Sorceress by Claudia Gray Read Free Book Online

Scrivener—but had given this up as futile about half an hour before. Now she was just scanning each page, looking for any mention of the word demon .
    And there were lots.
    Lists of demons filled the pages, too many for Verlaine to have any reasonable guess as to which one of these (if any) Asa might be. (At least ten of the names started with the letters A-S . Didn’t narrow it down lots.) These demons were blamed for any number of weird events: blights on crops (whatever a blight was), sick livestock, sudden turns in the weather, that kind of thing. Verlaine would have written this off as the superstition of ye olden days if she hadn’t personally known a demon—though Asa didn’t seem interested in blighting anything.
    Still, there was no doubting that demons played a role in black magic, and Goodwife Hale had been very, veryinterested in how to stop them.
    “ The demon’s name has more power in hell than on earth, but even here it can be used against him ,” Verlaine read in a whisper, leaning forward as she traced the scrawled handwriting. Time had faded the ink to sepia brown, and deeply yellowed the page, but she could make it out. “ Mark him in the Word of God. Mark him in the words of the Craft. And Mark him in that which he himself possesses. Pierce these and the demon will perish, returning to hell forevermore. ”
    Mark him? Pierce these? The demon’s name?
    “What is any of that supposed to mean?” she asked her cat. Smuckers blinked up at her, then stuck one leg in the air and began to lick his privates. Verlaine sighed. “Helpful and classy. Way to go, Smuckers.”
    “Honey?” Uncle Dave called. “There’s a roll of slice-and-bake cookies in the fridge calling your name.”
    Verlaine loved cookies as much as the next right-thinking human being, but . . . “I’ve got homework!” This ought to count as an assignment, right? Analyzing “historical documents”? Maybe she could get extra credit.
    “I hear that, but you’re a seventeen-year-old girl, so if you bake cookies on a weeknight, you’re just being a normal kid. If I bake the cookies, as a supposed adult person, then I’m a pathetic slob with no self-control.”
    She laughed despite herself. “Okay, hang on, I’m coming.” Cookie emergencies couldn’t be ignored. It wasn’t like she could transcribe the entire Book of Shadows tonight anyway.
    But quickly Verlaine flipped open Mrs. Walsh’s spell book, because she could have sworn she’d seen something about “the demon’s true name” in there when she’d scanned it the first time. Where is it, where is it . . .
    There.
    With his name and with this you will conquer him. The words were written beneath a wickedly edged drawing of an ornate dagger. There was no explanation of what the dagger did, but—come on, it was a dagger. Pretty obvious what that was for.
    I couldn’t hurt Asa in any case, she thought. The relief that settled over her went deeper than she’d known it would be. That is definitely a very specific kind of dagger. Not just some knife at your local Walmart. So Asa’s safe, because I don’t have a dagger like that or any idea how to find one . . .
    Which was when she realized she’d seen a dagger exactly like that. It was the knife Mateo had taken from his grandmother’s house, the one with an intricate design set into the hilt.
    Just like in this drawing. Exactly like it.
    The tool to kill Asa was at hand, and it had been all along.
    “The same knife?” Nadia said the next day in gym class, as they waited for their turn on the leg-press machine. “Are you sure?”
    Verlaine gave her a look and breathed out sharply, blowing aside a lock of her silver-gray hair that had escaped from its PE bun. “What, based on my expert knowledge ofdemon-killing magical weapons? I don’t have any idea if it’s the same one. But—it looked like it to me. Do you still have the knife?”
    Nadia nodded. Mateo had promised to return it to his grandmother eventually,