Evie stopped mid-chew. “You can’t be serious.” She stared at Will. “Oh, sweet Lois Lipstick, you are serious.”
Will tossed his hot-dog wrapper in a garbage can. “We’re going upstate, to Brethren. And we’re going to need a shovel.”
Jericho returned to the Bennington from the records department, where Will had sent him. He didn’t even stop to take his coat off. “I found it! The documentation.”
He handed it to Will and nodded grimly at Sam, who was seated at the dining room table with Evie. “Sam. You’re here late.”
“Just keeping Evie company,” Sam said. He smiled triumphantly at Jericho.
Will read aloud from the document. “Yohanan Hobbeson Algoode was taken to the Mother Nova Orphanage, where he was admitted on October 10, 1851. The director’s entries on him are brief, but they document Yohanan Algoode as quiet but ill-humored, a bed wetter, arrogant, and prone to small acts of cruelty. When brought before the director for discipline, he said only, ‘I am the Dragon of Old, chosen of the Lord our God.’ The other children shunned him. He called himself the Beast. After two thwarted attempts, Yohanan successfully ran away in the summer of 1857. No further documentation exists.”
“So we know it’s him. But we still don’t know how we’re going to stop him,” Jericho said, finally removing his coat and hanging it on the rack. “The last page of the Book of the Brethren—the one with the incantation for binding and destroying the Beast—was torn out. You said yourself that we have to dispatch him according to his beliefs. But how are we going to find that information in time? The comet arrives in two days.”
“I need to show you something.” Evie unwrapped the tissue covering John Hobbes’s ring.
“Is that what I think it is?” Will asked. Evie nodded. “This is becoming a habit, Evangeline.”
“Will, if I can see him, understand him, we can be one step ahead of him.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea, doll?” Sam asked. “This fella’s a killer.”
“And a ghost,” Jericho added.
“What good is it to have this power and not use it?”
“I salute your spunk, but I question your sanity,” Sam said.