Free Dark Waters (Elemental Book 1) by Rain Oxford Page B

other
babies before that.”
    “So he marries a woman, she gets pregnant, and then
she dies? Was he a wizard?”
    “No, but if he was correct, he had to has some sort
of connection with the dead to know what he did. He wrote a book after this
about summoning and exorcising demonic spirits. His twelfth wife was apparently
the keeper. She gave birth to a boy and then a little girl a year later. By
then, Heinrich was obsessed with keeping them all safe and ‘clean’ from evil
forces.
    “He designed the house and oversaw its construction
in 1870. Many of the builders were killed during the construction due to the
unorthodox designs. One room was built with no doors or windows, but one of the
construction workers fell from the rooftop, was rendered unconscious, and was
mistakenly sealed inside. His body was found many years later when a door was
put in.”
    “And nobody thought his disappearance was odd?”
    “Apparently, there were as many strange
disappearances as deaths. There are rooms with traps in order to kill
intruders. In fact, as the years passed, the construction workers worried that
they were never getting any closer to being finished because Heinrich continued
adding things to the plan.”
    “What about that book on demonic spirits?”
    He read on for a few minutes. “He continued writing
books, which became more sinister until his last one, which was all about
commanding demons and using their power. His kids, though…” he turned the book
so I could see the black and white pictures of the creepiest boy and girl I had
ever seen in my life.
    Both of them were pasty white in complexion and
emaciated with oily black hair, deep set, black eyes, and scowls. “Yeah, I see
your point.”
    “It sounds like Heinrich was afraid of them. In 1876,
the entire family was found dead with the house unfinished.”
    “And who got the bright idea to turn it into a
school?”
    “Well, it was supposedly cleansed of evil and a man
from England took it over in 1894. He supposedly was a powerful member of a famous
occult society founded in England in 1888. He… died, too, in 1897, but he was
stabbed by an exotic dancer thousands of miles away from the house. The wizard
council actually attained it then and finished the designs. Hunt bought it off
of them and opened it as a school…”
    “What’s wrong?” I asked as he trailed off.
    He ran his fingers down the inside margin and I saw
what stopped him. “After the Englishman got it, but before he died…” The uneven
edges in the margin were obvious. “The pages are torn out.”
    “The only reason for pages in a history book to be
torn out is if someone didn’t want that information known. What was the
Englishman’s name?”
    “The name is scratched out with a pen. It jumps from
him buying the place to him dying.”
    “Maybe there is another copy of the book somewhere,”
I suggested.
    “Do we really want to know? I’m already going to have
trouble sleeping tonight when the exotic dancers in my dreams try to stab me.”
    “There’s another library upstairs. Let’s try that.”
    “Dude, there’s like, twenty libraries in this school.
Let’s do that tomorrow when it’s daylight.”
    “Okay.” We returned to our room after that. Darwin
immediately shared every detail about the conversation we overheard with Henry.
I didn’t know whether he was very trusting of the shifter, or very bad at
keeping secrets.
    “You should take it to the wizard council,” Henry
said.
    “No, we should tell Hunt,” Darwin argued. “Hunt’s
going to be better equipped to handle his own school. I know enough about the
wizard council to know we don’t want them involved. They’ll probably nuke the
school and everyone in it.”
    “We’re not going to anyone,” I said. They both stared
at me. “You don’t kill a monster by cutting off its toe.”
    “I didn’t know we’re trying to kill a monster,” Henry
said, fishing.
    I sighed. “We’re not. I am. I’m a