Chapter 15 #2
“What the—” Beau began, and I yanked him deeper into the crowd, pulling him into a run.
“They’re, um, simulacra. Or something,” I jerked out, keeping my grip on the tablet and aiming for the thickest part of the crowd as we pelted down the grassy slope.
No time even to take a fleeting moment’s satisfaction at being able to work a really top-class word like simulacra into ordinary conversation; I just kept running.
“They aren’t human. They’re just constructs, or at least that’s my best guess.
They’re here to get us back to the Library and make me open it. ”
“So they can’t hurt us?” Beau managed not to trip over his sword even at full sprint, still looking incredulous that there was no blood on the blade.
“Oh, they can hurt us.” My wrist felt like it had been clamped in a vise from Chester’s grip, and I was pretty sure I’d have an indigo-blue bruise in about an hour. “Pick up the pace!”
“Where are we—”
“Keep up! And why do you have a sword?” Dodging past a pair of waiters staggering along between a mattress-size platter of oysters on ice.
“Sword cane. Popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for any gentleman wishing for a discreet—”
“Know how to use it?”
“Sure. Stick ’em with the pointy end; isn’t that what they say in Game of Thrones?
” And he turned and lunged full extension at Chester, hurtling after us down the grassy slope.
I had a distracted moment’s admiration for the picture he made—there’s really nothing like a man plunging his sword into the gut of your enemy to get the old heart fluttering—but this time the blade didn’t go into Chester, who sidestepped it with a hard shove while still intoning “Alix Watson, please come with us.” The shove sent Beau flying three feet into a marble cupid, which promptly crashed over.
“They learn,” I yelled, grabbing a champagne bottle from the nearest giggling feather duster of a flapper lurching past me toward the swimming pool.
“They know the sword’s dangerous now, so they’ll avoid it.
” They didn’t know about champagne bottles, though, because Chester didn’t try to duck as I swung the bottle with an overhead smash like Serena Williams serving at Wimbledon.
He went down as the bottle flew spinning out of my hand, but I didn’t see him start to evaporate into the ground so I guessed he wasn’t down for good.
I’d have hit him again, but the bottle had rolled behind him out of reach and he was already getting up.
“Come on,” I panted, yanking Beau to his feet, and we were flying again down to the bottom of the lawn and out through a pair of ornate gates where a series of flimsy-looking twenties roadsters were slowly weaving out with loads of inebriated party guests.
“Okay,” Beau gritted, managing to sheathe his sword cane even as he examined a torn flap in his pristine sleeve. “Now I am goddamn pissed.”
“Send the Library Board a bill. This way—” And we dove into a stand of trees just outside the Gatsby estate, right next to a roadside ditch.
“What are we doing? Is there a plan?”
“Yep.” I craned my neck. The car should be coming up just about now . . . and so was Chester. I stepped out from the trees and waved to get his attention.
He changed course at once, marching along the edge of the ditch toward me. “Alix Watson—”
“Please come along, yes, I know. You’re the one who needs to come along, Chester. Right—about—here—”
And a snazzy little roadster shot through the gate, clipped the column, swerved wildly, and plowed right at us. I stepped neatly back, the grille caught Chester, and the car flipped nose-down into the ditch with Library Security pinned at the bottom.
“Heh,” I cackled, peering down into the ditch and seeing the dissolution of those polyester pants under the crumpled hood. “Got him.”
Beau was staring at me. “What—how did you know—”
“There’s a car crash in chapter three of The Great Gatsby.
” I hitched up my garters, which were starting to slide down my silk stockings.
“A minor character named Owl Eyes drives his car into a ditch”—there he was scrambling out of the roadster now, spectacles draped over one ear, drunkenly complaining—“and it’s all a lot of foreshadowing for the fatal car crash at the end of the book when Daisy Buchanan drives over her husband’s mistress.
A little heavy-handed on the parallels, I always thought, but handy for slowing down the Library Board’s stooges.
Most things go splat if you shove ’em in front of a speeding car. ”
Beau didn’t look all that much more enlightened. “You just happen to remember the particulars of chapter three of The Great Gatsby?”
“Look, I’m not equipped to be the Chosen One in any novel.
I don’t know kung fu, I can’t sling spells, I don’t even have a cool hidden sword like you—” Gesturing at his cane, which once again looked like a humble silver-handled walking stick.
“But I am crammed with book trivia up to my goddamn ears, and if the Library Board wants to send their simulacra thugs after me, I can keep shoving ’em in front of Daisy Buchanan’s roadster, or off Huck Finn’s raft into the Mississippi, or into the mouth of the French guns in War and Peace.
I can do that as long as the Librarian needs me to, until she can heal up and take on the Board.
I’m not too impressive in most ways, but book ways”—I brandished the tablet like a shield, with its infinite catalog of Astral Library volumes at my fingertips—“do not fuck with me.”
“You,” Beau breathed, a grin starting to break over his face, “are such a nerd.”
“Says the man who gets all misty-eyed over bias-cut Vionnet,” I retorted, and fired up the green tablet. “Come on. Because something tells me Library Security is going to be back.”