Ethereal

31 - Creatura Damnati

In the peaceful afternoon, melted in Dominic's warm embrace, I settled for looking for my abuelita's maiden name amidst the sea of unfamiliar words and symbols in the Keeper journal. O'Cuinn. It shouldn't be too hard to spot.

If she was a descendant to witches (a startling revelation, but a likely one— given her homemade crema catalana was magical) then hopefully we'd find some trace of her mysterious family's origins in this occult census. A Keeper coven's recount of all magical beings of note in the last few centuries.

My life, I mused, had changed irreversibly over the past few weeks. It was a roller coaster I was just barely clinging on to.

The journal looked centuries old. Smelt it, too. I expected a cloud of dust to fly up if I so much as breathed too close to its crinkled pages. My friend Dylan — a history fanatic — would've loved to get his hands on it. If it didn't crumble to pieces beforehand.

The thought of him, and the reminder of the life I'd left behind, was like a stone dropped in the still lake of my thoughts— sending ripples of anxiety through my blood. I wondered what he was doing right now; if he was alright, if Harrison was alright, if Logan's hired babysitters had kept them safe like he'd promised they would.

"Do you know if my friends are okay?" I asked, drawing Dominic's attention.

His expression, at first lost to regal intrigue, became pinched with a deep understanding. "As far as I know, they're okay. Logan would've told you if anything happened to them."

I frowned, not quite convinced. "Would he?" I challenged helplessly. Or would he keep it from me to spare me the grief?

"He would," he assured me, certainty weaving like silk through his voice. "He knows better than anyone what it's like to be kept in the dark. He didn't find out what the rogues were doing to his family until it was too late to stop them. Trust me, he will not keep it from you if your friends get hurt. They are fine."

I nodded, returning my focus to the journal and allowing the ripples of worry to settle until at last my mind was quiet and content once more.

Pretty quickly, I realised my lack of knowledge regarding the language was a definite hurdle in my progress, and instead I studied the little drawings sketched onto a few pages. Deep black chalk depicted strange images, with exaggerated swipes instead of precise lines as though someone had gone over them way too many times— maybe in anger or frustration, or perhaps it was a more loving gesture.

Something about them drew me in, pulled my focus like a lighthouse in a storm, guiding me closer. There was something almost seeping from the drawings, as tendrils of smoke curling from a burnt-out bonfire. Countless flowers and their magical properties. A wild flame dancing above a hand. A particularly gruesome depiction of a gargoyle-like vampire draining a human. Definitely a caricature. Perhaps it was the knowledge that these drawings were hundreds of years old; a macabre story in a morbid little journal. An artefact of a bygone time.

Ever so gently, given I was scared any sort of pressure would turn the book to dust, I traced the harsh outline of the gargoyle creature.

"At least you don't look like this," I taunted lightly.

Dominic raised a sardonic brow even as his lips quirked up. "The bar is on the floor."

"The bar is six feet underground."

He groaned, his head tipping back. "Stop with the coffin references, I beg of you. I get it enough off everyone else."

"I don't think I will," I decided with a laugh.

On another page, a sketched gathering of caped men arranged themselves in a circle, with a giant fire in the centre, and shadowed figures crawled from the flames.