They crowded around the worktable to see the diagram—a mechanical cylinder with the words Ophthalmic Shift printed in tight script at the top.
“One of your grandfather’s inventions?” Jared leaned over my shoulder and examined the drawing. I remembered the way his hand felt on my back as I cried, and the way he smelled. I stepped forward, trying to put some space between us.
Priest shook his head. “That’s not my granddad’s handwriting, and this sketch is really old.”
The cylinder was the size of a small coffee can, with a piece of clear glass cut into one end like a window. Five looping symbols were etched around the outside. There were four other components—silver disks, each embedded with a different shade of glass: blue, red, yellow, and green. According to the diagram, the disks slid into the middle of the cylinder like trays.
Alara twisted her eyebrow ring. “What is it?”
“An ocular device,” Priest said.
“In English?” Jared leaned closer.
Priest tapped the top of the cylinder on the page. “You look through here and each layer of colored glass inside allows you to see a different part of the infrared spectrum—things you can’t see with the naked eye. The way a black light picks up the color white and amplifies it.”
“Are you saying it’s a decryption device?” Lukas asked.
How did he make that jump?
Priest nodded. “A pretty sophisticated one, considering it’s completely mechanical. If you used the right type of ink, you could write on almost anything and no one would be able to see it without these disks. If someone knew what they were doing, they could actually design a written code that required all five pieces to decipher.”
Lukas’ head snapped up. “Five pieces?”
“Yeah—” Priest started to explain, but Lukas was already heading back to the other side of the building.
“Luk?” Jared called after him. His brother didn’t even break stride, and I felt Jared’s body tense behind me.
“And you never noticed that picture before?” Alara asked before an awkward silence set in.
Priest gave her a hard stare. “Of course I did. But there are hundreds of sketches in here. And like I said, that isn’t my granddad’s handwriting. His is down in the corner.” The word Lilburn was printed neatly at the bottom of the page. “Another member of the Legion must have drawn it before he inherited the journal.”
“Then why is this Shift thing such a big deal all of a sudden?” Jared asked.
“Because of this.” Priest pointed at the seal. “Kennedy found it.”
Alara and Jared squinted to see what had taken my mind only seconds to record in complete detail. They gasped as recognition registered on their faces.
Jared looked up at me. “How’d you even see it?”
“I have twenty-twenty vision.” I didn’t want to tell them about my freakish memory. Priest might think it was cool, but Alara would undoubtedly point out that we weren’t going to be taking standardized tests anytime soon.
“If the seal is there, it means something,” Alara said.
“It does.” Lukas parted the sheet with one hand, his journal in the other. “Listen to this. ‘Five pieces. Separated until the day comes when, united, we can finally destroy him. Until that day, the pieces remain hidden from the demon that hunts them. The shift is the key.’ My uncle read it to me once. He thought it was a metaphor, and the five pieces represented the five members of the Legion, like the pieces of a puzzle.”
“But it mentions the Shift from the drawing,” I said.
Lukas set his journal on the worktable so the rest of us could see it. “The word shift isn’t capitalized here. He didn’t think it was a physical object.”
“ ‘Until the day comes when, united, we can finally destroy him.’ ” Alara repeated the words, trying to work it out.
“What if—?” Lukas leaned over the diagram. He gripped the sides of the table until his knuckles turned white. He finally raised his eyes to meet ours.
“I think the Shift is a weapon.”
CHAPTER 12
Fingerprints
We stared at Lukas standing over the drawing of the Shift. No one said anything as the words—and their implication—settled around us.
A weapon to destroy a demon.
They weren’t talking about salt rounds or voodoo wards.
“If you’re right, why didn’t the Legion use the Shift to destroy Andras?” I asked.
Priest paced in front of the table. “Maybe it was designed before they knew where to find him.”
“That’s a big maybe,” I said.
No one responded. They weren’t going to listen to the girl who didn’t even know spirits existed until two strangers shot one in her bedroom.
Alara watched Jared, waiting for his reaction. “You really think there’s a way to destroy Andras?”
“If our dad were here, he’d say—”
“There’s always a way.” Lukas cut him off, an edge in his voice. “You just have to find it.”
