Chapter 3 Chapter 3

I barely made it through the day by some miracle. I grabbed takeout and walked back to the apartment. The entire walk I could feel eyes on me.  The second I walked in, I dropped my bag and headed to the shower. After a shower, I sat on the couch and at the takeout, the Grimoire sat there as if mocking me. After a while, I gave up and decided to complete it. I only had one paragraph left.  I pulled out the chair and took a seat and opened the book. For a few seconds, the words seemed to pulse on the page. I read them quietly at first, then louder as I tried to make sense of it.

“…et septem peccata mortalia in unum conveniunt. Per sanguinem et carnem et voluntatem, voca nos…” (and the seven deadly sins come together as one. Through blood and flesh and will, call us.)

A gust of wind slammed against the window and the rain had suddenly gone silent. I kept reading, even though my voice started getting unsteady.

“…Ego sum Superbia. Veni ad me; ego sum Octava, Vas..” ( I am Pride. Come to me, I am the Eight, the Vessel.)

The lamp on my desk flickered, then went out. My entire apartment suddenly plunged into darkness and my breath caught in my throat.  I felt it right away, that same heavy, suffocating feeling from my dreams, and the air in my apartment seemed to freeze. The silence after I spoke the final words was unnatural. No, it wasn’t just quiet, it was dead, even the rain had stopped, just stopped. There was no traffic, none at all, even my fridge and the old radiator in the corner, which always clanked stopped. It was as if everything had just … paused and the only sound in the apartment was the sound of my heart beating.

I was left sitting frozen at my desk, my fingers were still touching the yellowed page of the grimoire. Then the temperature in the room dropped. My breath fogged up in front of my face and the hair on my arms stood on its end. It felt like instinct and fear, no it was more like terror had crawled up my spine, the kind that told me I had just done something irreversible. A low, cultured voice rolled through the darkness like thunder wrapped in silk.

“Finally.”

I spun around so fast that my chair toppled over with a crash. He was standing in the middle of my tiny living room. He was tall, too freaking tall, he was at least six-foot-nine. He had broad shoulders that filled out the perfectly tailored black suit that looked like it cost more than this entire building. His hair was silver-white and styled with effortless precision, his hair fell across his forehead just enough to look aristocratic rather than careless. His face… God, his face was almost painful to look at. He had sharp cheekbones, a strong jaw, and icy gray eyes that seemed to glow faintly in the dark. He was beautiful in the way a blade was beautiful, something designed to cut and hurt. I started backing away, I ran straight toward my room, but I didn't make it there. I became light-headed. The last thing I remembered thinking was why was the floor coming toward me?

I woke up with my face pressed against the yellowed pages of the grimoire, the corner of the black wooden box was digging into my shoulder. My neck was stiff, and my mouth tasted like stale coffee and copper. For a long, heart-stopping minute, I stayed perfectly still, listening.  Last night, the man. I continued listening. The radiator made its usual clanking sound, a car honked three floors down and the fridge made its usual, off-key tune. Everything was normal. "Just a panic attack," I whispered to the empty room, but my voice sounded thin and pathetic. "Too much caffeine, too much Latin, and a vivid-ass imagination." I said to myself.

I pushed myself up, rubbing my eyes. The lamp on my desk was still on. The darkness that had swallowed the room at 2:00 AM felt like a fever dream now. I looked down at the book, expecting to see the ink dry and dead, but the last line I had read, Ego sum Superbia, it seemed to be sitting on the top of the paper, it was darker and glossier than the rest of the text.

I reached out to touch it, then jerked my hand back. The $5,000 was real. The box was real. But the man? The tall, silver-haired man who had stood in my living room? He wasn't there now. I spent the next hour scrubbing my face and dragging myself into work. I wore the same oversized coat, the same boots, and the same guarded expression I always wore like a shield. I tucked the grimoire back into its box and slid it under my bed, and the weight of it seemed to vibrate through the floorboards.

The walk to Sin & Scripture felt longer than usual. The rain had slowed to a miserable drizzle, but the air felt charged, like the atmosphere right before a lightning strike.

Every time a tall man in a dark coat walked past me, my lungs seized up. Every time I saw a flash of silver in a shop window, I spun around, ready to scream, but there was nothing. Just the city, indifferent and cold.

"You're late, Raven," Mr. Cole grumbled, grumbled without looking up from a stack of dusty ledger pages.

"The bus was slow," I lied, heading straight for the back of the shop. I walked to work, but he didn't need to know that.

The bookstore was a maze of rotting paper and cedar, a place where shadows loved to congregate. Usually, I found comfort in the silence, but today, the silence felt like a trap. Around noon, I was in the back corner of the history section, balancing on a rickety ladder to reach the top shelf. The air was stagnant, smelling of dust and slow decay. I reached for a volume on 16th-century theology when the temperature suddenly dropped. It wasn't a draft. It was fixed in one area, it was so cold that it turned my breath into a faint mist.

My heart did a slow, heavy thud against my ribs. I froze, my hand was still resting on the spine of a book. The familiar scent of woodsmoke and old parchment, the same scent from the box, began to swirl around me. It was thick enough to taste. He was here, the shadow man. I didn't turn around, I couldn't. I was too scared.

I felt the weight of someone's gaze pressing into the small of my back, it was so intense it felt like a real touch. It was my dream, bleeding into the real world. I could almost feel the ghostly sensation of a hand sliding over my hip, pulling me back against a broad, solid chest.

"Is someone there?" I whispered, my voice was trembling, but there was no answer.