The Hidden Grimoire by Karla Brandenburg (pride and prejudice read TXT) 📕

to follow her through the kitchen to the utility room. The steel coal chute door, built into the brick exterior wall, had been sealed shut. Now, a washing machine and dryer occupied the place the coal bin would have been years ago.

Nora lowered her voice to a whisper. “Jerome told me he’d seen a ghost waving a finger at him when he was playing in here one day. Scared him, but not so much that he didn’t try to scare me and Charlotte, too, by luring us here, hoping we’d see something.” She squeezed between the machines and moved her hands over the bricks, tugged one, and a false front pulled from the wall. “The ghost was protecting this.” She reached into the cache in the wall and pulled out a book.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A book of spells.”

Chapter 3

When Nora extended the book toward me, I backed away. The first spell I’d cast, before I understood my gift, had resulted in the death of my best friend. “A spell book? As in ‘direct the magic?’ Aren’t you the one who taught me magic with intentions comes with unintended consequences?”

“I did. The first rule of magic,” Nora told me. “And an important reminder for those who don’t know how to harness their gifts.”

I certainly hadn’t known how. After my first spell, I’d stayed far away from anything remotely magical for fear of killing someone else. “Isn’t a spell, by its nature, an intention?”

She set the book on the washing machine. “What else have you learned about the magic?”

After a summer of confusion, I’d come to accept the magic was a part of me, and I was a part of the world around me—interconnected. Do what you will, but do no harm.

When I didn’t answer immediately, the tingling in my head let me know Nora probed my thoughts. “You saw firsthand what happens when someone intentionally sets out to harm someone else,” she said.

Memories of flames shot up around me. I cleared my throat to dislodge the phantom congestion and wrapped my arms around myself. I struggled to breathe, put out a hand to steady myself.

Someone took hold of my wrist and I let out a startled shriek before I met Nora’s eyes, bringing me back to the laundry room. Her lips moved, a silent incantation. Her voice was soft, soothing. “Be here. Now.”

The witch I’d come to refer to as that woman—I hadn’t wanted to know her name—had locked me in my workroom and set it on fire—intentional harm. She had died instead. Too often, a random word or a restless night returned me to that day.

I took measured breaths to steady my racing heart. The book of spells was still on the washing machine. My voice croaked. “What spells have you invoked?”

Nora rubbed my arms. “I cast a spell for protection around you when you were born.”

The stubborn ache of being abandoned tugged. “Why didn’t you come for me when my parents died?”

“We’ve talked about this,” she said. “Jerome didn’t tell me your parents had died for two years. From what Jason said, he and your mother had made a pact to keep you from me unless your magic presented itself. Didn’t you tell me you did all you could to suppress the magic after you discovered your gifts? I suspect they never knew.”

A nervous laugh bubbled up. “Apparently Jason knows.”

“Only because you found your way to me.”

Another uncomfortable thought pushed its way forward. “Do you think I’m the reason Jason stayed away from home, from Uncle Jerome’s? Because he didn’t want to be near a witch?”

“You’d have to ask him.”

The book rose from the washing machine on its own and floated toward the cache in the wall. Nora grabbed it. “Not quite yet,” she said. She carried the book through the kitchen and to the dining table.

I followed, maintaining a distance between myself and the grimoire. Did I want to know its secrets?

“We can’t know, of course, if Jason’s daughter will inherit the gift, but if she does, you’ll need to do your part—whether he likes it or not,” Nora said.

“You’re telling me I’ll need to cast a spell to protect her?”

“The book will tell you, when the time comes. There’s always a chance Jason will come to terms with our legacy before then, but in any event, his daughter will need to be protected from herself—her, or whoever is born into the legacy next.”

At times like these, I wished I had the answers, that life was more transparent, more straightforward.

Nora opened the book and a tendril rose from the pages—smoke? Dust? A triquetra, the three circles of a Celtic knot, were drawn on the first page. Reflexively, I covered the bracelet my mother had given me, a pattern of triquetras.

Nora slid a finger under a yellowed page and turned it gently. Letters seemed to crawl from her hand into the book. I held my breath as I watched them spell out my name beneath hers in a sort of family tree. Nora closed her eyes and sighed, then pushed the book toward me.

“It’s yours now.”

I was tempted to protest, to tell her I didn’t know what to do with it, but after the events of this past summer, I knew better.

“How did you do that?” I asked, running a finger over my name.

“The books, all of them, are living things. They respond to you. Anticipate what you need. The same way your name wrote itself in this book, a spell will call to you when you need it—like with the other grimoires.”

I shuddered. This book knew my name—the letters had moved to the page like spiders. “Why doesn’t that reassure me?”

Nora laughed. “Don’t fret. In all the years I’ve known it was here, I’ve only used it twice.”

I turned another brittle page to a drawing of a baby over a neatly written paragraph that read like a nursery rhyme.

“The first spell,” Nora whispered over my shoulder. “To protect the daughters when they are born.”

“But