back upstairs.
The War Room was every bit as depressing and messy as it had been yesterday, and after ten minutes of pawing through the papers on the table, and the big, heavy boxes on the floor, I hadn’t found the files about Hecate Hall. Frustrated, I let out a long sigh.
“Problem?” a silky voice murmured.
I ignored Torin and turned my attention to the stack of notebooks near the couch.
“I am sorry for what I said about your father this morning,” he said. “It was beneath me.”
I still didn’t say anything.
“Being trapped thus is incredibly frustrating for me, and occasionally I take it out on others. Again, I apologize. Now, if you’d like, I can help you with what you’re seeking.”
Knowing I’d probably regret it, I crossed the room and yanked the canvas off the mirror. As before, he was sitting on the table, smirking at me.
“Jackass, jackass on the wall, where’s the info on Hex Hall?”
Torin laughed long and loud at that, and I saw that his teeth were slightly crooked. Seeing as how he was from the sixteenth century, I guess he was lucky to have any teeth at all.
“Oh, I do like you,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes. “All these bloody warrior women are so serious. It’s nice to have a real wit about the place again.”
“Whatever. Do you know where the file on Hex Hall is, or not, Mirror Boy?”
He leaned forward and pointed under the table. In the mirror I saw a box pushed back in the shadows. No wonder I’d missed it.
As I dragged the box out, Torin said, “Is that all you want my help with, Sophia?”
I rocked back on my heels and scowled at him. “You made it pretty clear last night that you’re big into being cryptic. I’m not in the mood to have my chain jerked right now.”
He was quiet while I pawed through the box. I pulled out two big manila envelopes with casnoff scrawled across them. There were three separate folders labeled hecate hall, and I took those out, too.
“You were stuck in a void space,” Torin said.
I was so busy flipping through the first Casnoff folder that it took a second for what he said to register. Once it did, I looked up at him blankly. “What?”
“Those three weeks you lost. You were stuck in a void between dimensions. That’s how the Itineris works, traveling in and around other dimensions. Most of the time there are no problems. But you got stuck, probably because of what you are. Or aren’t.”
When I just kept staring at him, he clarified. “You’re not a demon anymore, not completely, but neither are you human.” Torin rested his chin in his hand, a heavy ruby ring on his pinkie winking at me. “You were a very confusing object for the Itineris to digest. So it held you for a bit. You’re quite fortunate it eventually decided to spit you out.”
The words “digest” and “spit” were more than a little unsettling. “Okay,” I finally said. “That’s, um, really awful to know. But thanks for telling me.”
He shrugged. “It was nothing.”
I went back to the folder, studying a picture of Mrs. Casnoff and her sister, Lara, when they were young, maybe in their late teens, early twenties. There was a man sitting with them who had black hair slicked back from his forehead, and a mustache every bit as elaborate as one of Mrs. Casnoff’s hairdos. I guessed this was Mrs. Casnoff’s father, Alexei.
“You know, I can see more than just the future or the past.”
“Really?” I asked, paging through the papers in the file. “Can you also see the present? Because I can do that, too. Like, right now, I sense that I’m in a messy room with a total toolbox.”
I didn’t look up, but I could hear the scowl in his voice when he said, “No. In certain cases, I can see…let us say, alternative futures.”
“What does that mean?”
“Time is not a fixed thing, Sophia. Every decision can lead us down a different path. So, occasionally, I see more than one possible outcome. For example, I told your aunt
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