As I scanned the list, my attention caught on a name: Myrrine Athanas. She was the fifth sorceress to have copied the grimoire, an ancestor from millennia ago.

Lower lip caught between my teeth, I flipped back to my mother’s notes and read the top page.

Insertions from Myrrine Athanas—direct descendant of Anthea??

3 5 passages added to her grimoire copy, not from original book

Journal entries?

Could be more, need to check to end

Myrrine mentions Λευκ?? – Leukás?

Leucadia, island in the Ionian Sea on the west coast of Greece

1000-700 BC?

Was she the first summoner to disobey the 12 warning???

I reread the last line several times. When I’d reviewed her notes before, I’d assumed “12 warning” was supposed to be “12 warnings” and she’d missed a letter. Figuring I’d eventually find these warnings, I hadn’t paid much attention to the note. But what if her quick scrawl didn’t contain an error but was her shorthand?

12 warning … twelfth warning … Twelfth House warning.

Pulling the grimoire closer, I carefully turned the fragile pages. The ancient paper, cracked and stained, tore easily and I didn’t want to add to the damage. Finally, I found the section I wanted—the demon Houses. I didn’t need a translation to recognize the First House. The illustration of a winged demon, with long horns, a muscular build, and thick tail with a heavy plate on the end, looked eerily similar to Tahēsh, the escaped demon that had nearly killed me and Zylas three months ago.

I flipped past the first eleven Houses and stopped on the final one. An illustration of Zylas’s doppelganger filled part of the page, and beneath the House name were two sentences written in precise strokes with an ancient pen. I’d translated them already.

Never summon from the Twelfth House. For the trespass of this sacred covenant, the sons of Vh’alyir will destroy you.

Could that be the warning my mother had referenced? Did she think Myrrine Athanas had summoned a Vh’alyir demon?

“Zylas?” I glanced over my shoulder. “Didn’t you say no demon of your House has ever been summoned before?”

He sleepily cracked one eye open. “Var.”

“Are you sure? Could a Vh’alyir have been summoned a really long time ago?”

“I do not know.” When I continued to look at him hopefully, he released a huffing breath. “Maybe. Most stories of our House are forgotten. Other demons say we are never summoned, but they maybe would not know if some few of our Dīnen disappeared long ago.”

Only demon kings—the Dīnen—could be summoned to Earth, a fact which I suspected was unknown to most Demonica practitioners. I might be the only human on the planet who knew we were stealing demon leaders to enslave as fighting puppets.

I tucked my hair behind my ear. “Why have your stories been forgotten?”

“The old Vh’alyir demons are all gone. Dead.” He gazed at the ceiling, his eyes seeing another world. “Our history died too. We are only what we are now.”

“What are you now?”

He closed his eyes again. “I know no stories. My sire died too soon to teach me.”

A memory pricked my subconscious, something else he’d told me, but before I could chase the feeling, he added brusquely, “All demons of my House are young and zh’ūltis. They do not know stories either.”

If the Vh’alyir House didn’t know their own history, maybe a Dīnen had been summoned and the current generation had forgotten about it. Myrrine had lived a very long time ago, even by demon standards—whatever those were.

I shuffled through my mother’s notes to another page that referenced Myrrine Athanas. Returning to the grimoire, I searched for any mention of the ancient sorceress. Probably futile, considering the length of the grimoire and the illegibility of some pages, but …

In the back half of the book, I turned past an endless section of complicated arcane arrays and their accompanying instructions, full of crossed-out sections and notations—that would be fun to translate—and found a long list of incantations.

Was it just me, or did this page feel different?

I peered at the edge. Were two pages stuck together? I rubbed the corner between my finger and thumb, and the edges parted. With painstaking care, I peeled the pages apart and laid them flat. On one side was the completed array that went with the marked-up instructions, and on the facing page was an illustration of a medallion.

It vaguely resembled an infernus. The artist had drawn both sides, with a tiny but complex array filling one face. The medallion’s other face displayed spiky markings in an outer ring around eleven sigils.

In the center was a twelfth sigil—Zylas’s House emblem.

My heart beat faster as I leaned over the page. A line of text, four words long, titled the illustration, but I couldn’t read it. It wasn’t Ancient Greek, Latin, or any language I recognized. What did it say?

“Imailatē Vīsh et Vh’alyir.”

I jumped. I hadn’t heard him move, but Zylas was sitting up. He reached past me, his arm brushing my shoulder, and touched the line of illegible text.

“Imailatē Vīsh et Vh’alyir,” he repeated. “Magic Amulet of Vh’alyir.”

It was written in demonic?

“A magical item of Vh’alyir?” I twisted to look at him. “What is it?”

“I do not know.”

“But it’s named after your House.” The only other text on the page was a short line scrawled under the drawing—this one in Ancient Greek. Excitement fizzed along my nerves as I flipped to a blank page in my notebook and picked up my pencil. It didn’t take me long to translate the line.

? ?ρμο? ? ?πολωλ?? ?π?ντων ?στιν ? κλε?? Μυρρ?νη ?θ?να?

 

The lost amulet is the key to everything.

– Myrrine Athanas

“The lost amulet,” I whispered, “is the key … to everything? What does she mean, everything?”

Zylas frowned at the page. “How is it lost?”