I couldn’t go back to sleep after my latest nightmare. The baby deer had become a helpless old man, and I was worn out watching him die every night.
I’d curled myself on the window seat in my room, watching the dawn break, a blanket of crocheted roses wrapped around my legs. Outside a cold, wet wind blew, soaking everything in sight. It was technically raining, but the drops were so small, you couldn’t see them. It was more like a constant mist. Smirr, my grandfather called it. A fitting name.
I cradled a warm cup of tea against my chest. My mother had introduced me to tea when I was young. It was one of the ways she tried to incorporate my dad’s Scottish heritage into our American lives. My grandmother couldn’t understand why I didn’t want milk or sugar in my tea, how I could stand it “black,” but it’s how I’d been drinking it forever. Milk and sugar were for cereal. I didn’t want anything to get in the way of the pure, earthy liquid.
The leather journal from the box of my mom’s stuff sat on my lap. I’d been flipping through the pages, examining the drawings, trying to make sense of them. It was comforting to look at her sketches and little notes to herself; it made me feel connected to her. I still had no idea what Arcēs Daemonium meant, although I had an odd feeling that I should know.
Although the window was closed, a breeze blew past and ruffled the pages of the journal, sending the vellum envelope I had tucked inside it fluttering to the floor. I set my teacup next to me, and picked it up. I opened and unfolded the letter to examine it again. The date was definitely written in her handwriting, but the rest of the page was empty. Why would my mom seal a blank page inside an envelope addressed to some place in France? Was that where I was supposed to deliver the journal? Or was it part of what she was warning me about?
All I had were questions, and the white paper wasn’t giving me any answers. I balanced the page on top of my teacup and returned to the journal.
I had figured out that the hundreds of pages of floor plans, room layouts, and what looked like secret passages all belonged to just three buildings—none of which I recognized despite a strong sense of déjà vu every time I looked at them. One was so large and ornate, I imagined it was the summer home of a royal family. Another resembled a library built around the turn of the century. The last was a fairly simple, perfectly square castle with a turret at each corner, although I noticed three of the towers were square and one was round. The buildings could be in any European country; maybe they weren’t even still standing.
Why was my mother so interested in these buildings? She wasn’t an architect—at least as far as I knew—she was a systems analyst. What systems was she analyzing? The buildings she’d been drawing would be lucky to have electricity, let alone high-tech anything.
Frustrated, I reached for my tea.
The empty page setting on top of my cup was no longer blank. In the middle, a perfect circle had appeared, cluttered with my mother’s frantic writing:
tercepted comm
Dangerous experiments a
animals first, then hum
I picked it up, and the writing disappeared, leaving the page blank once again. I blinked. Had I really seen words? I laid the paper back over the steaming mouth of my teacup, and the message reappeared. Invisible ink!
Suddenly, memories from my youth came rushing back. A doodle pad with a big, green plastic pen. I was crying because it had run out. My mom, with her love of encryption, had gotten me a kiddie spy kit with an invisible ink pen. She wiped my tears away, and told me that the pen itself wasn’t that special, it was the process. She showed me how regular household things could also “write” on paper invisibly: lemon juice, baking soda, even spit. Whatever you wrote would darken when it was heated, making it magically show up.
The heat from my tea must have activated whatever was covering the blank letter. I had to find a way to heat the entire piece of paper.
I tiptoed downstairs to the kitchen. The house was still quiet. I turned a sticky, round knob on the oven. As I waited impatiently for it to warm up, I contemplated what I had already read. Dangerous experiments involving animals? I thought Mom worked on computers . . . What else didn’t I know about her?
The oven beeped, and I carefully laid the paper on the middle rack. I switched on the oven light and stared through the smeared glass door. I needed enough heat to reveal the message, but not enough to set the paper on fire.
Slowly, words started to form. I waited as long as I could, until the outer edges of the paper began turning brown, then I lifted it out. I could now read the entire letter. It was signed by my mom, and addressed to something called the “High Council”:
To: High Council
Re: Project 666
The intercepted communications have been cracked. Dangerous experiments are set to start this week—on local animals first, then humans. They are rolling out the program in small, rural towns, beginning alphabetically. We must get additional soldiers on the ground in these locations immediately, or there will be great loss of life.
Anna Hamilton, Agent
#ROM1221
Soldiers? Great loss of life? Anna Hamilton, agent? Who exactly was my mom? Did she work for the CIA or something? Was she a spy? And more importantly, how did I not know any of this? How could she not tell me?
According to the date on the letter, the “dangerous experiments” had already started, at least on animals. What had Jo said about a dog? Stuart’s dog had died, and so had a bunch of others. No, I was being insane. That was just a coincidence. Besides, my mother was based out of Missouri. What in the world would she have to do with Aviemore, Scotland?
Although Aviemore did start with an A, I realized with a chill—the top of the alphabet. It was definitely a small town and definitely rural. My mom did work for an international company, and the envelope had been addressed to some place in France . . .
I ran back upstairs to get a pen and write the message down before it disappeared. The drawings and the letter were connected, and I was going to find out how. I had to. I sensed my life depended on it.
Two hours later, I was driving my grandparents’ tiny car along the narrow, deserted road that led to Speybridge, the next town over, twenty miles away. Proof that Aviemore was one of the most remote towns on Earth: no one had an Internet connection in their house, and any Wi-Fi was blocked by the mountains. You could get online at the high school, but it was Saturday, and Kingussie was closed. I told my grandparents I had a project to work on and headed to the nearest public library to translate the Latin phrases in my mom’s journal so I could start to figure out how it all fit together.