A Hundred Vicious Turns by Lee Paige O’Brien EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Lee Paige O’Brien
- Language: English
- Genre: Dark Fantasy
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Rat found their way through the house, the beam of their phone’s flashlight
trailing over the carpet ahead of them, but they didn’t let themself think
about where they were going until they’d made it back to the staircase that
didn’t exist.
The staircase rose up out of their family’s archive amid the aisles of
spellbooks and reference texts, the steps curving impossibly upward even
though Rat knew that there wasn’t anything above them in this part of the
house. A thin veil of dust drifted over the mouth of the steps, glowing dimly
in the darkness of the stacks, and the faint scent of magic hung in the air.
Rat always thought of them as dead passages—the staircases that no one
else could see and hallways that snaked off the edges of the map.
Some of the passages were strange, shifting things, but this one was
there whenever they looked for it and it always led to the same place, even
though they hadn’t been up in months.
Rat cast the beam of their flashlight over the bottom steps. Usually, as a
rule, they kept clear of the passages now, but they hadn’t been able to sleep.
Tomorrow, they would be on their way to Bellamy Arts, and they wouldn’t
be back home for a while.
“It’s fine,” they said under their breath. “Go up, get your things, come
back.”
With a pang, they wished that Harker was there. He could have cast an
actual light, and if nothing else, at least Rat wouldn’t have been going
alone. But it was past three in the morning the night before move-in day,
and they refused to think about texting him.
Rat looked over their shoulder one more time and then stepped through,
the veil of dust breaking around them.
On the other side, the air turned cool and dry, but otherwise, crossing
into the dead passage didn’t feel like anything. There had always been
something unsettlingly easy about it.
They’d asked Harker what he saw, back when he was still talking to
them, if he ever noticed the passages. He’d told them that it was like
catching a glimpse of something in the mirror, but if he moved to try and
get a better look, the angle changed and it was gone again.
Rat didn’t know why that bothered them so much, but they hadn’t
brought it up again after that.
When they’d asked Elise, maybe because she was their mother, she’d
just said, “Whatever this thing is, I promise you we’ll deal with it.”
It wasn’t, they understood, the way that magic was supposed to work.
But in spite of the fact that Rat was heir to the fourth oldest arcane
bloodline on the East Coast—the second oldest in New York, Elise had
reminded them more than once—it worked that way for them.
Their hand went to their compass as they took the stairs, the familiar
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