Tolliver hands me a mug shaped like a seahorse filled with steaming liquid, then offers one to Ezra. “This is a special potion I brew to help you feel better.”
I smirk into my cup. It’s basically just chamomile tea, but the placebo effect is real, and before long, Ezra is breathing normally and back to his much tanner skin shade.
“So, is this the second part of the con you all keep talking about?” he asks. “Going into the Afterlife?”
“Yeah,” I say. “But if we don’t get nabbed by a hellhound, the return is much gentler.”
“Good.” He takes a deep breath, then nods to himself. “I think I’d like to go back.”
Tolliver’s eyebrows shoot up. “Really?”
Ezra rubs his chin. “I don’t know why, but I feel…different. Like…shiny?”
“Oh.” I set down my mug. “Did we forget to tell you about the magic?”
Translating the grimoire is a long and arduous process.
I sit cross-legged on the wood floor of my living room with the codex and journal open in front of me, the others hovering over my shoulder. Dictionaries and crumpled papers are strewn across the floor. There’s a half-eaten box of pizza on the coffee table and several empty cans of energy drinks, which Crowlene is systematically piling in the fireplace.
We run into our first problem pretty quickly: Alice translated the journal into Latin, not English.
“We need to take a more structured approach,” Rook says, voice strained.
He’s leaning against the breakfast bar, but his posture is too stiff for it to look casual. Ever since we started translating, his polite demeanor has started cracking. He’s probably just impatient to get his sister back, but I can’t help but be suspicious of his every reaction. What if the Cult of Hades is using him, just like the syndicates used Alice? What if he’s just biding his time and plans to betray us at the earliest convenience?
“Who put you in charge of this?” Poppy snaps at him.
She’s not the only one with a short fuse right now. The longer we go without making progress, the thicker the tension gets.
Rook crosses his arms. “I can read in five languages, two of which are ancient languages, one of which isLatin.”
“Congrats?” Poppy says. “You’re not the only polyglot in the room. CJ knows Latin and Greek. I speak Frenchandtwo different creoles. And Tolliver knows Japanese, which has a writing system similar to this. Even New Guy knows Spanish.”
Ezra looks up from where he has been trying (and failing) to sketch the symbols from the book. “And Ladino. Some Hebrew.” He looks to me expectantly.
I shake my head. “Oh, no, I just do accents.”
“And,” Poppy continues, “you knowing Latin hasn’t exactly helped us so far. There are more symbols in…Voynish or whatever than words in the Latin translation, but fewer symbols than letters. Figure that out, Smart Guy.”
“It’s shorthand,” Tolliver says without looking up from where he playsMario Karton the couch.
We all stare at him.
I crawl over to grab the Switch from his hands. “It’s what?”
Tolliver pouts for a moment, then shrugs. “When I had to learn to write with my left hand, my dad taught me Takusari. It’s a Japanese shorthand. I could write more with fewer strokes, so it was easier.” He leans forward and points to a line of the grimoire. “The symbols are sounds.”
We all stare blankly at him.
“Look,” he says, sliding off the couch to sit in front of the coffee table.
He pushes a few empty cans of Ghost Energy onto the floor and pulls a piece of paper in front of him. His hand curls in standard lefty formation as he scribbles two lines across the page.
He points to the top line. “This is written using kanji, where each symbol represents a word.”
There are five symbols written across the page. The first one looks really complicated.
“This is the same thing written in Takusari,” Tolliver says, pointing to the second line, which honestly looks like a few squiggles. “There are more characters, because they’re sounds. And if I wrote this in like, English, where all the symbols are letters, it would be even longer.”