“Nothing,” Borden said.
“Nope,” Mary-Beth reported.
“Let’s head upstairs then,” Nathaniel said.
My mother’s office was fairly large, thankfully, so it didn’t feel exceptionally crowded, even with all four of us in it. Borden took a seat on the couch, crossing one ankle over the opposite knee. Mary-Beth sat in the macramé swing and pulled a book out with hands that were shaking, she was so excited.
“It was in the fiction section, with a bunch of medical thrillers,” she said. “It looks like it was damaged by water, so some of it isn’t legible anymore. But it looks to me like a book about healing.”
Nathaniel looked over at me, which drew Borden and Mary-Beth’s attention.
“What?” Mary-Beth asked.
I shook my head. “Nothing. It’s just that we knew it was possible.”
“You’re saying you’ve done it before?” Borden asked.
My gaze darkened a bit at his words. “The night the Boys attacked Nathaniel.” I tried to block out the image of Borden holding Nathaniel while David punched him, of him just standing there while David tried to drown the love of my life, but it was nearly impossible. “His ribs were broken, they split his cheek, which needed stitches, and his lip was cracked. They gave him a black eye. He wasn’t in good shape. So, I…put my hands on him and I…willed his body to heal.”
Mary-Beth looked from me to Borden, her eyes narrowing a bit. She didn’t really know what had happened in our past. How Nathaniel and I had to forgive Borden, just how far things had gone that night.
My stomach was a tight ball, hard and queasy.
“I’m sorry,” Borden said, and in his eyes, I knew that he meant it. It didn’t erase it though. “I never should have gotten involved that night. It’s going to haunt me for the rest of my life and I’m going to apologize every chance I get.”
“It’s fine,” Nathaniel said, stepping between my heated gaze and Borden. His eyes slid from Borden to me, and in them, I saw him begging me to let it go, to not let it eat me up.
I looked away, but there was still a bad taste in my mouth.
“Whoa,” Mary-Beth said, trying to break the tension in the air. “Sounds like there’s a little more history between the three of you than I realized.”
“It’s in the past,” Nathaniel said, his tone hard but even. “We’re all letting it die.”
I took one deep breath through my nose, telling myself to believe what Nathaniel said. “So, I know it works. I think this is important for us all to learn, because who knows what we’re going to have to deal with in the future.”
Mary-Beth cleared her throat awkwardly and fidgeted with the book in her lap. “Roger that, Commander.”