I have spent more hours in the library in the last two days than I have in the rest of my life combined.

Rook and Andie are naturals at the whole library scene, they get comfortable, page through to the relevant chapters, and then they read and take notes until they understand what they’re trying to learn. And then they do their homework. Andie spends all their time with their nose in a book, so it’s not entirely surprising, and Rook did technically tell me he was good in school back before all the, you know, trauma. So even though my time with Rook has until now mostly consisted of dodging cryptids and making out in vans and motel rooms, I have had to remind myself that this does actually make sense.

I was never good in school, and guess what, I’m still not hahaha. Earlier I was trying to read and eventually realized that I wasn’t actually even looking at the words, I was watching the end of my own pen tapping on the page. It’s an absolute nightmare.

Bass is almost as restless as I am, so at least I’m not alone in staring into space. Plus, at least I’m not as actively distracting as Bass is. Tonight, as we were laboring through an essay for Professor Protsman, he leaned against his elbow with a sigh and said, as if this were something we had been discussing all along, “the way everyone talks, it seems like they were studying magic, right?” And then before any of us could ask him what the hell he was talking about, he went on, “but I can’t think of any magic that would’ve done that to them — attacked them all like that? One after another while they were trying to escape?”

I was totally blind-side, but Rook evidently was not. “It must have been some kind of summoning,” he said, as if they’d come through this conversation once or twice already.

“You mean Robert Pennington and his friends?” Andie asked, brow furrowing, and when Bass looked at them as if to say, yeah obviously, they added, “I assumed it was a spell that went bad. Some kind of battle magic or something.”

“But if it was battle magic, why did it seek them all individually like that?” Bass said. “A spell gone bad would have blown up in their faces, wouldn’t it? I’ve never heard of a spell going so badly wrong that it chased down each of the casters individually, have you? Not without a consciousness attached to it.”

Andie looked appalled. “It didn’t chase anyone down —” they began, but then stopped. We were both remembering Rebecca, her disembodied feet in the grass as if they’d been sliced as she was running away; Katharine crushed beneath Robert as if he’d been trying to shield her; the distance between Oscar’s torso and his legs, as if he’d pulled himself in the grass. It really didn’t look like an explosion.

“Right, so it must have had a consciousness,” Rook said, and something in his tone suggested that this was not the first time they’d been through this discussion. “They must have been summoning something.”

My heart lurched and I was back in the woods two years ago, hand in hand with Tilly, a candle clutched between us, calling ourselves lighthouses, and asking anything to come find us in the dark. I cannot believe we were that stupid. Thank goodness Neal and Julian were there to intervene.

“But what could they possibly have summoned?” Bass said. “What were they trying to summon that was so important to all the teachers, and all their families, that they’d let a bunch of grad students carry on studying it, even though it was likely to julienne them like a bunch of carrot sticks if they succeeded?”

I fell back into my chair, staring at him.

“What I’m wondering,” Rook said, glancing at me, “is what’s happened to this thing now?”

There was a beat of silence as I sat there, staring between them, realizing that they must have been discussing this for weeks, probably at night while I was down the hall in my room with Andie, asking myself the exact same questions.

“If they did manage to summon something, it’s not here anymore,” Andie said. “Professor Sorely would never let us stay if it was still on the island.”

But to me that seemed entirely beside the point.

“Well sure,” Bass said. “But —”

“What was it? What were they looking for?” I finished for him. And then, because I did after all spend all last year apprenticed to a pair of cryptid hunters, I said, “I mean we know where they did all their work. We could go see if their notes are still there, right?”

Bass beamed at me, and smacked the table once, earning him a sour look from a sophomore a few tables over. “Told you she’d want to check it out,” he said to Rook, who was smiling reluctantly.

“I believed you,” Rook said. “That’s why I said we shouldn’t bring it up.”

Obviously I took maximum offense, which must have been all over my face because he quickly added, “It’s fine to theorize about what happened, but c’mon Shiloh, what happens if we investigate and we actually find something?”

Now, in retrospect, he was probably remembering the time that Billy Ace and his people tied us up in their kitchen and be both almost died, or the time we were almost eaten by a gigantic pissed off bird, or the time I gave him a letter for my mom just in case I got eaten by gigantic snake, and was just trying to keep us out of mortal danger, but at at the time I thought he was saying I couldn’t handle an unknown monster, and I CAN handle unknown monsters thank you very much. The only time I’ve ever died it was because a regular dude shot me in the face, nothing supernatural about it. (No, I’ll never stop making jokes about the time I died)

“I mean it’s not like we’d work it like a real case,” I said. “I’m sure Lana and Lily have already taken care of whatever it was, right? We’d just be… poking around a bit. Out of curiosity.”

Bass gestured at me like That’s exactly what I said.

Rook rolled his eyes, but he was working very hard not to smile.

“That’s a really bad idea,” Andie said, slightly shrilly.

“True,” Rook said, but he was smirking at me, clearly enjoying my expression of defiant determination as I closed my book and started packing away my iPad.

“Right this second?” Bass asked eagerly, closing his book, too, but Andie grabbed my book bag and tugged me back down into my seat, hissing, “are you insane? They won’t let you go down into the basement labs right now, we’re not even Saint Niveus students!”

And to be quite honest I was sorta relieved to not have to go back down into that basement room right that exact moment. Obviously, I WOULD have, since Rook didn’t want me to, but if I’m honest I’m not actually eager to go back down there. That vast, cavernous room, full of hulking shadows, and odd contraptions, and mysterious drips and creaks.

“Fine,” I snapped. “But soon.”

I think we’ll probably go up tomorrow night. Rook agreed to come as long as he has time to start the essay we were assigned in Professor Protsman’s class yesterday. He teaches a class calledThe Occult in Context: Our Secret History which we started yesterday, and so far we’re starting at the literal dawn of time. He’s got us writing about evidence of prehistoric people’s interaction with magic, and if I’m perfectly honest it’s cool as shit. Or it would be if I didn’t have to read academic texts. Literally why does it all have to be so wordy, why can’t any of these pretentious assholes just say what they mean for fucks sake?

(It’s entirely possible that I’m just a bad reader, but because this is my blog we’re going to just accept that the fault lies with scholars)