Poisons & Pages: A Library Witch Mystery Book 13 (Paperback)

My best friend was stuck in an enchanted sleep, and it was all my fault.

I turned the pages of the journal fervently, as though I might find a solution to all my problems nestled within its covers. 

My crow familiar, Jet, supervised from his perch on my shoulder. “Any luck, partner?” he asked for about the fiftieth time.

“Nope.” I’d made a habit of skimming through the book during breaks between visitors to the library, but translating the made-up code in which my dad had written the journal was somewhat difficult with an excitable crow bouncing around. “Do you want to go and help Estelle with the Halloween event planning?”

“She said she needed to make some calls alone, partner!”

“Ah.” 

Making phone calls would also be tricky with a talkative crow in the background, but I kind of wished my familiar would get a new hobby. Since my Aunt Candace had taken to spending every moment of her spare time trying to get into a secret room inside the equally secret, newly rediscovered fourth-floor corridor, she often forgot to ask Jet to bring her the latest gossip from the rest of town.

I couldn’t believe that over a month had passed since Aunt Candace cracked the code for the corridor’s secret door, but she still hadn’t managed to get inside. But my best friend, Laney, had fallen into a coma around that time, and I was still no closer to figuring out a solution. Living in a magical library with pretty much every book in existence should’ve helped point me in the right direction, but the library itself was a creation of my late grandmother, and she’d left us to uncover its secrets without a map—in a literal sense and a metaphorical one.

Jet bounced across the desk like a feathery ping-pong ball. “Do you want me to put the returns away?”

“No… leave it to me.” 

Jet was scarcely bigger than my hand, but that didn’t deter him from trying to lift huge textbooks and accidentally dropping them on the floor instead. 

“Or maybe ask Spark to help,” I said. “Is he around?”

I assumed Estelle didn’t want the excitable pixie butting in on her phone calls, either, but I hadn’t seen Spark all day.

“I think he’s with your Aunt Candace, partner.”

I groaned. “He isn’t, is he?”

“I saw them go upstairs together.” He fluttered anxiously. “Should I fetch him?”

“Sure—go ahead.”

He took off, while I opened the journal once again and tried to find the spot where I’d left off. Finding any answers in it was a long shot, I knew, but the journal had belonged to my dad, who’d been intertwined with the magical world far before I became aware of its existence myself. Working through the complex code in which my dad had written the entries had been a months-long endeavour, and I still had a long way to go before I reached the end, but I lived in the hope that he might have dropped a clue that would get me out of my current dilemma.

Now that summer and the back-to-school season were over with, the comparative lack of visitors to the library should’ve meant that I would have a bit more time, but certain family members of mine rarely got through the day without unleashing some disaster or other.

Soon enough, Aunt Candace sauntered over to the desk. “Did you send your familiar to badger me?”

“Only to make sure you didn’t turn Spark into a pencil.” 

Lean and willowy with wild, curly red hair, my aunt always looked as if she’d been interrupted in the middle of writing, which was usually true. Her mismatched flower-patterned skirt and blouse were bright enough that spotting the glittery purple pixie perched on her shoulder took me a moment.

“Now, why would I do that?” She wagged a finger at me. “I only borrowed him for this morning.”

“Estelle won’t like that.”

“Estelle is too busy to notice.” Her mouth tilted upward in amusement. “It’s nearly Halloween already, is it?”

“Yep.” We’d fallen behind on decorating, and while pumpkins certainly wouldn’t look out of place amid the library’s towering stacks and hidden corners, I wasn’t in a particularly celebratory mood. 

“Don’t look so morose,” Aunt Candace said. “Unless you’re practising to be a zombie for the party. Then that expression on your face is perfect.”

I made a noncommittal noise. If not for my desire to support my cousin, I’d kind of hoped to spend the night reading a book instead of going to the party myself. But leaving Estelle in charge of wrangling the guests wouldn’t be fair—not to mention Aunt Candace, who would no doubt unleash her own personal brand of chaos at the party.

