Chapter 17 #2
“Yes, I can.” He cut me off. “Because the shop, it’s all I’ve got. If I lose that—”
“I know it’s all you’ve got,” I shouted. “I know it’s your dream, I know it’s your whole life, but we also have a woman in a goddamn coma.” I gestured wildly back at the still figure of the Librarian. “A woman in a coma and a library in danger.”
“And what’s a dress shop compared to that?” He folded his arms across his chest. “Is that what you’re thinking? It’s just a dress shop. It’s just clothes.”
“Don’t go putting words in my mouth—”
“You thought it. Everybody does. Look at him and his silly sewing machine, get a real job. Doesn’t matter that I’ve built my life around a craft I love, a craft I’ve put thousands of hours into learning, a craft I’m damn good at.
Doesn’t matter that I’ve got a business I’m trying not to let get sucked down the drain along with every penny I own.
Doesn’t matter in the long run because when the chips are down, it’s just clothes. ”
“Oh, fuck off! I didn’t say any of that and you know it!”
We stood glaring at each other, my hands doubled up at my sides, him standing with arms folded. I swallowed my anger, because it wasn’t anger that was making me flare up like this, not really. It was fear.
“Beau,” I said, much more quietly. “It’s terrible that the Board is trying to get at you this way, but—” But what? He stood there, face set, not looking at me. I reached out to touch his gabardine sleeve. “Please don’t let them scare you off. Don’t go. I’m just trying to save this place.”
And I’m scared to do it alone.
“Yeah, well, I’ve got to go home and save my place.” He looked down. “Can you please let me out of here?”
I swallowed around the boulder suddenly lodged in my throat. “Okay.”
But I didn’t need to go hunting on my tablet for an Unlock code.
The Library knew when it wasn’t wanted. The door opened by itself, just a hair, showing a sliver of library I wasn’t familiar with—Beau’s local branch, maybe.
The handle rattled under his hand, an inquiring sound: You’re sure about this?
But Beau yanked the door open the rest of the way, speaking over his shoulder without looking at me.
“Come by Brummell’s and let me know how it all turns out, all right? ”
“Beau—”
“I’ve gotta go,” he said again, and the man of my dreams walked out of the Astral Library without looking back.
Well, I wasn’t giving up that easy.
I needed help here, and I wasn’t giving up on the one person I’d been able to enlist as an ally since the Librarian went down.
I was going to crack this tablet, get past all the Access denied pop-ups on the email function, and find a way to get Beau a message.
Tell him to bring that goddamn Belle dress back to the Library and work on it with time in limbo until he was done—he could keep watch on the Librarian while I went margin-traveling to lead Chad and Chester away again.
He could finish his commission and help the Library—it wasn’t an either-or.
He could choose both. Dammit, I was going to make sure he chose both (me, please choose me, Beau, I really want you to choose me!) and I was going to do it now.
I blew out a breath. “It’s a plan,” I said aloud to the Library, and headed to the Wardrobe Department to change back into my old jeans and the T-shirt I’d put on what felt like a million years ago for my shift at The Bump ’n’ Grind (more comfortable than a tattered Regency walking dress and spencer).
I didn’t dare head into a book world yet with Library Security breathing down my neck, but I could hunker down in here to crack the tablet.
Get messages off to the Gallerist and the Programmer as well as Beau, because I refused to play Lone Hero here.
For one thing it was a real cliché; for another it was unnecessary.
There were people both inside and outside this strange, magical plane who could help me, if I could just find a way to rope them back in.
“All right, tablet, you and I are going to have ourselves a negotiation,” I said, coming out of Wardrobe and swiping the little green machine off the counter. But the clock gave a soft chime, and when I looked up, I saw another piece of paper drift out of the book drop.
I braced for another of those nauseatingly bureaucratic, politely menacing, poorly punctuated communiqués from the Library Board, but this one wasn’t on official letterhead, and it wasn’t typed out either.
It was handwritten in a breathless slantwise cursive, and I knew that writing like the back of my hand.
I’d seen it so many times when I was a kid: on grocery lists, on day planners, on library cards.
On that last birthday card I’d received at thirteen, saying, See you soon!
My mother started this letter without salutation, as though we were just picking up a conversation we’d abandoned ten minutes ago. Or as if she was writing so fast, she didn’t have time for greetings.
