With a shrug, Iris closed the book and set it on the “nope” pile, which was starting to teeter precariously. She thought better of it and moved the book to start a new pile beside it.
Suyin would kill them if there was even a speck of damage on any of the grimoires. Everything here was carefully cataloged and organized, and they’d need to be sure they put everything back exactly where they got it when they were finished.
Iris had discreetly texted the other witch to ask what she was doing that day, and when Suyin had confirmed she wasn’t going in to the coven, Iris and Lily had headed there to use the library. The shop upstairs was currently open and Marie-Thérèse was working, but she was a relatively inexperienced witch and had no cause to suspect they were up to anything unusual.
“I think you’ve been through most of the library,” Iris said, barely believing it.
The coven’s collection wasn’t that extensive, consisting of only half a dozen bookshelves crammed into their underground cellar. Still, half a dozen bookshelves held a lot of books, and until now, Lily had been searching alone.
“Do you ever leave here?” Iris asked. “When was the last time you hung out with your demon? Went on a date?”
Lily looked up from the grimoire she was flipping through, her green eyes lit with an impassioned fervor Iris had never seen in them before. “This is Mist’sfreedomwe’re talking about. It’s not something I can just forget about. I have control of the brands. Therefore, it’s my responsibility to get rid of them.”
“Lil...” Iris sighed. “I thought you were going to ease up on the obsession a little bit.”
It had been over two weeks since their conversation at movie night, but this was Iris’s first time coming to the library with Lily. Now, she was realizing she should have made an effort to help sooner, if only to try to save her twin from falling any further down this rabbit hole.
“I have eased up. I’ve been forcing myself to only spend four hours here a day.”
“Four hours... aday?” Iris gaped at her. No wonder she’d read the entire library already. “That’s insane.”
Lily shook her head. “I don’t think there’s anything here anyway. I think I need to visit Hell again.”
There was a pause in which Iris’s mouth dropped open.
“I’m sorry, but I did not just hear you say you want to voluntarily visit Hell.”
“Think about it,” Lily said, proving that she had, in fact, said that. “Bel told me once that he used to have one of the most extensive libraries in the underworld, and well, I was wondering... Bel gave up his territory when he went rogue, but maybe there’s still a way to access that library. Or, at the very least, to find someone else to do it for me.”
“Someone... like who?”
“Well, I know Bel and Mist said he was bad news, but... what about Murmur? He bargained to help us out once. Maybe he’d do it again.”
Iris was speechless. Her sister wanted to return to Hell and bargain with a zombie-demon necromancer who’d butchered an entire army of gargoyles and then threatened to kill them unless Mist vowed not to challenge him for Paimon’s lair.
Luckily, Mist had no desire for the defeated Queen of Hell’s creepy castle and had agreed to his terms, and they hadn’t been forced to discover what Murmur would have done had they made him their enemy. In return, the Necromancer had vowed not to track them back to Earth.
Sheolic blood vows were unbreakable, but that didn’t mean Iris trusted him. Of course she bloody didn’t.
She’d accepted that there were some demons who weren’t wholly evil anymore, but Murmur wasn’t one of them. And his vow contained no promises not to immediately capture the prophesied blood-born twins and sell them to the highest bidder, should they ever cross his path again.
So no, Iris did not like the idea of Lily contacting the Necromancer at all.
“Are you fuckingcrazy?”
Okay, she’d found her voice again. That was good because she needed to scream at Lily until her sister saw sense.
“I’ve been thinking about this for a while, actually,” Lily went on. “I’ve been waiting around for Dan’s angel friend, but I realized that she probably won’t be able to find anything either. The brands came from Hell. The answers are probably going to be found there too, not in the Empyrean Library. It’s the same way I know we won’t find anything here either. These grimoires were made by witches. Powerful witches, but they’re still human, and as far as I know, none of them ever went to Hell. Of course they won’t have what I need.”
“Belial, Mist, and all of them went rogue, Lily. That means no one can know where they are. If you go marching back into Hell, you can best believe Mist is going to come with you. What if that gets him caught?”
“He’s not technically rogue like the others since no one reported—”
“He is. After you got rid of Paimon, he disappeared and hasn’t returned. That’s against the rules. He’s not allowed to do whatever he wants on Earth with humans. He’s rogue. They’re all rogue. And if they get caught, they’re going to be in deep shite.”
Iris suddenly thought of Meph, and her heart skipped a beat. For the first time, it fully sank in what it had meant for him and his brothers to escape Hell.
If Team Heaven found them, they were allowed to exterminate them on sight. If Team Hell found them, they would be dragged back to the underworld and punished horribly—or exterminated on sight. And Iris had overheard Belial saying multiple times that if Lucifer found him, it would start a war the likes of which they hadn’t seen in, well, ever.