Alara pointed at the word scrawled in the corner of the page. “Does Lilburn mean anything to you?”
Priest shook his head. “Nope.”
“We need to figure out who or what Lilburn is,” she said. “And if this Shift exists, we need to find it.”
Lukas reached for his laptop. “Already on the first part.”
When he turned it around moments later, a Gothic mansion with a peaked roof filled the screen. A medieval tower rose up on one side, the stone battlements inconsistent with the style of the house. The headline read Haunted History Returns to Lilburn Mansion.
“It’s in Ellicott City.” Lukas kept reading. “This iron trader, Henry Hazlehurst, built the house in 1857, and his wife and three kids died there. No written accounts of hauntings until 1923, when the new owner tore down the tower and built another one after a fire. But get this. It was completely different from the original.”
Priest whistled. “That’ll do it. Spirits aren’t fans of construction.”
Lukas scrolled farther down the page. “That’s an understatement.”
“Mind sharing with the rest of us?” Jared asked.
“If you give me a minute,” Lukas snapped. “We don’t need to make any more mistakes.”
“You mean I don’t.” Jared’s back stiffened, the tension between them stretching like a rubber band about to snap.
“What does it say?” Alara stepped closer to Lukas, blocking Jared from his line of vision.
He focused his attention back to the article. “Lilburn’s always been haunted. Footsteps in the tower, a baby crying, a little girl playing in the hall—the usual stuff.”
“That’s the usual stuff?” The four of them shared a vocabulary that was completely alien to me.
“If we’re dealing with a residual haunting,” Priest said. I gave him a blank stare. “It’s like a fingerprint, energy that’s left behind after someone dies traumatically. It can be a sound like footsteps, or an actual apparition. But the apparition can’t interact with people because it’s not really there.”
“There’s nothing residual about what’s going on at Lilburn now.” Lukas handed the laptop to his brother without looking at him.
Jared’s eyes darkened. “Two people almost died there within a week. One fell down the stairs and the other from a second-story window. Both said they were pushed, but no one else was home when it happened.”
“The name of this place is written on the same page as the diagram of the Shift,” Alara said. “What are the odds?”
No one responded. It was one question we could all answer.
The White Stripes blared from the speakers behind Priest’s worktable. This time it was “Seven Nation Army,” and Priest looked like he was outfitting an army of his own. I checked off supplies from a list on a notepad, quizzing Priest and Alara about every piece of equipment.
Priest tossed Alara a box of nails and filled in the blanks for me. “It’s like packi
ng for a trip when you don’t have the weather report.”
I only recognized about 50 percent of what Alara put in the bag, and had no idea what they planned to do with any of it. But I was determined to find out.
I held up the nails. “I’m guessing these are for severe thunderstorms?”
Priest grinned. “Or unexpected rain, depending on the vengeance spirit.” He handed Alara a high-tech crossbow with orange duct tape wrapped around the barrel.
“You can shoot spirits with that?”
Alara scowled. Spotting Andras’ seal on the diagram had only earned me a temporary reprieve. I sensed her sizing me up every time she looked at me, trying to determine what my ignorance would cost them.
“Almost any type of weapon works as long as you have the right ammo. Regular bullets won’t hurt spirits. They just piss them off,” Priest said.
“You grandfather taught you how to make all this stuff?”
“Yeah. He could build a weapon out of a soda can.” Priest examined a leather glove with spikes protruding from the knuckles. “I need to do a quick fix. Alara, put this on for a minute.”
She pointed at the soldering iron. “Don’t burn me.”
I scanned the list while Priest lit the blue flame on the soldering iron: nail gun, crossbow, shotgun, strike gloves, nails, bolts, shells, salt, EMF detectors, batteries, flashlights, torch, headphones. I smiled at the last one and watched Priest work. The pencil in my hand started to move, following the curves of his face, the shape of the hood flipped over his head. But his trademark headphones morphed into part of his body like a crazy steampunk helmet.
It felt good to be sketching, like I was suddenly me again.
Priest finished and looked over. “What are you drawing?”
“You.” I penciled in some quick lines to round out the sketch.
He pushed the goggles up on his forehead and walked around the table. “Wow. That’s amazing.”