The Darkest Magic (A Book of Spirits and Thieves) by Morgan Rhodes Read Free Book Online

at all. It’s not a good look for you.”
    “My eyes were glowing?” Becca asked, her throat thick.
    “Like lightbulbs from hell.”
    The haze was gone, but something else had replaced it—an intense need to see the book again. To touch it, to hold it. It was like an itch that needed to be scratched.
    Julia hushed Crys and helped Becca into a nearby chair. She pushed the blond hair off of her daughter’s forehead and smiled at her.
    “Well, that was rather dramatic, wasn’t it?” Julia glanced over at Jackie. “What do you make of it?”
    Jackie just watched them, her expression troubled, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. “I wish like hell I knew.”
    “Perhaps we should ask Becca herself,” suggested Dr. Vega.
    “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Jackie replied.
    Becca glared at her. She couldn’t help it. She loathed when people talked about her—or worse, spoke
for
her—as if she weren’t even there.
    She’d only met Dr. Vega yesterday, but she liked him quite a lot. She knew how Crys felt about him—that he was abrupt, scatterbrained, and perhaps a little too eccentric—but Becca thought he was kind of funny. He wanted to learn much more about her experience with the book, but Jackie and Julia—
and
Crys—had told him she still needed some time to recover before he could grill her about it. She appreciated that Dr. Vega didn’t look at her like she was just a fifteen-year-old kid; the couple of times he’d talked to her so far, she’d felt respected. Like a peer.
    Then again, maybe it was more like a lab rat
. She thought of him slamming the Codex in the desk drawer just moments ago. Perhaps it was too soon to tell whose side Dr. Vega was on.
    “I do think it’s a good idea,” Becca said to Jackie. “I want to help if I can. The more you learn about that book, the better you’ll be able to figure out why it has these effects on me, right? And why it doesn’t seem to have any effect on anyone else.”
    “You are exactly right,” Dr. Vega said, giving her a toothy grin. He pushed his glasses up higher on his nose, then reached for a pen and notebook. “Excellent. Let’s begin.”
    Julia shook her head. “I don’t know. Are you sure you feel up to this, Becca?”
    Her mother was actually giving her a choice in the matter. That was new. And appreciated. “Yes. Seriously, Mom, I want to help.”
    Jackie and Julia shared a concerned look.
    “All right,” Julia said. “But promise you’ll stop if it gets to be too much, okay?”
    “Promise.” Becca shifted in her seat. “Where should I start, Dr. Vega? At the beginning, when my spirit left my body and went to another world? Or start from just a couple of minutes ago when that book turned me into a zombie?”
    Vega raised his bushy brows. “Is that what it felt like to you? That you were a zombie?”
    She thought back. “All I know is that I was upstairs in the library, reading, and then, suddenly, I was here. Like my legs were thinking for themselves. So
zombie
might be the wrong word, but . . . it also feels pretty accurate.” Becca paused, not sure if putting this strange experience into words made her feel more relieved or more nervous. She looked up at Crys. “You said my eyes were glowing?”
    “Yeah,” said Crys, and Becca was both surprised and grateful that she didn’t follow that up with a snarky joke this time.
    Dr. Vega scribbled something down in his notebook, then sent a cautious glance at Julia and Jackie, both of whom stared at Becca with a perturbed look in their eyes. “May we continue?” he said.
    Julia twisted her hands. “Yes. Please do. We all need to know more.”
    He nodded solemnly. “All right, Becca. I have previouslyhypothesized that this book is the gateway to another world. And from what little I know of your experience, you can confirm that. Yes?”
    “Well, yes”—Dr. Vega beamed—“and no.” And just like that, the doctor’s face fell again. Becca went on. “When I