Free The Sight by Chloe Neill

stairs.
    I flipped on the light in the second-floor storage room, testing it. The power was back on.
    I’d always liked to stay busy—fixing broken things, organizing the storage room, restoring an antique I’d found or traded for other things in the store.
    And since learning my father had been a Sensitive, I’d been going through the building—the records, the antiques, my father’s personal effects—looking for some clue about when he’d become a Sensitive and what he’d done about it.
    Had he learned to cast off his magic, to keep his magic balanced? Was that why the store had been shielded from the magic monitors outside? And the most important question—the only one that really mattered: Why hadn’t he told me?
    â€œHe just hadn’t told me
yet
,” I mumbled, repeating the mantra I’d decided on.
    I’d been too young—only eighteen—when he was killed. He had meant to tell me, maybe when I was older. He’d had every intentionof telling me but had been killed before he was able to take that step. Because the alternative made my chest ache—the possibility that he’d never intended to tell me, he’d never considered the possibility that I’d end up the same way—but without his help or guidance.
    I sat down in front of two barrister’s bookshelves in the storage room and opened the glass door on the bottom shelf. This week, I was working my way through the books my father had collected. The spines were gorgeous, all tooled leather and gilding, and they’d have sold for a pretty penny once upon a time. There were French Quarter tourist favorites—
A Confederacy of Dunces
and William Faulkner’s
New Orleans Sketches
—along with plenty of classics I hadn’t been allowed to touch as a child. Those tables had certainly turned.
    â€œI’ll take a letter,” I said, pulling a book off the shelf, flipping through the pages. When no hidden note or secret message appeared, I replaced it again. “A sticky note. A receipt. A recipe card. A torn page from an old phone book.”
    Anything that would help me understand who he’d really been.
    I pulled a copy of
The Secret Garden
, my heart momentarily speeding when I spotted faint scribbles in the front of the book. But it was just a penciled price from some long-ago sale.
    With more discoveries like that, night slipped away. Five more books followed, then ten. Then twenty. And then I was down to the final shelf.
    â€œ
The Revolt of the Angels
,” I murmured, reading the gold letters on the red leather spine. I didn’t know the book, but I’d bet the author hadn’t correctly imagined what a revolt of angels actually involved. I ran my fingers over the pressed metallic designs in the cover, the blue and red points of a radiating star.
    â€œAnd how long ago were you written?” I wondered, opening the cover to find the publication information on the first page.
    But there was no publication page.
    The book’s interior pages had been hollowed out, carved into a rectangle but for a border of pages about an inch on each side. And there, resting inside the book, was a set of papers.
    My heart pounding, palms suddenly sweating with anticipation, I carefully unfolded them, pressed them flat.
    They were old legal documents—a deed issued to a name I didn’t recognize and what I thought were supporting documents, all of them yellowed with age.
    They weren’t my father’s, I realized, flipping through half the pages. Just documents someone had put in a book for safekeeping, probably thinking they were being clever about it. My father had likely gotten the book as part of a larger lot, hadn’t even opened it.
    I put them both aside, lowered my head to my knees. Maybe I’d never figure out anything else about my father. Maybe I’d learn to live with what I knew and what I didn’t.
    â€œAnd maybe hell will