“I did all this in five hours?” I ask, surprised by how thorough the note-taking is, when usually I hit only the highlights and rely on my really good memory （present situation obviously not included） to fill in the blanks.
“Actually, you did all that in an hour and a half. At one thirty, I closed the library for a few minutes and ran out to my cottage to get some medicine for a sudden headache. You said you were doing well, so I left you working, but when I came back, you were gone. And the Athame of Morrigan had been stolen.”
Horror moves through me as all the threads of the story start to come together in one glaring realization. “You think I did this?” I ask. “You think I stole the…” I wave my hand in the air.
“Athame,” Macy fills in. “It’s a double-sided ceremonial blade for witches. This particular one has been in our family for centuries.”
I want to be outraged that they think I could do this. But the truth is, they have every right to suspect me. Especially since I have absolutely no idea what I was doing during the time Amka left the library.
“We don’t think you stole it,” Uncle Finn tells me in a voice I recognize as deliberately soothing. “But we do think something is going on inside you that makes you do these things, and that’s what we want to try to figure out so we can help you.”
“Do we really know?” I ask, my voice coming out higher and louder than I want it to. “I mean, are you sure I’m the one who did this?” It’s not even that I doubt them, it’s just that I don’t want to believe them. Because then I have to start wondering. What kind of powers does this gargoyle inside me have? And why is it using me to do these terrible things?
Jaxon wraps a supportive arm around my waist, then rests his chin on my shoulder as he whispers in my ear, “It’s okay. We’ve got this.”
I’m glad he thinks so, because right now, it doesn’t feel like I’ve got anything.
“That’s why we wanted you to come here, so we could all rewatch the footage together. See if we can figure out what’s really going on.” My uncle walks behind the circulation desk.
“Nobody blames you, Grace,” Macy says with a reassuring smile. “We know something else is going on.”
My knees get weak at theirs words—there’s footage?—and at the grim look on my uncle’s face. Because if they’ve seen the footage already, then they know for sure that I’m the one who stole the athame.
The knowledge hits me like a body blow.
I know it’s naive, but I think I’ve been holding out hope all day. Hope that there was another explanation for the blood on my clothes this morning. Definite hope that someone else attacked Cole, and now hope that someone else stole the athame.
Because knowing that it’s me, knowing that I did all that and have no recollection of it whatsoever, is beyond terrifying. Not just that I can’t remember but that I really don’t have any control over what I do when I’m like that.
I could actually kill someone, and I would never know.
Panic starts to bubble up in my chest, my breath coming out in shallow puffs. I count to ten…then twenty. My heart is beating so fast, I start to feel light-headed. I don’t take my gaze from my uncle as he fiddles with the computer on the circulation desk and then turns the monitor around to face me.
“It’s okay,” Jaxon says again, even though it’s not. Even though it’s about as far from okay as it can possibly get. “I promise you, Grace, we’ll figure this out.”
“I hope so,” I answer as we all crowd around Uncle Finn to watch the video footage. “Because how long can this go on before I end up in prison…or worse?”
My stomach sinks as I watch a recording of me on the screen—doing things I don’t remember doing.
According to the time at the bottom of the footage, I got up from the table where I was reading and taking notes at exactly one thirty. I went over to Amka and said something to her. She nodded with a strange look on her face, and less than a minute later, she got up. But instead of leaving, like she’d said earlier, she walked over to the glass case housing the athame and several other precious magical items, all of which, it turns out, were under a protection spell, my uncle explains.
And at 1:37, the librarian went ahead and opened the case like it was nothing. Then she walked out of the library and didn’t come back.
“What just happened?” I ask, looking from Jaxon to Amka to my uncle and then back again. “Did I use some kind of special gargoyle power?”