Alix, honey, where are you? I’ve been trying to catch up with you from book to book, and you keep slipping out of reach. I don’t dare stay in one place too long with the Board trying to find me. Are they trying to get their hooks in you too?
A line drop there, making my stomach drop too, like I’d stepped off the edge of a cliff. I kept reading, realizing distantly that my hands were shaking.
I’m sorry I was gone for so long. I was in a book—it’s a long story, but time passed differently there, and the Board .
. . well, they’re bad news. I don’t need to tell you that.
But you shouldn’t have to face them by yourself.
I can help—I know a little something by now about how they operate, God knows.
I don’t know where you’re going to pop up next, the way you’ve been running book to book, and the Library’s sealed up like Fort Knox. So I’m waiting in the Boston Public Library—the Reading Room. Your favorite place.
Let me help you, Alix. You don’t have to do this alone.
—Mom
Her handwriting. Her voice. Her words—I could hear her in my head, the breathless rush of her voice when she was worried.
The entire inside of me tumbled and roared, bells clanging in my brain, hands still trembling.
I’d been right—all along, I’d been right.
She had disappeared into a book; I had been seeing her in one book world after another.
And now she was waiting outside. Waiting to explain. Waiting to help.
I wasn’t alone.
My mouth opened in a silent gasp, and I stumbled dazedly up the green-carpeted stairs toward the big door. I wasn’t thinking clearly, wasn’t thinking much of anything except that I needed to get out of here.
I wrenched open the door and ran out of the Astral Library into the familiar book-bound space of the BPL Reading Room. The sanctified hush of it in the morning light streaming through the windows—it had to be before opening hours; the room was empty.
Almost.
A woman sat at the very farthest table on the other end of the Reading Room, back turned toward me, head bowed.
My lips parted, letting out a cracked whisper. “Mom?”
Hardly feeling my feet beneath me, I began to walk down the central aisle. My heart thudded. I raised my voice so it echoed off the high barrel-vaulted ceiling. “Mom?”
She started to turn. And then I ran smack into a doughy wall of chest covered by a poly-blend uniform shirt with a Cheez Whiz stain.
“Alix Watson,” Chad intoned. “Please come with me—”
It was just reflex, I swear. I’d dispatched Chad so many times by this point, I moved on instinct as soon as I felt the clammy touch of those surprisingly strong fingers.
I wasn’t thinking as I shoved him hard with both hands.
I wasn’t thinking that we weren’t in a book world anymore; that this was the real world in the very real Boston Public Library.
I realized it in a split second of horrified comprehension right before Chad fell heavily backward, head striking the corner of the nearest reading table.
No slow collapse of empty clothes this time.
There was a sound like a wet sack of cement hitting a brick hearth and an ear-splitting howl as a very real, very corporeal man hit the floor.
I faltered back in utter horror as a drench of shockingly crimson blood spattered across the floor from a split in Chad’s scalp, as Chester came running in his knife-edged uniform.
The real Chester, not the simulacrum version that had been chasing me from Dickens to Dumas.
“Alix Watson, you are trespassing on Library grounds outside of public hours of operation and have assaulted a member of Library Security.”
I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Chad, groaning on the floor, clutching his bleeding head. I’d done that. I hadn’t distinguished truth from fiction and now a man was on the ground gushing blood.
Mom, I thought, and looked around wildly.
But the woman rising from the table at the far end of the Reading Room and coming toward me with a click of heels wasn’t my mother.
It was just a clerk, some middle-aged library staffer with a puzzled face—puzzlement quickly turning to horror as she saw Chad on the floor bleeding, and began to scream.
I recognized her vaguely from my shifts shelving books here as a page—I knew her, and she definitely wasn’t my mother.
My mother wasn’t here.
Inside the cage of my ribs, my heart knocked like a coffin lid.
Chester was dragging me along by the arm now. I didn’t protest. Mom, I kept thinking, Mom—and then, absurdly, Beau. What I’d give to see Beau charge the length of the Reading Room to my rescue, swinging his sword cane. But Beau was on his way back to his shop, long gone.
I looked at the note in my hand. Let me help you, Alix. You don’t have to do this alone. Still my mother’s handwriting, still her voice. But where was she?
Chester bundled me down the Reading Room, clearly thrilled at the chance to do some actual manhandling. I had one last nightmarish glimpse of the spray of Chad’s blood on the floor.
What had I done?
“Alix Watson,” Chester boomed, dragging me out, “I am placing you into custody for violent criminal assault.”