Burned

Chapter Thirty-One

It had been a week since we first made progress on translating. A lot of things happened last week. Kate and I, with the help of the others, almost fully translated the spell. There was maybe another line or two that we needed to translate, but other than that it was finished. We could easily finish it today, then we were all set.

I hadn't realized how much time I had been spending with Kate. It wasn't until Daniel said something that I saw he was right. I had spent almost every day with her as we spent countless hours translating. I know he missed me, but once we were finished we could break the Curse. That would mean more to him than us hanging out more than once a week.

Breaking the Curse plagued my mind. It was all I ever thought about. My mind was constantly translating, stuck on a loop. The language was unique and unlike anything I had ever seen. It was a tricky language and one that was constantly adapting to the world around it. The language changed -- daily. It made it difficult to fully express to Kate, but by day four we had figured it out.

The Dark Language was like the moon. It changed every day depending on its orbit. After we made the correlation, we checked The Moon phase and sure enough, T.D.L was linked to Tthe Moon. It was amazing! I wanted to meet the person who created such a brillant language. It was poetic almost that the language orbited around the Earth, mimicking The Moon.

It was connected to the Earth and Moon. It was like Samuel had written in his spell, he had to call on nature for balance. It was the opposite of what Sarah Good had done. For obvious reasons, the Curse needed to be broken. The more I translated the more I respected T.D.L. Of course, Phantom didn't like this. I think he would have preferred we not translate it at all. He didn't understand.

"Speak of the Devil," I muttered under my breath as Phantom pushed open my bedroom door. I was about to leave for class, but I had a few minutes to talk with him. He rubbed up against my leg, purring.

"Your thoughts are loud today," he commented.

"And yours are full of paranoia and unreasonable caution," I retorted coyly. He chuckled, somewhat amused with me.

"Unreasonable caution isn't a thing -- you made it up." He pounced forward, catching a fly easily. I grabbed a broach that had been Gran's off my vanity and pinned it to my black blazer. It was a quarter-sized lime-green beetle. It had been one of Gran's favorites. It looked good against the dark blazer. "Anyways, yes I came to warn you. Before you groan and sigh," he narrowed his orange eyes at me. "Just so you know warning you is apart of my job as a Familiar." I put up my hands defensively.

"Okay," I groaned.

"I am weary of your Aunt Dolores." His statement was laughable.

"Phantom, come on! Dolls? She's--

"Suspicious," he answered for me.

"Why do you think that?" I crossed my arms over my chest. Phantom relied on his gut and intuition but never had actual proof to why he felt a certain way.

"I've heard some of her phone calls and she disappears for large portions of the day. Let's not forget the murders started when she arrived." He was insistent.

I sighed.

"That's not reason enough to say she's suspicious," I replied flatly. I liked Dolls and wanted her to stay. I wasn't going to act weird (okay, weirder) around her. She was my aunt and one of the last remaining family members I had. I wanted to keep them around, not shoo them away because my paranoid cat told me. He wasn't being reasonable.

"I beg of you to listen," he hissed as I tried to leave.

"Let's talk later, I have to go or I'll be late." The word "late" had little to no meaning to me. It was a word I had used so much, it barely sounded like a word anymore. His eyes were dilated and for a split second, I thought he was going to pounce on me. He didn't. Instead, he chose to pout. He sauntered out of my room and disappeared into smoke down the hallway.