“Or a Reaper,” she added with a snort of laughter. “I’d like to see the look on that Grim Reaper’s face if we all dress up as him. I wonder if the fancy dress shop has any scythes?”

“Please don’t.” 

The Grim Reaper had quite enough reasons to be annoyed at me without adding impersonation to the list. 

“Nor the vampires, either, before you make that suggestion,” I added.

Aunt Candace tipped her head to one side. “Are any of the vampires planning to attend the party?”

“I hope not.” Evangeline and her fellow vampires were decidedly on the wrong side of creepy, and they didn’t need to attend our parties when they held their own at the renovated old church that they’d made their home.

“I think you should invite them.” She grinned. “It’d be a riot.”

“Or a bloodbath.” I rubbed my temples. “Have you had any luck upstairs?”

“No, and don’t change the subject.”

“I’m not,” I replied, indicating the little pixie perched on her shoulder. “I want to know what you were doing with Spark.”

“Nothing.” A shrug. “I wondered if a nonhuman might be able to get through the door.”

I frowned. “What would give you that idea?”

“The riddle asked for my heart’s desire, but I contain far too many desires to be simplified in a single request.” She spoke with a dramatic flourish. “A simpler creature has simpler desires.”

“That’s not very kind of you.” I didn’t know how much English the pixie understood, but he didn’t seem bothered by her comment. “Simple or not, he’s not your guinea pig.”

Furthermore, a pixie was unlikely to succeed at getting through the door that had stumped my entire family. My aunt had needed a powerful translator spell to crack the code written on the door in the first place. The Spell Assistant, like the corridor itself, was one of Grandma’s own creations, but it had been stolen from the library years before and had found its way back into our hands only when one of the Founders’ would-be human recruits stole from them in turn. Yet even the Spell Assistant couldn’t help us figure out the actual meaning of the riddle. 

Speak your heart’s desire. We’d all tried, addressing the door with everything from petty requests to deeply buried ambitions—but none had worked. Aunt Candace alone persisted, while the rest of us had gone back to our everyday routines without expending too much energy on the corridor and its mysterious magic.

“Don’t be such a worrywart,” my aunt added. “You should be going out, having fun, not moping over a desk.” 

“I’ve never been a party animal. And someone has to watch the front door for visitors.” 

My Aunt Adelaide was upstairs in the alchemy division, Estelle was occupied with planning the Halloween event, and Cass—I didn’t know what Cass was doing, except that it probably involved dangerous magical creatures. 

“Anyway, I’d have thought you’d want to help Aunt Adelaide hunt down details of rare poisons. Isn’t that more of a worthwhile exercise than poking a door that doesn’t want to open?”

“You would say that,” she said. “You have a vested interest in the subject.”

“Can you blame me?” Given her usual interest in anything weird or dangerous, I’d hoped her own interests would line up with Aunt Adelaide’s quest to research vampire-killing poisons, but apparently not. “I’d have thought you’d be first in line to try out the recipe.” 

Under normal circumstances, handing my aunt Candace the means of brewing a deadly poison was a recipe for disaster, pun intended, but this particular brew was complex enough that she’d soon lost interest in figuring out the ingredients and had gone back up to the fourth floor instead—no matter that a poison that could stop a vampire’s heart would have also been useful in our ongoing struggle against the Founders. She’d replied that she was a writer and not an alchemist, and that was that.

“Ask the vampires instead,” she said. “When did you last speak to Evangeline?”

“Last week, and I don’t want to bother her.” I was constantly struggling not to check up on Evangeline’s own research into possible cures for the poison more frequently, but pestering a centuries-old vampire was a spectacular way to end up locked in a coffin.

Aunt Candace scoffed. “I bet she has all the answers hidden inside that pretty head of hers. Vampires are hoarders of knowledge.”

“If she knew of a cure, she wouldn’t have kept it from me.” I hope. The poison that had put Laney to sleep was rare enough that the sole recipe in existence was only available as an untranslated scribble on an ancient piece of parchment, which suggested that any existing cure was likely to be equally hard to access, even for a vampire as ancient and knowledgeable as Evangeline.

