Now that Caitlin held the actual book in her hands, felt the weight of it, she was in awe. The book was bigger than she thought, heavier, more substantial, and the drawings, done in color so many hundreds of years ago, were still so vibrant, so vivid, the colors popping off the pages as if they had just been printed. The text was in a language no one understood. It was all, from start to finish, a mystery.
As Caitlin turned the pages, took it all in, a pattern began to emerge in her brain. She had to give herself some credit; after all, she was one of the most distinguished scholars of her time, and she had a mind unlike any other, bringing to her scholarship a perception that even Aiden did not share. Maybe she was able to decipher patterns that others were not. Or maybe it was something else; maybe she was experiencing flashbacks. Or maybe it was just a mother’s love for her daughter, a desperation that was driving her to grasp the text. She was not just another historian looking casually for answers; she was a mother with her daughter’s life at stake. She had to decode this book. As a mother could lift a car that her daughter was trapped under, Caitlin felt that her mind, in such a time of desperation, could rise to the task, could become a super mind, could decrypt and decipher something that no one else could.
Indeed, as Caitlin flipped through the pages, one after the next, she felt something happening, felt her mind tingling and buzzing, as she began to see patterns in the words and phrases. She did not understand the language, but she began to get a bird’s-eye feeling of the visuals, the appearance of the letters in the lines. She began to see things. At first it was just a letter, here and there. Then it became a pattern of letters. On one page, she saw a word spelled out in the shape of a diagonal, the letters slanting down to the left and to the right and back again. On the next, she saw a word spelled out in a circle. On the next page, in a long rectangle.
Caitlin did not understand how the patterns were coming to her, but they were. Her heart pounding madly, she began to decode it all.
It began to dawn on her that this was not meant to be an entire book. It was meant to be one word per page, meant to spell out but a few sentences. A key. A code. A message, for the initiated. Meant only for the one who knew how to look.
Caitlin checked off the words as she turned page after page, and she remembered them, and in her mind, sentences began to form:
The last vampire will arise after 2,000 years have passed. She will rise across the ocean and will be named for the color of blood. To enter the city, one needs a key. And the key can only be found here.
Caitlin’s hands shook as she turned the final page of the book, and saw on it nothing but a large diagram, a picture. It was a circle, and inside was what looked like petals of a flower, alternating scarlet and blue. In its center was another circle, with a crude drawing of a face. It was one of the most unusual drawings Caitlin had ever seen, looking like something out a surrealist painting.
As Caitlin looked closely she recognized the symbol – and as she did, aghast, her breath caught in her throat, her hands shaking.
What shocked her was not how unusual the symbol was – but how familiar. She had seen it before, this drawing, many times. It adorned a small leather box belonging to her grandmother. A box that still sat in her grandmother’s attic, in her old house in Florida. That symbol had been a persistent mystery of Caitlin’s childhood, especially after her grandmother had chastised her one day and told her never to touch the box again.
As Caitlin, hands trembling, looked at the last page, she made out a word spelled backwards, written in fine print, in cursive, surrounding the circle. She looked over every sixth word, then every fifth then fourth, then third, and another pattern began to emerge. She went around the circle, again and again, and her heart stopped as she gasped and dropped the book.
There was no mistaking it. The circle spelled out a word. A single word. Her last name:
Paine.
Chapter Twenty Three
Scarlet stood at the edge of the Hudson River as the sun began to set, standing inside the old, abandoned ruin of the gazebo, their destined meeting place, a place they had both been to before. In this lonely, desolate area hidden by trees, on the edge of the shores, was a private place that only Scarlet and Sage knew about, a place they could mistake for no other. She had been looking forward to meeting him here with such excitement, looking forward to their next time together more than she could say.
Yet now Scarlet cried as she stood there, looking out at the river, watching the sun set, hardly able to comprehend that she was standing here alone. Sage had promised he would meet her here by four o’clock. Now it was after five.
Sage’s ominous last words rang in her head: If I’m not there by four, you can be sure that I’m dead. I would never leave you. I would never abandon you.
Scarlet wept and wept. She had been standing there for an over an hour. Obviously Sage had not made it back from wherever he had gone. Where had he gone? she wondered, burning with frustration, with a desire to know. Why couldn’t he have just told her? Why had he even had to leave? Scarlet would have wanted to be there with them, in his final dying moments. She would have wanted to do anything she could to save him. Why did he feel he had to go off and die alone?
Scarlet, still weeping, stepped out of the gazebo, looking out as the crimson sun began to spread over the river. It felt like death falling all around her, like the last day on earth, the last day she would want to live. With Sage gone, she didn’t want to live, either. The earth held nothing left.
Scarlet slowly stopped crying, took a deep breath, and wiped her tears, feeling a sense of resolve come over her. She knew what she had to do. It was time to say her goodbyes. She would go home, see her parents one last time, and then join Sage, wherever he was.
Scarlet hurried up the front steps to her house, noticing there were no cars in the driveway, and wondered where her parents could be. On the one hand, she had to admit that it felt good to be home, in a familiar place, a place that was hers; yet on the other hand, she knew this was no longer her home. She had changed so much since leaving here, she now felt as if she were walking up the steps to another world. Another place. Another lifetime.
As Scarlet reached the door, she was surprised to find it already ajar. She pushed it open further, walked inside, and was shocked at the sight before her.
Her entire house was trashed, curtains on the floor, curtain rods hanging half off the wall, couches torn apart, furniture upended – it looked like a tornado had spun through. Her parents’ precious mahogany dining table was on its side, all the china in the cabinets was smashed, glass littered the floor everywhere. It was like walking through a place that had been bombed. There was not a single thing left intact.
Scarlet looked around in terror, trying to fathom what could have happened.… Who could have done such a thing? And why?