The Summoning at Blackthorn Manor

The letter arrived on a Tuesday, though I would later learn that nothing in my grandmother's world happened by accident—not even the day of the week bore significance in the old ways.

Dearest Lenora,

If you are reading this, I have crossed the veil. Blackthorn Manor is yours now, along with everything within its walls. You will know what to do when the time comes. The blood remembers, even when the mind forgets.

With eternal devotion, Grandmother Morrigan

I had not seen my grandmother in fifteen years, not since my mother forbade all contact after that strange summer when I was twelve. The summer of whispered Latin in candlelit rooms, of books bound in leather that felt wrong beneath my fingers, of dreams that left me gasping and confused in tangled sheets.

Now, at twenty-seven, with a doctorate in Medieval Occult Studies nearly complete, I understood what my mother had feared. I understood, and I wanted it anyway.

The key that accompanied the letter was iron, cold and heavy, engraved with symbols I recognized from my research: a seal of summoning, a binding sigil, and something else—something that made my fingers tingle when I traced its curves.

Three days later, I stood before Blackthorn Manor as October rain drummed against my umbrella and the dying light painted the Gothic Revival mansion in shades of blood and shadow.

It was perfect. It was terrible. It was mine.

The interior smelled of old books, beeswax candles, and something else—myrrh, perhaps, or frankincense. Sacred scents. Profane scents. The distinction had always been thinner than the Church would admit.

I had expected dust and decay, but the manor was pristine, as though my grandmother had merely stepped out for an evening constitutional rather than departed this mortal realm three weeks prior. Candles stood ready in their holders. Fresh wood sat stacked beside the library hearth. And everywhere—everywhere—were books.

They lined the walls from floor to ceiling in the entrance hall. They occupied the drawing room in neat, obsessive rows. They climbed the curved staircase in precarious towers. My grandmother had been a collector, a scholar, a woman who understood that knowledge was the truest form of power.

I found her study on the second floor, in a round tower room with windows on all sides. The October storm lashed against the glass, and for a moment, I felt as though I stood at the center of the tempest itself—isolated, elevated, untouchable.

Her desk dominated the space, a massive thing of black walnut that seemed to absorb the lamplight rather than reflect it. And there, placed precisely in the center as though waiting for me, lay the grimoire.

I knew it instantly. The leather binding was midnight black, soft as sin beneath my trembling fingers. No title adorned the cover, only a single symbol tooled into the leather: the same symbol from ...