Despite her dire state, Laney had been incredibly lucky. At a higher dose, the poison was capable of stopping even a vampire’s undead heart. Yet that didn’t stop my sense of guilt from her ingesting the poison while preventing one of the Founders’ vampires from clawing my face off. The others had told me over and over not to blame myself, but the fact was that she’d been in that situation only because of me.

“If Evangeline doesn’t know, one of her other fanged friends will.” A wicked smile curved her mouth. “Just give me the word, and I’ll offer her an invitation to the party. It won’t be that hard to spike her drink with truth potion.”

“Aunt Candace.” Horror washed over me. “Evangeline can read minds. She won’t be fooled by a simple ruse. Also, I’m not sure truth potions even work on vampires.”

“Some do.” She burst out laughing. “Your face, Rory. The idea of going and asking her in person doesn’t seem that bad now, does it?”

“You were trying to goad me into paying the vampires a visit?” It’d almost worked too. Except… “Can truth potions work on vampires? I mean, if there’s a poison that can affect them, they aren’t immune to all potions.”

“No.” A thoughtful expression came over her. “I wonder if those alchemical tomes might tell me more.”

“That’s right, go and help Aunt Adelaide.” I wasn’t sure my other aunt would appreciate her assistance, but that would be an improvement on her skulking around the fourth-floor corridor and using Estelle’s pixie sidekick as an unwitting target on which to test her theories on how to open the sealed door.

“If I brew one of those potions, we’ll need a lab rat,” she said as though she’d picked up on my line of thought. 

My shoulders tensed. “What, Laney?” 

“No, of course not.” Aunt Candace jabbed a finger at the carpeted floor. “Our sleepy friend in the basement.”

“He’s been asleep for decades.” 

That was possibly a result of the very same poison, but he certainly hadn’t consented to her testing more potions on him. My aunts didn’t even know the sleeping vampire’s name, though he was known among our family as Albert. “Have you ever tried to wake him up before?”

“Of course. I’ve used every spell and potion that I know of, but without any luck.” A sigh passed her lips. “I spent many weeks down there as a youth. I hoped that we might have a passionate affair when he awakened, but it was not to be.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m sure Albert will be thrilled to learn you’ve been ogling him when he eventually wakes up. Do you think he was affected by the same poison as Laney?”

The Founders normally gave the poison to their recruits with instructions to use it on themselves if they were captured by the enemy, but the vampire in the basement had been there since my grandmother’s day. I wondered if she’d been the one who’d poisoned him or someone else. I was only guessing that he’d been a recipient of the same poison at all, but very few methods exist for incapacitating a vampire, much less putting one to sleep for decades or longer.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Aunt Candace said. “If my mother went to the trouble of obtaining the ingredients to brew a poison that rare, you’d think she’d have left us a sample, but I haven’t found one.”

“You didn’t ask the sealed door for that… did you?” Of course she did. 

While that would admittedly be a simpler option than brewing the poison ourselves, nothing in our lives was ever as simple as it seemed, even a door that cryptically declared it could grant our heart’s desires. 

“If you want the poison that badly, why not follow the recipe yourself?” she asked. “I see the merits of loading up a water gun with the poison and taking aim at the Founders from a safe distance.”

“If the ingredients are as rare as you say, it won’t be that easy.” I’d been studying magic for less than a year, and advanced potions were far beyond my current level. “More people would have discovered the poison if it’d been easy to brew. I wonder why the Founders created a poison capable of killing their fellow vampires at all.”

“To deal with anyone who might give away their secrets, I would guess,” Aunt Candace said. “I can think of a thousand possible reasons. Some of them are going into my next book.”

“Please don’t get killed by the Founders for putting their secrets in writing.”

“It’s fiction, Rory. You can write anything, and nobody will believe it.” And on that note, she skipped away, the pixie still riding her shoulder.

“Honestly.” I shook my head. “Well, I can hardly tick off the Founders more than I already have.”

