The Familiars by Adam Jay Epstein Read Free Book Online

Jack.”
    Moments later, Jack’s breathing became heavy. The boy had fallen into a peaceful slumber.
     
    Aldwyn tried to get comfortable, but unlike the first night, when he’d been too exhausted to care where he slept, tonight he simply couldn’t fall asleep with a roof over his head. He decided he needed a breath of fresh air and tip-toed to the hallway. As he passed Dalton’s neighboring room, he could see through the crack in the door that the boy was still awake, studying a scroll by candlelight.
    Entering the living room, he spotted a window that had been left open and quickly made his waytoward it, passing the hammocks strung up in front of the fireplace. The room was much darker now, since the lightning bugs had gone to sleep in their hive. Hopping up onto a large oak table, Aldwyn paused to look at a framed painting of what appeared to be Kalstaff in his younger years, accompanied by another man wearing a robe just like Kalstaff’s and a beautiful, imperial-looking woman in a long white dress. He recognized her as a younger Queen Loranella—there was a statue of her in front of Bridgetower’s courthouse that Aldwyn used to sleep beneath on hot summer afternoons. The wizards were joined by what had to be their familiars: Kalstaff’s bloodhound, the wizard’s turtle, and the queen’s gray rabbit. Aldwyn continued along the table, past an enchanted quill pen that was busily copying Kalstaff’s lesson plans for the next day, before bounding out the window.
    He immediately looked for the easiest path to the roof and spotted an orange tree whose branches brushed up against the clay shingles atop the cottage. As Aldwyn walked swiftly across the yard, he noticed that one of the spelllibrary’s windows was open. He didn’t think much of it until he saw Skylar exit with a small leather-bound book gripped in her talons. He ducked out of sight as Skylar pushed the sill shut with her beak before flapping off into the woods. Aldwyn found her actions curious and decided to follow her.
    He stepped quietly through the dense underbrush at the edge of the woods until he arrived at a clearing. Fallen leaves of orange and green carpeted the ground, and at the center, Skylar was perched upon a tree stump, the borrowed—or was it stolen?—book open before her. Aldwyn hid in the darkness, peering through a narrow gap between two massive oaks. Skylar flipped the pages of the book with her wing, looking purposefully for a passage of interest. Then she seemed to have found it. Aldwyn watched with growing curiosity as she plucked the carcass of a large beetle from her satchel and placed it beside her on the stump. Her eyes sped across the page of the book, and then her clawed foot dove back into the satchel, removing a talonful of silver powder. She sprinkled some down onto the beetle carcass andread aloud from the tome.
    “ Mortis animatum !”

    Aldwyn felt a chill tickle his ear, almost as if the air were whispering to him. Then, on the tree stump, the beetle’s legs began to twitch. Aldwyn was quite certain the beetle had been dead just moments ago, so how could it be moving now? Skylar looked like she expected something more to happen. When it didn’t, she buried her beak back into the spell book, and as she read, a gust of wind blew some of the leaves up off the ground, exposing what lay beneath them: a scattering of elk bones, left behind by forest-dwelling wolves.The same breeze sent the excess powder from the stump sprinkling down onto the gnawed skeletal remains. Skylar, still searching the text, failed to notice the bones of the great elk starting to reassemble themselves behind her. Aldwyn watched aghast and fascinated as the jigsaw puzzle of hooves and antlers pieced itself together, one cracked bone at a time. What kind of dark magic was Skylar dabbling in? Finally, she looked up, just in time to see the skeletal elk reborn. She seemed terrified and at the same time thrilled by what she had accidentally brought