“No, you’re not disturbing me.” He waved her in. “I just got some old vinyl from my dad’s house this last weekend. I was helping him move into a smaller place, and, of course, I had to try some of them out.”

Harper smiled. “I understand.”

She walked over to his desk, meaning to sit down in the chair across from him, but the spot was already taken by a crate of records.

“I’ll get that. Sorry.” Pine hurried around the desk and picked up the crate, then set it on the floor. “Have a seat.”

“Thank you,” Harper said, and obliged him.

“So, you said you had something for me to look at?” Pine asked as he went back around the desk. He was gathering the papers into a stack as he spoke, and he looked at Harper over the top of his glasses.

“Yes, I was able to convince my sister to let me bring the scroll with me.”

That had been a bit of a challenge. After they’d taken their swim together yesterday afternoon, Harper and Gemma had a very long discussion about it, and Gemma finally relented after an hour of Harper’s promising her that it would be absolutely safe with her.

“Oh, excellent,” Pine said. “You have it with you now?”

“Yeah.” Harper reached into her book bag and pulled out the rolled-up tube. Gemma had carefully tied a string around it so it wouldn’t unfurl during Harper’s travels.

Pine untied the string, then carefully spread the scroll out on his desk. It was roughly two feet long, so he placed a desk lamp and a heavy tape dispenser on either end to keep it from rolling back up.

“What do you think?” Harper asked, leaning forward on the edge of the seat.

Pine let out a low whistle between his teeth. “I think that I can honestly say I have no idea what I’m looking at.”

Her shoulders sagged. “Really?”

“No. I mean, I have an idea.” He rubbed his forehead. “But it doesn’t make any sense.”

“What do you mean?”

“This paper it feels…” He ran his finger along the edge. “It should be falling apart. It has that texture, it feels authentic, but if it were, this should be … disintegrating.” He readjusted his glasses and shook his head. “I should do a carbon testing on this.”

“What about the words?” Harper asked since she didn’t particularly care how old the document was. She believed it was real, which meant it was thousands of years old, but that was irrelevant to her pursuit.

“This ink is like nothing I’ve ever seen.” Pine tilted the scroll to the side. “Do you see that? The way it changes color in the light, going from black to reddish.”

“It’s some kind of iridescent ink,” Harper said.

“Could be.” Pine took off his glasses and rummaged through a desk drawer before pulling out the monocular. He attached it to his glasses, then leaned over the paper, analyzing the ink more closely. “Could be blood.”

“Blood?” Harper asked, but that shouldn’t surprise her. Of course an ancient curse would be written in blood.

“Don’t quote me on that, and it doesn’t really have the consistency of blood, so I can’t explain why I think that’s what it is, but…” He sighed. “Call it gut instinct. But I think it might be.”

“Do any of the letters or words look familiar?”

“This might be…” He tapped a letter. “This is one that I thought was an aleph, and I’m really leaning toward that. And this word”—he tapped a word starting with the aleph symbol—“it appears several times.”

Harper had noticed that before, but she hadn’t been able to glean any meaning from it. Many of the words looked similar to her.

He grabbed a Post-it note and started scribbling on it, drawing out variations of the symbols. “If that’s an a, then this could be Cypriot, so that would make the next letter an i.”

“So it’s like a i weird w-thing a?’” Harper asked.

“Let me check something.” Pine pulled his iPad from a briefcase he had sitting behind his desk. He pushed his glasses up on his forehead and kept glancing down at the scroll as he typed rapidly. “Here we go.”

He turned the screen out to face Harper, so she could see. He’d zoomed it out so a single word was clearly visible on the screen: a’ima, with αίμα written below it.

“A’ima?” Harper asked uncertainly, saying it like ah-ma.

“A’ima,” Pine repeated, but he pronounced it e-ma so it rhymed with edema. “It means blood. I know, I know, it sounds like I have blood on the brain. But … it reminds me of something.”

When he trailed off, he looked back down at his tablet, typing on it. “I don’t even know why I’m thinking of this. I’m not even sure what the letters are, or if that’s some kind of weird gimmel, which is sorta like gamma, then it could even be …

“Found it. Here.” He clicked on his iPad, then tilted it toward her. He’d zoomed in again, so To αíμα νερó δε γíνεται showed clearly on the screen.

Harper shook her head. “I have no idea what any of that means.”

“It’s an old Greek proverb that literally translates to ‘the blood can’t become water,’” Pine explained. “It’s similar to the phrase ‘blood is thicker than water,’ meaning family is more important than strangers.”