Since I’d moved into the library the past winter, I’d encountered the group of knowledge-seeking vampires more times than I’d wanted to, and once had been bad enough. First, they tried to steal my dad’s journal and got me fired from my former job at my dad’s old bookshop in the process. My family members swooped in to rescue me from the Founders’ pursuit and swept me away into their magical library, but the vampires had been a recurring blot on my time in the magical world.

“Partner?” Jet hopped onto my shoulder again. “Should I follow her?”

“Go ahead,” I told my familiar. “Make sure she doesn’t bother Aunt Adelaide too much, okay?”

As he launched into flight, I returned my attention to the journal. Thanks to the slow translation process, I was currently mired in the middle of a series of entries on my dad’s attempts to find an old book of spells, a rare first edition of some kind. He’d had an uncanny knack for fixating on books that were also wanted by the vampiric collectors of rare tomes, but in fairness, the Founders seemed to want every rare book, whether its subject matter concerned the vampires or not. 

That included the journal itself, which had been written in code both to keep the Founders at bay and to keep from exposing the magical world to me or to my mother. My mum had been a normal, and there were strict rules against bringing nonmagical people into this world. As a result, I’d grown up on the outside. Knowing I’d been a toddler when these diary entries were being written didn’t stop the faint pang of regret that stirred when I read any mention of my family members in the journal.

I spoke to my sisters, and they mentioned one of Mother’s inventions went missing recently, I read. I have to admit I forgot it was still in the library. It’ll come in handy if anyone ever needs to read this.

I wondered if he was talking about the Spell Assistant. A note was scribbled in the margins, added to a later date, and I hastened to turn the page sideways to properly read the words.

It never did show up, Dad’s note read. Strange. Adelaide thinks Candace broke it and won’t admit to anything, but I have a hard time believing any creation of Mother’s could be easily broken. She always understood that the most powerful spells are those which concern the magic of possibility…

Sylvester came swooping down to land behind me and cut off my concentration. “Why the long face?”

“Sylvester, do you remember when the Spell Assistant went missing?” I asked the owl.

“What kind of question is that? I know everything.”

“You do remember.” I jabbed a finger at the page. “According to this, my aunts thought the Spell Assistant had been left in a spare room and didn’t realize it was missing for years. Did you look for it at all?”

“That’s not my job,” he said petulantly. “I can’t be expected to keep track of every corner of this place.”

“You are this place. Technically speaking.” I spoke in a low voice, though nobody was close enough to overhear. 

In response, Sylvester let out a screech that made my ears throb with pain. 

“What is going on?” Aunt Adelaide came walking over, looking mildly frazzled. “Your Aunt Candace has decided to remove half the books in the alchemy section. I was going to consult those.” 

“Sorry, that’s my fault,” I said. “I was trying to distract her from using poor Spark the pixie to test out new ideas on how to get through that door.”

“Oh, your aunt hardly needs an excuse to cause mischief.” She tutted. “Sylvester, can you help me carry these books upstairs?”

“Certainly not,” he said. “I don’t have hands.”

“You have feet, and you’re just being awkward.”

The owl made a rude noise. “Everyone is so argumentative today. I went to see the vampire girl, and you would’ve thought I’d put a dead mouse in her bed from the way certain people reacted.”

My attention snapped over to him. “You visited Laney?”

“I thought that if I recited poetry, it might wake her up.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or scold him. “Wait, who argued with you? Laney is…” Asleep. That meant someone else was in her room. 

Aunt Adelaide stepped in. “I can take over the desk, Rory, if you want to check up on her.”

From her tone, I didn’t know whether she meant Laney or Cass. My other cousin had taken to watching over Laney voluntarily for reasons I hadn’t figured out. I hadn’t realised Cass was up there today and not on the third floor with her animals. I didn’t think she would be any more pleased to see me than she’d been to see Sylvester, but at least I had no intention of reciting poetry at either of them.

“Thanks.” I left my aunt arguing with the owl and crossed the lobby to the corridor that led to our family’s living quarters.

From there, I climbed the winding staircase to the first floor, where my room and Estelle’s were located as well as the guest room that Laney had claimed as her own. I slowed my pace when I reached the room, whose door lay partly open. 

