The Breaker (The Secret of Spellshadow Manor #2)(47)

He wasn’t ashamed to admit he missed them. The manor could be a lonely place.

Equally pressing was the idea that he was falling behind in some intangible way. With an hour on his hands and Jari absent from the dorm, Alex pulled the notebook back out from its hiding place and scanned the pages. It was a code—he knew that. He just had to figure it out. Surely, that would be easy?

Alex looked across the sketched symbols, seeing no continuity or repetition in any of them. Had he expected the answer to jump out from the page, just because he was a Spellbreaker? No matter which way he turned the book or looked at the inked markings, no epiphany came.

He lay his hand over one of the pages and brought the tendrils of his anti-magic creeping out onto the yellowing paper. It did nothing but dampen the fragile page ever so slightly. Perplexed, he tried uttering random words like “Spellbreaker,” “Leander,” and even “open sesame,” in case a password unlocked the code. The symbols remained exactly as they were.

Frustrated, Alex lay back on his bed with the notebook open on his chest and stared up at the sky, just visible through the curtains, as he tried to come up with something useful. It reminded him of rainy days when he was a kid, the heavy droplets pattering softly against the window as he would pull a box full of jigsaws and puzzle books from beneath his bed. His grandmother had taught him how to do the ones where you had to unfocus your eyes to see a shape beneath a pattern.

He tried it with the notebook, crossing his eyes slightly. It just made him feel stupid, squinting cross-eyed at the pages.

He racked his brain, trying to think of other solutions to puzzles from his childhood. Jigsaws were easy; they just required the missing pieces. But as far as Alex could tell, there were no pieces to be found here. There had been crosswords and code words, but he had tried those already with the book. The symbols didn’t seem to represent letters or characters of any sort. They were just randomly spaced on the paper, each one different.

What else? What am I missing? Alex thought, frustrated by the shapes on the page.

An image of Christmas Day flickered into his memory. He couldn’t have been older than seven or eight, wearing a bright orange paper hat as he sat at the dinner table with his mother and his grandparents, from her side of the family. They had never had any of his father’s side around the dinner table, from what he could remember. His grandparents were dead now, but he could picture them vividly, laughing and smiling as his grandmother served the Christmas meal that sat in the center of the table, a Santa hat on her head. He watched the scene as if it were playing on an old reel. His grandfather reaching over with a dark green package, spotted with golden snowflakes, wiggling it in front of the younger Alex for him to open. Little Alex grasped the wrapped parcel eagerly and began to tear into the wrapping paper, opening the present quickly to see what was inside. A small booklet fell from within the package, followed swiftly by a small magnifying glass made of red plastic. The younger Alex snatched up the magnifying glass and unfolded the booklet onto the first page to reveal a blue, red, and white pattern dotted across the sheet. As the smaller version of himself held the magnifying glass up to his curious eye, the pattern shifted, revealing the words Merry Christmas. The Alex in his memory whooped in delight at the neat trick.

It seemed like a random, useless memory, until it gave the present Alex an idea.

Scanning the room, he made sure he was alone as he pressed the notebook flat on the covers of the bed. Certain that he was, he allowed his anti-magic to flow slowly into the palms of his hands before stretching it into a thin square of glittering black-and-silver energy, much like the shielding spell he had tried the other day but far smaller, held in the space between his palms. A thrill of excitement coursed through him as he lowered the screen of anti-magic over the top of the notebook, like his younger self had done with the red magnifying glass.

Beneath the glittering square, the symbols sprang to life, each sketch spreading across the page in a series of sentences and diagrams and bullet points. There was no real structure to the writing itself, but the screen permitted him to see it as it had been intended. It was a scrappy sort of journal, really, with thoughts jotted down as they had come to the writer. Sometimes, the work was dated. Other times, it was not.

Alex had to re-conjure the screen every time he wanted to turn the page, but what he saw made his eyes go wide in fascination. The work was written by an actual Spellbreaker. It was a fact Alex already knew, but the information within was designed specifically for Spellbreakers. A true first for Alex. It was like a well-fitting shoe after years of wearing a too-small boot.

On some pages, there were lists of spells and what they were used for. Others told of control techniques, to make the best out of anti-magic abilities—actual, specific instructions on attack and defense methods and how to forge anti-magical weaponry that could be thrown or maintained in a duel. It was all aimed at his kind. There was no figuring out necessary; the words were right there, in bluish-green, on the page, spelling it out.

Though Alex had discovered how to form certain types of weaponry, the notebook described kinds he had never seen before, some of them positively medieval. There was a delicate sketch showing an anti-magical longbow and arrows, with a side note that it was often far more effort than it was worth. Another showed a spiked mace and a double-edged axe, though Alex thought those looked a bit too vicious for his liking.

Just having the notebook in his hands, with the humorous side notes and inner monologue of the writer, Alex felt slightly less alone. It was the most tangible relic of Spellbreaker heritage he had come in contact with, and it soothed a dull ache within the caverns of his heart.