Demonglass by Rachel Hawkins Read Free Book Online Page B

cabinet.”
    I followed her as she headed to the second floor. “Weird how?”
    “You’ll see. Okay, I was near the back, by the painting of some dude on a horse….”
    I could see where Jenna would have trouble remembering which shelf was which. Downstairs, the books had lined the walls, leaving the floor open. Up here, there were roughly thirty bookcases vying for space, some of them so close together I had to turn sideways just to pass between them.
    “Aha!” I heard Jenna exalt from somewhere to my left.
    I found her standing on tiptoes, scanning a shelf that was indeed next to a painting of a dude on a horse. I thought he looked awfully irritated for a guy in such a spiffy ermine cape.
    Jenna was wearing an equally annoyed expression. “It’s not here,” she said. “Maybe we should look downstairs again.”
    I bit back disappointment. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to see the book so badly. I already knew where I’d heard Thorne before, and why it was so important.
    Thorne was the last name of the woman whose spell had made Alice a demon. Who had, inadvertently I guess, made me a demon. There was no doubt in my mind that Alice had been one of those girls sent here during the Blitz, and that Thorne Abbey was where everything had started.
    Still, I wanted to see a picture of Alice here. Before she’d been changed.
    “Yeah,” I told Jenna. “We can look again later. It’s not that big a deal.”
    Jenna wasn’t an idiot. She’d known me long enough to know when I was lying. But she let it go and said, “Oh, check this out.”
    Shoved in the corner, just under Pissy Guy on a Horse, was a small black bookcase that only came up to my chest. It was covered in dust, and I saw immediately why Jenna had said it was weird. There was only one book on the shelf, but it was under a thick glass cube. Scratched into the glass were symbols I’d never seen before.
    “Try to open it,” Jenna said.
    There wasn’t any handle that I could see, so I curled my fingers around the edge of the glass, trying to see if it could be pried open.
    I immediately jerked my hand back. “Whoa.”
    “I know, right? That thing is covered in some serious mojo.”
    Serious mojo was an understatement. My fingers were burning. The sensation was similar to what I’d felt when I’d touched Archer’s chest and felt the mark of The Eye sear into my palm. “Whatever that book is, someone really didn’t want anyone to look at it.”
    “No, they didn’t.”
    Jenna and I both jumped and whirled around.
    My dad stood behind us, a small smile on his lips. His hands were clasped behind his back. “That book is the Thorne family’s grimoire. A spell book.”
    “I know what a grimoire is,” I said irritably, but he continued like I hadn’t spoken.
    “It contains some of the darkest magic ever known to Prodigium. The Council locked it up years ago.”
    “They were witches, then? The Thornes?”
    Dad ran a hand over the top of the cabinet. I flinched for him, but he didn’t even seem to feel the shock of magic. “They were,” he replied. “Dark witches, of course. Very powerful and very adept at concealing their true identity from humans.”
    “They’re the ones who made Alice a demon, right?”
    Jenna made a little surprised noise next to me, but Dad just studied me for a moment before saying, “Yes. And aren’t you clever for putting that together so quickly?”
    He sounded genuinely pleased, and a little surge of happiness went through me. Still, I said, “Jenna actually helped me figure it out. She read something about a bunch of girls being sent here during the Blitz, and I remembered Mrs. Casnoff saying that the lady who, uh, changed Alice was named Thorne. That’s why we were in here, actually. I was going to see if I could find Alice’s picture in one of the books Jenna was reading.”
    “If you want a picture of your great-grandmother during her time at Thorne, I have one. Why didn’t you just come ask me in the first