Hearts Aflame Collection IV: 4-Book Bundle Read Online Free PDF

months, but she’d had a good feeling that had turned out, as it so often
had, to be false.
    “ Oh, Tara dear, welcome back. Are you looking for more cookbooks?”
    Mrs. Pillson was the
elderly proprietor of the used bookstore, and she smiled kindly at the young
woman who stood so sadly in the entryway.
    Tara Roth was twenty-eight, but with her slender
figure, round face, and mass of ash-blond curls, she could have passed easily
for one of her own students. She tried to dress up in skirts, leggings and
cardigans, but she always had the sneaking suspicion that she looked like a
little girl playing dress up.
    She shook her head at Mrs. Pillson ,
who had a habit of lightly mothering everyone who came in the door.
    “ No, I'm still working my way through the last one I
bought, but thank you. Is there anything new?”
    Tara figured that even if her love life was doomed
to end in with a whimper rather than a bang, her fantasy life didn't have to.
She was an avid reader and had been since she was a child. It led to her
life-long love of language and words, and eventually, to a scholarship to study
ancient linguistics in France.
    She drifted toward the New Arrivals cart that Mrs. Pillson pointed out and ran her finger haphazardly across
the spines of elderly romances and self-help books. She was wondering if she
was looking at her future, spent entirely in used bookstores and take-out Thai
when she blinked and noticed something different.
    The book was small but thick, and to her surprise,
it seemed to be bound in genuine leather. There was no name on the spine, but
when she opened it up, she was greeted by a vivid red illustration of a dragon
chained to a pillar, surrounded by words she thought she recognized.
    It had the look and feel of some of the manuscripts
she had worked with, the ones from the very earliest days of printing, but she
knew that was foolishness. Those books were worth hundreds of thousands of
dollars, and there was a faint sticky spot on this book where Mrs. Pillson had probably scraped off an old price sticker.
Still, it was odd and the leather cover was attractive, so she brought it up to
the front.
    “ Oh, that's part of that strange lot that came in
the other day,” said Mrs. Pillson , checking the price
she had lightly penciled into the front cover. “ Hm , I
said ten for this, but we'll just say five for you, dear.”
    Tara smiled, because if Mrs. Pillson continued to treat her like a broke college student, she wasn't going to
complain too loudly.
    She only remembered the book after she had finished
her dinner that night. There was still a chilly bite to the spring air, and she
was cozily wrapped in a blanket on the couch. Turning off the television, she
fetched the book from its plastic bag and opened it curiously.
    Now that she was looking at it much more closely,
she realized that it was indeed very old. Her area of expertise was in the
words, not the pages that they were written on, however, so she turned her
attention to them instead.
    It was not Latin or Coptic, as she had assumed, but
instead it was a code, one used by a group of people who considered themselves
wizards. They were known as the Sybelline Brotherhood, and she had done her thesis on them just four years ago. An odd
shock ran down her spine as she realized that this must be a piece of writing
from the same group that she had spent so much time researching.
    They were strange men, convinced that they held the
keys to the universe, and now, she was holding something that she was becoming
more and more certain was part of their library. Her excitement rose, and she
hastily opened her laptop, consulting her notes on their strange code. There
were perhaps five people in the world who would have even known where to start
when confronted with this book, and Tara was one of them.
    In a fever of excitement, she wrote down the words
that she saw in the book, typing them hastily onto her computer. She was so
consumed by the act of translation