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“A book?” asked Beth. She picked it up and dust puffed up in our faces.

We heard voices above in the stables level. They were coming.

Beth and I cupped the flashlight to hide the light as much as we could and dragged the plank into the cell with us. We pushed the creaking cell door closed as quietly as we could. The broken latch didn’t let it go all the way shut, but it would look good enough from outside. Beth grabbed up the ancient dust-covered book and slid it under her arm. I frowned, wondering what kind of grim family secrets were in that book. We had a habit of not looking at our past too closely in my family.

We snapped off the light when we heard steps on the stairs. I heard a single, sharp bark, and I knew a new fear. If Danny or Thomas could sniff us out, all my work would be for nothing.

I was glad to hear a sneeze. It was a dog-sneeze, I felt fairly sure of it. A furry head poked down into the dungeon and I slipped back against the crumbling walls of our cell.

“Get a light down here,” said Danny in a growling voice. Sometimes, it was hard for us to speak when we were fully changed into animal form.

“I don’t think they’re down here, Danny,” said another voice, this one whiny. I thought it was Thomas.

“Get down here you chicken. I smell a rat.”

“It’s a dungeon, man, of course there are rats.”

“Not this big! Come on.”

More steps and a growing pool of light. They had a lantern of some kind.

“They’re down here, I knew it! Look at the footprints. Get everyone.”

“Now who’s scared of a rat?” chuckled Thomas.

“Okay we don’t need help. Follow me.”

They were in the hallway now. I could tell by the way the light was splashing the walls further away from us that they had taken the bait. They wandered further away, and still we waited. A few more kids showed up and followed them. When it was quiet again, I gave Beth’s hand a yank and we ran for it.

We burst out of the cell and ran up the steps. We pulled the door closed behind us, and I gathered up the rope I’d left on the stairs. I quickly tied one end to the loop of iron and the other to the stairway rail. They were trapped down there for now.

Beth and I took a moment to grin at each other. I hope it scared the heck out of them.

We rushed up the steps and spilled out into the room with all the horse harnesses when we ran straight into Sarah.

We almost knocked each other down.

“Connor?” Sarah stared at us and the dungeon door. She blinked. “Did you lock them down there?” she asked, and then she laughed.

I looked at her darkly. I put a hand out protectively in front of Beth, I did it automatically, without even thinking about it. “Don’t get in my way, Sarah.”

Her eyes took in the way that I was protecting Beth. She pursed her lips in a disgusted expression.

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to give you and your girly away.”

I softened my expression. “Thanks,” I said. “Could you play deaf for a while too and leave them down there?”

She giggled and shook her head at me. “One last great prank. Okay, Connor.”

“I owe you,” I said, and as I walked past her, I kissed her on the forehead.

Both girls gave me a bewildered look, and I felt a rush of embarrassment. What had made me do that? Not giving anyone a chance to think more about it, not even me, I ran out of the room with Beth right behind me.

One last prank, Sarah had said. Would this really be my last one?

Chapter Thirty-One

The Book

We found a new hiding place: the dormitories. Who would expect us to simply return to our rooms, the very heart of enemy territory? I figured it was foolproof and the last place they would look, but Beth was quite nervous.

“One of them will come back any second for a hairbrush or something.”

“This room was shared by Jake, Chris Anderson and I,” I said. “The only thing Chris Anderson would come back for would be a nap.”

She laughed quietly, but still seemed nervous. She paged through the book she had lugged up the stairs from the dungeon cell. I’d suggested she dump it a few times, but she had refused. I did get her to put it down for a while.

One of the reasons I chose this room was because of the secret snack supplies. Both Jake and Chris were chunky guys, and they could be counted on to have a stash of food somewhere. We found a bag of chips under Chris Anderson’s bed, but the big score was a full bag of peanuts and a full soda in Jake’s backpack. We ate this happily. Food always tastes best when you are really hungry.

After a few hours of waiting around with our fists shoved up against our cheeks, she began poking around with the book again.

“It must be getting dark outside,” I said, eyeing her and the book. “Maybe we should go have a look around.”

“You don’t want me to read this, do you?”

“Why don’t you put that book down, Beth?”

“What do you think might be written in here?” she asked, looking from the book to me, and then back to the book. She had it laid across her lap.

I hesitated. “Well, some of our family history isn’t very happy.”

“I’ve figured that out.”

“I can’t imagine that a book found in a hidden dungeon beneath our mansion could have a happy story in it.”

She nodded, looking at the book curiously. She polished off spots of dust that still hid in the creases of the leather cover. She opened the book, and my chest tightened. I thought about grabbing it out of her hands, but held myself back.

“There’s a title…” she said.

“What?” I asked.

She smiled. “You sure you want to know?”

“No,” I said. “Forget it. Just close it up again.”

“It’s called Alchemical Experiments.”

I raised my eyebrows. That did sound interesting. Alchemy was the study of half-magical sciences, things that normal schools taught you were all nonsense. In our family, alchemy was considered a legitimate pursuit. I slid closer to Beth. We both sat on Jake’s bed. I cocked my head to read the book with her.

She smiled and opened it up. I scooted close enough to read over her shoulder. There was a date written in flowing longhand script. It said 1782. Beth sucked in her breath. “Was there even anyone living in Oregon in 1782?” she asked aloud.

“Apparently,” I said. “Or maybe this book comes from somewhere else.”

She nodded and we began to puzzle through the book. It was more like a collection of essays than anything else, written on old crumbling parchment and piled in between the leather covers like a binder of loose paper notes. Some of the pages were torn or missing. Others were impossible to read or in foreign languages.

We found a clearly written essay at last. It was titled simply “ The Beginning. ” The first page had been stained so badly you couldn’t read it, but the second page grabbed our attention immediately.

***

…of course, being of sound mind and memory, this stranger’s story of my own creation seemed preposterous. I could quite clearly recall a family I’d grown up with, but not my early childhood, I will admit. The family that raised me had been an adopted one, or so they had told me. They had all been killed mysteriously one night soon after I’d come of age. I’d spent a century searching for the killers, but without success. I had to admit, however, that the stranger’s story about an alchemist he called the maker was more than an intriguing fantasy. His words disturbed me. I’d heard of alchemists, people who experiment with the thin line between science and magic. Sometimes people called them sorcerers, but others put them in a very different category. For this stranger to come along and inform me that my very long, secret life had started as an alchemical experiment which had gone horribly wrong I found unsettling.