“Actually, I’d call it harassing.” John looked smug.

I ignored him. I was too busy trying to cover my tracks with Liv. “It was a guy named John, but he wasn’t in the Birthday—”

I stopped.

A guy named John.

Lena looked back at me.

The Birthday Room.

We were thinking the same thing.

What if we’ve been looking at this all wrong?

“John, when’s your birthday?”

He was stretched out, tossing a ball above the spot where his boots were propped against the wall. “Why, you gonna throw me a party, Mortal? I’m not big on cake.”

“Just answer the question,” Lena said.

The ball hit the wall again. “December 22nd. At least that’s what Abraham told me. But it’s probably some random day he picked. He found me, remember? It’s not like I had a note pinned to my shirt with my birthday written on it.”

He couldn’t be that stupid. “Does Abraham seem like the kind of guy who would care if you had a birthday or not?”

The ball stopped hitting the wall.

Liv was flipping through an almanac. I heard her breath catch. “Oh my God.”

John walked to the table and leaned over Liv’s shoulder. “What?”

“December 22nd is the winter solstice, the longest night of the year.”

John dropped into the chair next to her. He tried to look bored, his general expression, but I could tell he was curious. “So, it’s a long night. Who cares?”

Liv closed the almanac. “Ancient Celts considered winter solstice the most sacred day of the year. They believed the Wheel of the Year stopped turning for a short time at the moment of the solstice. It was a time of cleansing and rebirth—”

Liv was still talking, but I couldn’t hear anything but my own thoughts.

The Wheel of the Year.

The Wheel of Fate.

Cleansing and rebirth.

A sacrifice.

It’s what the Lilum was trying to tell me at Mrs. English’s house. On the Eighteenth Moon, the night of the winter solstice, the sacrifice would have to be made to bring forth the New Order.

“Ethan?” Lena was staring at me, concerned. “Are you okay?”

“No. None of us are.” I looked at John. “If you’re telling the truth, and you aren’t waiting around for Abraham and Sarafine to come to the rescue, I need you to tell me everything you can about him.”

John leaned across the table toward me. “If you think I can’t break out of a little study in the Tunnels, you’re a bigger idiot than I thought. You have no idea what I can do. I’m here because—” He glanced at Liv. “I have nowhere else to go.”

I didn’t know if he was lying. But all the signs—the songs, the messages, even Aunt Prue and the Lilum—pointed to him.

John handed Liv a pencil. “Get out that red notebook, and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

After listening to John talk about his childhood with Silas Ravenwood—who sounded like a military drill sergeant who spent most of his time beating the crap out of John or forcing him to memorize Silas’ anti-Caster doctrine—even I was starting to feel a little sorry for him. Not that I would ever admit it.

Liv was writing down every word. “So, basically, Silas hates Casters. Interesting, considering he married two of them.” She glanced at John. “And raised one.”

John laughed, and there was no way to miss the bitterness in his voice. “I wouldn’t want to be around if he heard you call me that. Silas and Abraham never considered me a Caster. According to Abraham, I’m ‘the next generation’—stronger, faster, impervious to sunlight, and all that good stuff. Abraham is pretty apocalyptic for a Demon. He believes the end is coming, even if he has to bring it around himself, and the inferior race will finally be wiped out.”

I rubbed my hands over my face. I wasn’t sure how much more of this I could take. “I guess that’s bad news for us Mortals.”

John gave me a strange look. “Mortals aren’t the inferior race. You’re just the bottom of the food chain. He’s talking about Casters.”

Liv tucked her pencil behind her ear. “I didn’t realize how much he hated Light Casters.”

John shook his head. “You don’t get it. I’m not talking about Light Casters. Abraham wants to get rid of all the Casters.”

Lena looked up, surprised.

“But Sarafine—” Liv started to say.

“He doesn’t care about her. He only tells her what she wants to hear.” John’s voice was serious. “Abraham Ravenwood doesn’t care about anyone.”

There were a lot of nights when I couldn’t sleep, but tonight I didn’t want to. I wanted to forget about Abraham Ravenwood plotting to destroy the world, and the Lilum promising it would destroy itself. Unless, of course, someone wanted to sacrifice themselves. Someone I had to find.

If I fell asleep, those thoughts would twist themselves into rivers of blood as real as the mud in my sheets when I first met Lena. I wanted to find a place to hide from all of it, where the nightmares and the rivers and reality couldn’t find me. For me, that place was always inside a book.

And I knew just the one. It wasn’t under my bed; it was in one of the shoe boxes stacked against my walls. Those boxes held everything that was important to me, and I knew what was inside all of them.

At least I thought I did.