II.
On the flight to London, Kylie had stayed awake all night long, sandwiched in between a large snoring man beside her on her right and a dead-to-the-world eleven-year-old on his way to visit his father in London on her left, doing her best to ignore them both. She’d appropriated a pair of gloves from the library so that The Book of the Raven wouldn’t burn her hands as she finished reading it. Inside were the principles of the book.
Language was everything. Trust was for fools. Love came and went. Words could be stolen.
The text gave off a faint orange glow and there was the stink of sulfur, but everyone on the flight was asleep and no one paid any attention to the tall young woman with a wash of red in her hair who was so engaged in her book she didn’t notice when there was turbulence halfway across the Atlantic. No one knew who Kylie was or what she’d been through. She had left the person she cared about most in the world in a deep coma at Mass General, where the doctors were concerned he might never be roused, and, if he was, whether or not the damage he’d sustained might be irreversible.
Images of Gideon on that afternoon in the Cambridge Common continued to surface, how alive he was, how carefree, other than his worries about an exam he was certain to pass. All Kylie could do was try her best to concentrate on the book. Nothing else mattered other than lifting the curse. The prose was written on thin pages of vellum, bound in black calfskin that had been tied together with knotted black thread. It contained fewer than a hundred pages, but was difficult to read; parts had been written in Italian, and some of the script disappeared as it was being read, vanishing from the page as if washed clean before her eyes. This was literary magic, written by Amelia Bassano, who had studied astrology with a great master, and the conjurations and charms she had known were so powerful they flared in the dark and could be read by the light of their meaning alone. Kylie had taken a class in conversational Italian, but she was far from fluent and so she’d bought a phrase book at the airport bookstore to help her decipher sections of the text, not as helpful as she’d wished, for it appeared an archaic version of that language had been used.
The book advised the practitioner on the practical uses of what the author referred to as magia nera, black magic. How to call up maladies to befall one’s enemies, how to force a liar to tell the truth, how to conjure demons that would haunt men’s daily lives as well as their dreams, how to bring a rain of destruction down from the sky.
Know what you want, and be sure of it, for regret gives birth to more regret and nothing more.
The light that emanated from the writing caused the flight attendant to rush over to see if the flickering was created by a lit cigarette, but Kylie had quickly covered the book with a napkin, and the flight attendant, who then assumed she must have imagined the wavering yellow flare due to her own exhaustion, apologized for disturbing her.
* * *
Once she’d arrived in London, Kylie found a small, shabby hotel in Bayswater. The bedsheets were grimy, and the bathroom was down the hall. “We plan on sprucing up,” the desk clerk told her, as if she cared. She felt a million miles from home, alone in a world to which she didn’t belong. Kylie took a few bites from one of the packaged sandwiches she’d bought in a quick mart at Heathrow, but it was stale and she had no appetite. She had to hurry and she knew it. She didn’t take a shower or change her clothes. The longer it took to discover a way to end the curse, the more likely she was to lose Gideon. According to The Book of the Raven, her first act should be to create the sign of the pentacle of Solomon to summon the spirit of Hecate, goddess of the crossroads and of sorcery. If she did so, she would discover the direction in which she would find the knowledge she needed.
Kylie lifted the fringed throw rug and used a black felt pen to sketch a pentacle on the scuffed wooden floor. She burned sage and sandalwood in the metal dustbin, herbs her aunts had given to her to smudge her dorm room. “Never be without these,” her aunt Jet had advised, but Kylie had stuffed the herbs into a drawer, remembering them only when she stopped at Dunster House on her way to the airport to toss her passport and a change of clothes into her backpack. Now as the pungent smoke arose in the dingy hotel room, she stood in the center of the circle that was intended to unite the four sections of the world and the four elements. She would do whatever she must to follow the instructions set down in The Book of the Raven, although she worried about her abilities. She had few skills, other than spying auras and telling what the weather would bring, and no reference for magic—her mother had seen to that. Surprisingly, that had begun to change. Ever since she’d opened the first page of The Book of the Raven she could see what was previously unseen; she could feel what she’d never felt before. She could view the edges of the future, which caused a strange double vision. It was the sight, the inherited ability to see what was to come, a skill that had been repressed and rejected by her mother, a talent Kylie now welcomed.