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Tashi stood on our front porch, looking radiantly serene in the way only a Sunshine Club girl could. Her dress, a dark sky blue, was cinched to show off her tiny waist, and her curly hair gleamed in the sun like something out of a Renaissance painting.
The three of us met at the door at the same time. Megan smoothed her hair, and Kasey straightened the sleeves she’d pushed up over her elbows.
Tashi didn’t ring again. When I opened the door, she wasn’t even looking at me. She gazed out at the sky, which was streaked with the first pink clouds of sunset.
“Hi, guys,” she said, turning around.
“Hi,” we all said at once.
She looked slightly embarrassed. “So…Adrie
“Oh, you do?” I asked. “Which unit?”
“One thirty-three,” she said. She peered inside my house and gave a short laugh. “It looks…the same as this one, actually.”
“Big surprise,” I said.
That was when I noticed her eyes on my wet hair. I froze.
But she didn’t ask about it. “So…my mom’s holding di
“The book?” I asked, glancing behind me into the house. “I don’t think so…”
Tashi raised a finger and pointed. “Could that be it? In that purple backpack?”
We all three spun in place to see a tiny piece of blue velvet sticking out of Megan’s bag.
“Oh, my gosh!” Megan exclaimed, walking over to it. “Wow, how weird is that? Yeah, look. Somehow it ended up in my bag. I’ll drive it back over to her house right now.”
“I can take it,” Tashi said. “I’m going over there later to study.” She had a slow, easy energy about her—like a cowboy. You got the idea that nothing ruffled her. But then I noticed how her left hand was gripping her skirt so tightly that the fabric was wrinkled and sweaty when she let it go.
“But if Adrie
Tashi rolled her eyes, which seemed to me to be pushing the outer edge of Sunshine Club decorum. “Adrie
There was a pause.
“Are you sure?” Megan asked.
“Honestly?” Tashi said, “I don’t care. But there’s no reason for you to drive all the way out to Lakewood when I’m going over after di
Megan hesitated.
“Do whatever you want,” Tashi said, starting to turn around. “At least call her.”
“No,” Megan said. “Here, you can have it.”
She stepped out into the golden evening light, holding the book like an offering.
Tashi laughed again as she took it. “Adrie
As the door started to close, she reached out and stopped it.
The energy in the room seemed to crackle.
Tashi squinted. “Megan, what happened to your knees?”
“I tripped,” Megan said. “Getting out of the—on the—tile. I should probably wear a long skirt tomorrow, or I’ll get massacred in Betterment. Bruises are totally un-sunshiny.” Then she faked a laugh. Ho ho ho, massacres are hilarious.
“I wouldn’t worry,” Tashi said. “But your shirt is stained.”
We all looked at Megan’s light green shirt. On each side, near the hem, were a pair of grayish smudges.
“You’re right,” Megan said.
“That might not come out,” Tashi said, turning to leave.
I took that as a personal challenge.
“Stay su
“She knows we took the book,” Megan said. “She totally knows.”
“I’m sure she thinks it was an accident,” Kasey said, still gazing out the window. “She’s very trusting.”
“Here’s what we know,” Megan said. “Until we can figure out how to safely destroy the book, we’re somehow co
Fun stuff? I gazed at Megan for maybe a millisecond too long before I started talking. “We can keep researching libris exanimus,” I said. “But maybe we need to face the fact that we can’t fix this tonight. And we definitely can’t destroy the book.”
“Because it’s gone,” Megan said.
“Even if it were here,” I said. “It’s too risky.”
The thought popped into my head like a hunch: But we’ll be fine.
“But we’ll be fine,” I said.
Megan and Kasey shrugged.
“I guess,” Kasey said, not totally convinced.
For the next hour we searched for more information. Kasey ma
There wasn’t much to be learned about a libris exanimus. All we’d been able to look up were the definitions of the two words and a paragraph at an occult website making them sound like some urban legend of the dark side: If any went undiscovered long enough to escape the most common form of destruction (burning by pious locals or clergy), they were generally believed to have been so well-hidden as to have almost certainly decayed completely.
“Well, ours isn’t decayed,” Megan said, a hint of defiance in her voice.
But if something was dead, how would you keep it from decaying?
By co
I sat straight up.
Maybe the oath allowed Aralt to feed off the girls, sort of the way they were feeding off of him. They tapped into whatever it was that made you popular, pretty, and smart, while he got to suck on their life energy. Symbiosis. Like hippos and those little birds that eat their fleas.
“Hey, guys. Listen,” I said, picking up the notepad where Megan had written down the translation. “‘I invite him to a union.’ ‘Together, we will grow. ’”
Kasey’s lips turned down in dread.
I was breathless. “The power center,” I said. “It’s not the book. It’s the girls who took the oath. The Sunshine Club.”
“All of us,” Megan said slowly.
Not all of us. I avoided meeting her glance.
“So what does that mean? What do I look for?” Kasey asked.
“It means there’s no point in burning the book. It’s just a glorified instruction manual. Maybe it’s where he lives when he doesn’t have a Sunshine Club to leech off of.” Energized by my own insight, I took Kasey’s chair at the computer. “Here, let me try.”
I typed Aralt. But that produced too many results. So we added various words, from oath to ghost. Nothing worked, until I typed in Aralt + Ireland + book.
There was a single result: THE FAMILY HISTORY OF THE O’DOYLES OF COUNTY KILDARE.
I clicked the link and got an error message saying,
Page not found.
“Dead end,” Megan said. She sighed and turned toward the mirror over the dresser, combing through her hair with her fingers.
“Not necessarily,” I said, going back to the search engine. I clicked on the link that said CACHED, which pulled up an archived version of the page. That brought up the image of a single paragraph of all-caps red writing on a black background.
I AM REMOVING ALL CONTENT DUE TO EXTREME PRIVACY VIOLATIONS WHICH I FEEL HAVE GONE ABOVE AND BEYOND WHAT I WOULD OF CONSIDERED POLITE OR MAYBE EVEN LEGAL!!! BUT I DON’T FEEL LIKE FIGHTING U FASCISTS ANYMORE ITS JUST A STUPID WEBPAGE!
“Um…interesting guy,” Kasey said. “But it still doesn’t tell us anything.”
Searching the phone directory for “O’Doyle” produced thousands of listings.