Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
To Mom,
Thank you for encouraging me to follow my dreams.
Also, thank you to my big brother Kevin for giving me many ideas for the story. Without his creativity this story would not have come to life.
A huge huge huge thank you to Ray Ivey for meticulously editing my book and pointing out every single word and sentence that did not serve the story or get the imagination going.
And finally, a big thank you to Evelyn Chea for reading and revising my many different drafts and helping to bring this book to the next level.
Lastly, thank you to Bill Adams for looking one last time over my manuscript and giving it the final polish.
Facts
The game of roulette was invented by French mathematician Blaise Pascal in 1655. It is also called the Devil’s game. The sum of the numbers on a roulette wheel is 666, which is the number of the Beast (the Devil) in the Bible’s Book of Revelation.
OCCULTA is a small shop in Frankfurt, Germany. The building is the only one on Aldalbertstraße that was spared by the Allied bombing raids in World War II.
The Codex Gigas (also known as the Devil’s Bible) is a medieval, handwritten manuscript that is the only book known to dedicate an entire page to the Devil. The Codex Gigas is kept at the National Library in Stockholm.
The Ars Goetia is one of the five books of The Lesser Key of Solomon, also known as the Clavicula Salomonis Regis or Lemegeton. This book is an anonymous spell book on demonology from the mid-17th century, with material that dates back to the 15th century.
Hrad Houska (Houska Castle) is a Gothic castle built in the 13th century, forty-seven kilometers north of Prague, in the Czech Republic.
The Shell Grotto is an underground chamber in Margate, England. It was discovered by accident in 1835 by a local farmer. Its origin and meaning is still a mystery.
All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.
