“Neither do I,” I tell Phillip. “What’s the purpose of this book?”
“It’s called…” Phillip flips it over to show the front, “The Book of the Dead.”
Now there are symbols on the cover, glowing in a faint, dull blue.
Eleira shakes her head. “No,” she says. “No. This is wrong. No. We shouldn’t be looking at this. No. This isn’t ours.”
“Eleira.” I look at her in concern. “Don’t worry. It’s just me, you, and Phillip. He found it in my library. There’s nothing wrong with—”
“No,” she cuts me off. She backs away until her shoulders hit the wall. “No, no, no,” she keeps repeating.
I glare at Phillip. “What’s wrong with her?”
Eleira keeps going on. “No, no, no…”
“I don’t know,” Phillip admits. He spreads his hands helplessly.
“Is it the book? Is it affecting her?” I demand. “It’s doing something to her, isn’t it?”
The glow on the cover is getting stronger. I rush to Eleira and hold her by the shoulders. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
But she just keeps muttering the same word. “No, no, no, no.” She shields herself against me.
I throw my arms around her body. “I’m here. I promise. Just tell me what’s wrong!” Again I glare at Phillip. “Get that book out of here!”
“NO!” Eleira screams and suddenly a violent blue light explodes from within the pages. It knocks me back, it knocks Phillip back. It knocks everything in the room back, except for… Eleira.
She is standing upright, her eyes fixed straight ahead but unseeing. Her hair is being blown away from her by a wind that’s started gusting from the pages of the book. The whole room is enveloped in that blue light.
Eleira steps forward. I try to move—and find myself unable to. None of my muscles respond.
And yet it’s not like I’m locked in place. Rather, it feels like my mind has started to operate at hyper-speed, watching, seeing, processing everything. Yet the physical restraints of the world prevent my body from keeping up.
Or maybe time has crawled to a standstill, and the only thing operating at proper speed is my brain.
I see Phillip. He’s frozen, too.
Eleira, however, approaches the ghastly book with ease.
She starts to mutter something in a horrible language. The room pulses with violent energy. Her inclination grows louder. The voice is not her own. I fight against the light pushing me down, but I’m like an insect caught beneath a panel of glass. I feel like a specimen on display in a museum—forever watching, forever unable to affect my surroundings.
Eleira reaches the table. Her voice takes on a truly terrible bass. The pages of the book flap this way and that. All the energy inside is escaping and feeding into the blue light. It pulses in time with the cadence of Eleira’s speech.
A dim shape, thick as ink and dark as the deepest night, starts to rise out from the midst of the book.
No! I want to scream.
I push against the force holding me down. Panic takes over when I realize that strength is still not enough. I cannot move. I’m trapped, and all I can do is watch as Eleira draws that malevolent black shape out of the book.
The room’s temperature quickly drops. Eleira keep chanting. The shape continues to grow. It’s the size of a rat, now, and I can already see its body taking form, the hideous lines, the misshaped head, the crooked torso—
Suddenly the main doors fly open. Morgan is standing there, staff in hand. She takes one look at what is happening and steps into the blue light.
Somehow she’s able to penetrate the force field. Her lips move, yet I cannot hear what she says. But I feel the power of her words as they clash against Eleira’s chant in the air.
Eleira snarls at my Mother. Such a viciousness contorts Eleira’s face that it frightens even me. She draws her lips back and shows her fangs. Her eyes have gone almost completely black—nothing like the eyes of the girl I love. Her cheeks look hollow, gaunt, as if she is undernourished.
Eleira’s incantation grows louder. She screams the words at Morgan.
But Mother’s focus is all on the creature rising from the book. She deflects Eleira’s words and points her staff at the black shape. The blue light draws inward, like a deflating dome. It seems to be flowing into Mother’s staff, and yet…
And yet Eleira is doing everything she can to stop it.
Eleira grips the edge of the table. Her claws have come out. They carve deep marks in the wood. Her entire body is tense and sinewy. The foul words continue spewing from her lips, challenging Mother’s.
A blast of white explodes from the tip of Morgan’s staff. A beam of the stuff, almost like fire, scorches across the room and collides with the awful black shape.