“This place reeks of the hh’ainun.”

“We can’t find anything but their clothes.”

He prowled deeper into the room. His gaze passed over the garments, the futon and cot, and the table and overflowing garbage. He took a few steps toward the shower corner, then reeled back, his disgust intensifying. Gliding steps carried him in a circle around the room, and he came to a stop beside the trash.

I cringed. “We don’t need to dig through that, do we?”

He crouched, head tilted, then pushed on the trash can. It slid sideways with a gritty rasp, a drink cup and crumpled brown napkin toppling to the floor. He ran his fingers across the cracked concrete, then dug his claws into a short, fat crack.

An oblong chip of concrete popped free, revealing a metal handle embedded into the floor. Zylas grabbed it and pulled. A rough circle lifted—a trapdoor, disguised to look like part of the floor, its seams lost in the cracks.

He dragged the door off the opening, and we peered into the dark hole. The light from my phone illuminated a flimsy aluminum ladder propped against the wall.

Grasping the edge, Zylas stuck his head and shoulders into the hole. He leaned farther in, then straightened, repositioned, and dropped into the gap feet-first. I heard the faint thump of his landing.

“Vayanin.”

Holding my phone with my teeth, I sat on the edge and slid my feet into the gap. His hands curled over my thighs, and I pushed off. He caught my weight and lowered me onto the floor. My shoes settled against hard-packed dirt. Taking my phone from my mouth, I shone the light across the space.

It was a roughly dug basement, gray cinderblocks supporting the walls and the floor left as unfinished dirt, except for a circular pad in the center, twelve feet across. A familiar shape had been etched into the concrete: a thick ring ten feet in diameter, with lines and runes swirling in and around it.

A summoning circle.

No demon waited inside it, but the sight still chilled me. I moved my light across the walls. Boxes and crates were stacked on one side, and on the other was a wooden table constructed of two-by-fours, the surface covered in papers, notebooks, leather-bound texts, and an assortment of pens, rulers, and calculators.

I crossed to the table, and Zylas followed, both of us walking around the summoning circle. Embossed titles in Latin and Greek glimmered on the tomes’ spines, but the notebooks and binders had blank covers. A stack of steel armbands waited beside a grimoire-shaped book, and I flipped the cover open to find a complex array and list of ingredients.

A quick perusal confirmed that replacing any damaged armbands would be a real chore for the sorcerers, requiring complex spellwork and days for the spells to charge.

Plus, I noticed with an unpleasant twist of my gut, each spell listed demon blood as an ingredient.

Closing the book, I handed it to Zylas to carry, then sidled along the table. Diagrams covered most of it—large sheets of brown paper filled with notes and corrections. The scrawled sketches and hasty annotations reminded me of Anthea’s spell experiments in the grimoire.

I peered more closely at a scribbled array, where the sorcerer had circled a central element and drawn an angry question mark, then turned to the black binder lying in the middle of the mess.

Nervous prickles chased each other along my nerves. I flipped the binder’s cover open.

“Zylas!” I gasped.

He pressed closer, leaning over the binder beside me, and together we stared down at the page, nestled in a clear plastic sheath. A grimoire page.

A page from my grimoire.

Chapter Nineteen

Disbelieving elation swept through me. I turned to the next page protector in the binder. It held another page stolen from the Athanas Grimoire, its edge roughly torn.

I flipped through each one. Twelve pages in all, carefully protected in the binder.

“We found them!” I grabbed Zylas’s hand, squeezing hard. “We found the stolen pages!”

“Take it and we will go.”

“Right.” I scooped the binder up, then tucked the sorcerers’ abjuration grimoire behind the sturdy cover. “Let’s get out of here.”

He grabbed the edge of the trapdoor and pulled himself up, and I hastily climbed the ladder after him. Twitchy apprehension wound into my muscles. We’d found more than a clue about the sorcerers—we’d found the prize. The stolen pages I’d feared we’d never recover. How had the sorcerers gotten them from Claude? Or had Claude never had them?

Either way, I now needed to escape with them.

I pocketed my phone and crept to the door, Zylas behind me. Cracking it open, I peered into the dark alley. Zylas leaned into my back as he too peered outside, his vision better suited to spotting enemies.

“Go toward the busy, noisy place,” he whispered. “Quickly.”

As I sucked in a deep breath, he dissolved into light and returned to the infernus. I flung the door open and rushed into the alley. With not a soul in sight, a notch of my tension released. I quickened my pace, making a beeline for the busy street at the bottom of the hill.

A man appeared on the sidewalk and turned into the alley. Fear skittered through me, but I could tell he wasn’t one of the sorcerer twins. A white beard covered his lower face, and he had the thick middle of an older man who’d once been fit.

Exhaling unsteadily, I continued down the alley as the old man headed uphill, a hat pulled low to protect his ears from the chilly wind. We drew closer to each other, and I resisted the urge to veer toward the edge of the pavement, holding my course in the alley’s center.

We drew level with each other. One more step and I’d be past him.

His hand swung up and pressed against the binder clutched to my chest, the unexpected push bringing me to a stumbling halt. His chin rose, bearded face turning toward me.

“That binder,” he said in a gravelly voice as our gazes met, “doesn’t belong to you.”

I stared into his eyes—unnaturally pale blue and framed by white lashes. My heart hammered in my chest.

“Actually,” I whispered, my petrified throat scarcely able to make a sound, “it does.”

Twisting away from his hand, I leaped sideways, stumbled, then bolted downhill. If he was an abjuration sorcerer like the twins, then all his artifacts were built for demon combat. He wouldn’t have anything that could stop a human. All I had to do was reach the busy street and—