Taking a deep breath, I entered. When Cass rose upright from her seat beside Laney’s bed, I froze, unable to look directly at my best friend’s still body. Since vampires didn’t need to breathe, she might as well have been a corpse.

“Sorry.” I stumbled back into the doorway. “Didn’t mean to interrupt. Sylvester mentioned he was in here tormenting you…”

“Relax.” Cass turned back to Laney. “I’m not going to bite your head off. I already did that to the owl.”

“I figured,” I said. “I don’t know if he thought he was helping or just trying to be annoying.”

“More like he was irritated at me for asking the Book of Questions to give us an antidote.”

I raised an eyebrow. “How many times have you asked now?”

“I’ve tried at least a dozen versions of the same question,” she replied. “He said the library doesn’t contain that information. That doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist.”

“Right…” My gaze caught on the book half open on Cass’s lap, but she pointedly put it aside before I could glimpse the title. “How is she?”

“There’s no change,” she told me. “Unless Aunt Candace has decided to start experimenting with cures?”

“No… Well, she’s up in the alchemy section, but she’s more interested in figuring out which other potions work on vampires. Like truth potions.”

Her brow arched. “I hope she doesn’t plan on testing them on anyone.”

“Except for the vampire in the basement, no.” I drew in a breath. “She also suggested that Evangeline isn’t being entirely honest with us about her own knowledge on the subject.”

Cass snorted. “Obviously. Evangeline’s a centuries-old vampire. Deceit is hardwired into her.”

“I guess.” My throat closed up when I caught sight of Laney’s expressionless face out of the corner of my eye. Any hopes of curing her rested amongst her fellow undead, and only one place had the slightest chance of providing that knowledge.

“Go on,” she said. “One of us has to go and ask more questions, and you’re more diplomatic than I am.”

“Diplomatic?” I echoed. “Is that the most important trait I need to deal with Evangeline?”

“Better than Aunt Candace’s approach.”

“True.”

Aunt Candace had nearly landed herself in trouble by interrogating the vampires in a much less subtle manner than I was capable of. “I’ll see what the others say.”

I forced myself to take one last look at Laney before I left the room. Cass was far stronger than I was, to spend so much time in here without breaking down, but she at least hadn’t been responsible for Laney’s current state. She also didn’t blame me for it, for a wonder.

When I walked downstairs, Estelle was waiting for me in the living room. “No change?”

“No.” I buried my hands in my pockets. “No, and I think we’re only going to get anywhere if we’re willing to look outside of the library. It’s been a while since I last spoke to Evangeline and asked for an update.”

Estelle blanched. “Only because she actually would bite your head off if you asked too many questions.”

“She’s the one with the contacts, though.” 

Even my dad hadn’t been on friendly terms with the Founders—and for all Evangeline’s claims that she wasn’t one of them, she’d lived for hundreds of years and had been acquainted with the other vampires even since long before my grandmother’s day. 

“I don’t know. It was just an idea,” I said. “How’s the Halloween planning going?”

“I’m taking a break. Still no visitors?”

“Nope.” I walked with her to the desk, where her mother sat thumbing through the record book. 

Sylvester had vanished, probably to sulk, unless she’d managed to convince him to carry the books upstairs after all. “Hey, Aunt Adelaide… do you think I should pay Evangeline another visit? Aunt Candace suggested she was withholding information on curing Laney.”

“I wouldn’t advise you to take my sister up on any of her suggestions, Rory.”

“No, but… well, I haven’t spoken to them for a while,” I said. “Evangeline doesn’t seem to pay visits to the library anymore either.”

Ancient vampires showing up on the doorstep and hovering around looking creepy wasn’t necessarily good for business, but it probably said something about her level of faith in our own progress that she hadn’t come to ask us whether we’d had any breakthroughs of our own. 

Estelle glanced at her mother. “If you want to go, I’ll come with you. Jet too.”

Aunt Adelaide exhaled in a sigh. “If you’re sure, but please be careful.”