Christine Warren - Huntress

“Daddy,” she quoted on a groan, “I just got cider in my ear.”

Aaron Bullard’s hands shook as he turned from the photo in the text on his left, removed his glasses, and polished the lenses on the tail of his rumpled shirt. They continued to shake as he shoved his already mussed brown hair away from his forehead and replaced the rectangular frames before his wide, bewildered, muddy-green eyes. They didn’t even stop when he stared down at the delicate ancient volume spread out on the desk before him. Could it possibly be true?

For a minute he wondered frantically if he’d just been working too long, as usual, poring over lists and catalogs and books for an hour or four too many. He couldn’t possibly have just made the discovery of his obscure and geeky career in the basement of his Uncle Alistair’s dilapidated old house.

But he had.

His secret hope and worst nightmare had just been simultaneously confirmed—the leather-bound tome he’d found secreted behind a collection of inconsequential eighteenth-century herbals on the bottom shelf of his late uncle’s occult library was indeed the world’s only surviving copy of Valterum’s Praedicti Arcanum .

Arcane Prophecies . The legendary playbook for the end of the world. The script that told how the devils of the underworld would start a war that would bring humanity to its knees and enslave the mortal population into eternal torment.

Wow, didn’t that sound like fun.

Blowing out a breath, Aaron rubbed his hand over his face, scrunched his eyes closed, and mumbled another curse, but when he looked back at the table, nothing had changed. He really had found the Prophecies , and Uncle Alistair had had it all along.

Christ.

Aaron tried to remember if his uncle had ever mentioned anything. He didn’t think so. After all, Aaron had been obsessed with the text for almost fifteen years; surely he’d remember if Alistair had ever said anything about owning it. He’d have leapt on the chance to examine it like a terrier on a barn rat. Provided, of course, that he’d believed the story.

Alistair Gerrald Eratosthenes Carruthers had been a remarkable storyteller. As a child, Aaron had begged his mother’s eccentric older brother to tell him stories every time the man had come to visit. He’d thrilled to the tales of Alistair’s occult experiments, his magical discoveries, and his adventures as a demonologist and defender of mankind. Of course, at the time, Aaron had been about seven, tops. By the time he hit the ripe old age of ten, his parents had taken him aside and explained to him in words a child could understand that his beloved Uncle Alistair was a total crackpot.

Oh, the man had been a renowned occultist, a gifted sorcerer, and a devoted researcher in the field of demonology, but he’d also possessed a wide streak of dramatics. He’d often become so caught up in his own stories that he forgot which parts of them had actually— technically —happened. An embellishment here or there was completely understandable, but in the most exciting of Alistair’s stories, the embellishments tended to obscure the facts of the matter. In fact, in the best tales, there was very little fact at all. Once Aaron understood all this, he had treated those stories very differently. He had still asked Alistair to tell them when they were stuck inside because of rain or snow or childhood groundings, but at some point, he had stopped really listening to much of what came out of his uncle’s mouth. Could that be how he’d missed something like this?

Well, he had no intention of missing anything now. Aaron leaned forward, reached for the corner of a fragile, vellum page, and cursed under his breath. In his excitement, he’d nearly forgotten all the years of his training and touched the manuscript with his bare hands. Some curator of rare books and manuscripts he was acting like. A wave of his hand and a tweak of his will and white cotton gloves appeared on his fingers.

He’d heard of the Prophecies , of course; he couldn’t think of a single witch, wizard, sorcerer, demonologist, or occult historian who hadn’t. Written by a ninth-century magician living somewhere in what was now Germany, the codex was reported to contain a record of prophecies that had been spoken ages before by a greatly respected oracle of the ancient world. Most experts had long assumed it had been lost or destroyed centuries ago, though rumors of it popping up in esoteric collections or middle eastern caves did crop up occasionally, only to be almost immediately disproved. Aaron himself had written an undergraduate thesis on this very book during his days in the Yale history department. Never, not in his wildest dreams, had he ever expected to see it, to touch it. To own it.

The knowledge hit him like a shot of single malt, heating his belly with excitement that spread faster than the glow of a good scotch. Uncle Alistair had left Aaron not only his house and his modest life savings, but also his extensive and eclectic collection of occult items. From the skull of Ezekiel of Bramley (a well-known magician, anatomist, and unfortunately poor alchemist who had been killed when the iron demon he’d summoned with the intention of transmuting it into gold had burst into flame and ignited the cottage around them), to the brass dog bowl owned by Pope Eugene III and supposedly blessed by St. Bernard himself, Aaron had inherited it all. Including the library.

Including the Prophecies .

God, he couldn’t wait to read them.

He swallowed a sudden mouthful of saliva and turned to the first page of the codex to stare in wonder at the sight before him. The first quarter of the page was filled by an intricate drawing of a serpent, huge and thick and crowned on each of three massive heads by a pair of wickedly sharp horns and sets of razor sharp teeth. The detail in the illustration almost made him see the gleam of venom on each curved fang and smell the taint of blood and death in each gaping mouth. The serpent’s red-and-black body coiled around an enormous capital letter C , twining in and out of the open curve. Dark smudges of black appeared to spread from its body to stain the vivid blue of the letter. In the background, lush greenery sprang up from bloody soil, but rather than looking alive and fertile, the vegetation managed to embrace and oppress the viewer as if drawing him into the page and suffocating him in moist, humid decomposition.

As his eyes moved across the page, they caught the first few Latin words, and he could almost hear them echoing in his mind in a deep, rumbling, oily voice. The imagined sound of it made him feel somehow compelled and tainted all at once. It hissed in his ear, until he could feel something inside him shrink back in horror …

Caveo rex malefic —

Blinking, Aaron drew back from the page and shook his head to clear it. Sheesh. He really had been working too hard. The words were just words, the picture just color and lines on tightly stretched and conditioned sheepskin. If he could read sinister intent into any of that, he clearly needed a break—a few hours of sleep, maybe a shower, and a cup or seven of coffee.

He pushed back from the desk, a huge, tall affair he imagined his uncle had gotten from either a British headmaster’s office or the Jolly Green Giant. It offered more space than any one person could possibly need, but the lack of drawers on both sides indicated that it wasn’t meant to seat two. Which was a good thing, Aaron decided, since currently every square inch of it was piled with books and papers and mostly empty mugs of the coffee he’d just decided he needed.

“Good idea,” he muttered to himself and headed up the stairs into the kitchen of the old Queen Anne-style mansion. He would put on a new pot of coffee, stretch his legs for a minute, let his eyes focus on something other than dense reference texts and oddly compelling illuminations. Maybe he’d even check the answering machine or bring the newspaper in from the front porch, just to make sure the rest of the world was still out there. When he was working, he tended to lose track.