ArcKnight (The ArcKnight Chronicles #1)

Chapter Thirty-two

Ephrem

Langley shoved a stack of books toward me. They were old and smelled of the must of centuries. Everything I wanted to know about the KelHan pack was contained within these stacks. Langley warned me I might not want to know what was in there. That some things were meant to be buried forever. I gave the old man a curt nod, noting his beady eyes, filled with more knowledge than any man should ever possess. His warning had not been given lightly, and I thanked him for his concern.

It had everything to do with my fiancé, Lily. For her, it was worth shaking out the skeletons, even when it involved a centuries-old curse.

Settling down at one of the desks, I flipped through the delicate papers. The archives were vast, dark and reeked of old leather. Langley practically lived there, biding his time documenting the current events and organizing the ancient ones.

"I found another one." Langley approached the desk with another book of bound papers. The pages were uneven and had been woven into the book seemingly at random. It was thinner than the other massive volumes he'd given me earlier.

"I appreciate this, really. Is there any way you'd happen to know anything about a KelHan shifter named Grayson?"

Langley rubbed his white beard thoughtfully. He could play Santa Claus each winter if he wanted to, but I doubted he'd ever thought of taking such a job.

"I think this is the volume you need to read the most carefully. It has family trees as recent as this century, sketches of the leaders of the KelHan pack and details about the prophecy they used to claim would one day save them." A long, aged finger reached out of his long robe and tapped the volume he'd just brought.

"Thank you again, Langley. This helps a lot." I grabbed the volume and flipped to the first page. Langley was already gone before I looked back up, and I wondered if he'd even heard me thank him. It didn't matter; I had what I needed. I just needed to narrow it down even more.

The first page was a decorated family tree. I followed the tree to Grayson KelHan's branch. It indicated he'd never married but had remained celibate for centuries. Impressed, I followed the lines that listed his parents, who were now deceased, having died shortly after their banishment. Grayson had a sister, but her whereabouts were unknown, for she had disappeared shortly after leaving the MarkTier stronghold.

Flipping through the following pages quickly became tedious. There were extended branches of more families than I could ever count in the KelHan pack. If MarkTier was big now, it had been quadruple it's current size when the KelHans were part of the pack. How had such a great pack disappeared off the face of the earth? How was it that Grayson had been born in the 1600s and was still alive?

They were immortal. The rumors about the curse allowing them to live were true. If Grayson was really four hundred years old, where were the rest of them?

A feeling of doom filled my gut as I passed the next section: a list of known dead in the KelHan pack. There were almost as many names there as in the pages of all the lineages. It was heartbreaking to find that there were less than a hundred left of them at the last census, which had been taken at the turn of the century.

What had killed them off? It had been a slow but unrelenting extinction. Had the curse driven them to their deaths? Had it involved some sort of disease that could wither them into dust? It had something to do with their gargoyle abilities. It had to.

"Do you remember the hall of statues?"

I looked up from the book and watched as Langley walked past me and plucked another volume from a wall of bookshelves. I'd need a very tall ladder to reach the top of that stack.