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"In less than ten hours, I turn overh priority"

"You are a stubborn man"

"I aht down by the Wicked Witch of the Midwest"

Cut and print

• • •

We took tiet food, and for Mallory and Catcher to get showered We gathered again in Ethan’s office, where the screen now displayed the dossier Luc had put together about Sorcha Reed

"If ant to beat the Wicked Witch," Luc said, "we have to predict her ic, we have to kno she ticks"

"Wicked Bitch, more like," Lindsey muttered

"No objection there," Ethan said

Luc nodded "First, Mallory and Catcher have an update"

Mallory, who’d gotten dressed while we’d gotten ready for the h bun today, her petite body swaan House sweatshirt She looked a little like a sopho finals week It was a look she pulled off pretty well

"Thanks to Merit," she said, "we’ve ress"

Hopein the notes?"

"We did," Mallory said "Kind of So, the notes are basically raiven how they were ordered around the room It looks like tidbits of spells she was interested in, ideas for projects, stuff like that It was basically a really obsessive bulletin board Together, the pieces don’t make much sense So you have to consider them individually And individually, they didn’t ot to this"

She offered me the piece of paper It was a photocopy of what looked like a book or journal page The top half of the page was filled with handwritten words in the silded e bore sketches drawn in a thin, scraggly line What looked like a globe near what looked like a star, with two-dis of humans

"It looks old," I said "But not particularly familiar"

"Nor to e But I did a little sleuthing It’s a page fro," I said, but gave the page another look

"And what is the Danzig Manuscript?" Luc asked

I hadn’t actually seen the Danzig Manuscript, but I knew enough about it "A book written in the seventeenth century," I said "Drawings of plants and anis that weren’t in any identifiable language" Mallory was right--the letter fore, but it wasn’t a Latin alphabet, or Cyrillic, or any alphabet I recognized

"There are a few dozen theories on what the book’s supposed to mean," I said "Whether it was encoded or encrypted, the last writing in a lost language, the ras of a madman, a very old practical joke"