Chapter 23
CHARLOTTE
The hidden section was in the back of the shop, behind a curtain that looked like it had been there since before curtains were fashionable and had no intention of keeping up with trends.
Mercy parted it with one hand and gestured us through without ceremony.
The back room was smaller than the main shop and smelled different.
The air was dense with the scent of old paper.
When I was little, my mom used to say that books could think, that’s why they were so full of interesting words.
If that was true, then this was the kind of smell that came from books that had been thinking for a very long time.
The floor-to-ceiling shelves were built with no consideration for reaching anything on the top rows without significant commitment.
Some of the spines of the books were labeled.
Some of them weren’t. There were a few objects that weren’t books at all, tucked between volumes like bookmarks in a larger story: a dried bundle of something silver-leafed, a compass with no cardinal markers, a small wooden box with a keyhole but no visible key.
“Some of these are for sale,” Mercy said. “Some of them are not. You’ll know which is which.”
Then she went back through the curtain.
The man looked at the shelves like he’d been handed something precious that he’d wanted for a long time and was now afraid to touch.
He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and started scanning spines with focused, methodical attention, moving left to right, head tilting one way, then the other.
I started on the opposite end and explored whatever caught my attention.
We didn’t talk for a while, but the silence wasn’t awkward.
It was comfortable. The room had a quality that made silence feel inhabited rather than empty.
I heard the October wind against the high, narrow window and the distant sound of harbor bells and, underneath everything, a sound that wasn’t quite a sound, more like the feeling of something old paying attention.
“Anything?” he asked eventually without looking up from a large volume he’d pulled from the middle shelf.
“Not yet. You?”
“Maybe.” He opened the book carefully, almost reverently.
“This might be promising.” He tilted the book slightly toward me, not really sharing, exactly, but offering me a look in case I was interested.
I wasn’t. The page was dense with small text in a script I’d need better light and more patience to read.
“Council records from 1887. Pre-restructuring.”
What I was interested in was why he was looking into council history.
“You’re researching the council?” I kept my voice casual.
He pulled his gaze away from the pages and looked at me with calculating blue-grey eyes. Appearing to come to a decision he nodded. “Yes, for academic purposes,” he said. While his face gave nothing away, the sharp, spicey note that shot through his scent did. He was lying.
“Sure,” I said and went back to perusing the shelves.
Forty minutes later, I found a book I hoped would have some information to help me tucked between two volumes on hereditary magical lineages.
It was a slim book with no title on the spine.
The cover was dark green, almost black, worn smooth at the corners, and when I pulled it free, a faint warmth moved up my fingers that I chose not to examine too closely.
I opened it.
Blank.
Every page, blank. Cream-colored, smooth, faintly luminous in the way of things that had been looked at a great many times during their life. I turned to the front page. Nothing. The back page. Nothing.
I carried it to Mercy anyway. She took one look at it and nodded like she was expecting it.
“Forty-five dollars,” she said. “The pages populate when they’re ready.”
I bought it without arguing, because that was the most honest thing anyone had said to me in three weeks.