Chapter 28
twenty-eight
Let’s Get Down to Business
With so much stock to work with, life gets a bit crazy.
I spend two days organizing everything Erica brought, then identifying the books that need the most help.
By the end, I have five boxes of books that are ready to head to the shelves, seven boxes that need to be re-covered—a simple process—and three boxes of books in critical condition.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do about them yet.
I prioritize the re-covers since they’re something I can do now and prepare the shelves for the next big photoshoot.
After a week and a half of cutting cardboard, gluing fabric to covers, pasting on text, and mashing everything together, I have enough stock for half a wall.
That’ll be enough for my social pages and the website to do the initial shoot, but the shop still isn’t nearly ready.
Fortunately, my shit finally arrives, and I’m able to have a real dining room table. I have the movers store my mattress in the bedroom closet since I don’t want them to watch Bastian recall his magic right then and there.
A few hours later, I have a new—ish—fridge installed alongside an element burner stove. It’s not perfect, but it’s serviceable. Bastian is still worried about me leaving the hoard, so I order groceries to be delivered. I will need to go back to the Hanson’s at some point to pay my debt…
Renee comes over to paint genre signs with me the following week, and Bastian lingers nearby, hovering as if she might be a threat.
It’s sort of sweet that he’s so protective.
I find myself recalling the way he’d broken Robbie’s wrist, and threatened to kill Erica.
Why am I not appalled by it at all, but…
“Aroused? With company,” Bastian whispers behind me when Renee goes to the bathroom.
Blood thunders through my body as I keep working on my “Sci-Fi” placard. I artfully pepper the thin, white paint over the blackened sky, creating a starry effect, doing my best to ignore his proximity and inflame the situation.
“Your lips may be silent, but I can hear your heart,” he murmurs.
His fingers graze the bare skin of my neck as his hand glides down to my chest. His palm rests over my heart and I sense the power thrumming through the tattoo on my ribs.
“How does this fucking around work?” he asks. “Can I initiate, or must I wait for you to make the first move?”
His tail slithers over my thigh and I clamp my hand down on it.
“We have company,” I hiss.
His lips ghost over the back of my neck as he groans. “That didn’t stop you from fantasizing about me.”
My hand trembles and I splotch the sign with a heavy dot of white.
The toilet flushing brings me back to my senses.
“Later,” I say, shooing away his tail as I jab my paintbrush at his face.
Bastian backs away with a lewd smirk. “I’ll hold you to that.”
He disappears in an inky mist just as Renee opens the door. I try not to look flustered, but I think she can tell.
“Oh, that was a choice,” she says as she looks at my sign.
The white blotch is right over the spaceship I’d painted an hour before.
I clear my throat to buy time for my excuse. “I was trying to make a lens flare, or, whatever…”
“Uh huh,” she says with amusement as she takes her seat.
We paint in quiet for a while, heat creeping over my face with every second.
“So, any encounters with that warlock?” Renee finally asks.
“Just the one I told you about, but nothing since. Bastian thinks he’s still recovering and planning his next attempt.”
“And your progress?” she prods.
I pull down a deep breath and swish my paintbrush through the air like a magic wand. White curls off the brush in long swipes as I move, rippling like paint in water. I draw her a spaceship…sorta.
She snorts. “Wow, nice cock.”
“It’s a rocket,” I say indignantly.
I jab the brush in her direction and fling the illusionary paint at her. She yelps and covers her face with her arm, then looks at it with confusion when nothing hits her.
“Not real, remember?” I say, dipping my brush in the watery white again because by golly, I’m going to make that lens flare happen.
“Right, so weird,” she says. “But Bastian’s magic is real?”
I nod. “More or less.”
“Why do you think the warlock wants him?” she asks.
“He can create things, even heal people. They want to use him,” I say, circling the brush around the other blotch to make a lighter, more transparent blotch.
“Why didn’t the warlock just blow us up with magic and take him that day on the docks?”
I’d asked Bastian the same thing a few days after the front door incident. He was cagey and reluctant to share, but mostly I think it was from confusion and a lack of details. He doesn’t like to not be in the know.
“I think it has something to do with Oscar. The creep didn’t seem to like him,” I say, giving my buddy a little scritch behind the ears.
He’s balled up some of our drop cloth into a bed for himself, despite having many around the house. The sun glistens against his silky fur as he rolls to the side and shows his belly, an invitation for a few good scritches there. I oblige but stop at three for fear of going over.
“Dude just walked into the lake,” Renee murmurs.
“I know,” I say, shaking my head. “I think he was trying to scare us, like, look what I can do. I don’t know. I’m worried about what he’ll try next, but Bastian tells me we’re very safe here.”
She sighs. “But that means you can’t leave. And plus, what if he comes after us to get at you?”
I scowl. “I hadn’t thought about it…maybe we should go over to the hotel and put some protection spells there?”
But then what about Erica, or anyone else in the town? Would this creeper go that far?
I blow out my cheeks. “The worst thing is just not knowing where he is, or what’s going to happen next, while still trying to get this business going. It was the last of my money, my one shot to start a new life, and if I flop, I’ll have to move back in with my parents—”
She interrupts me with a raspberry. “Yeah, that’s not happening. If things go to shit, you can work for me at the hotel for a while until you figure it out. But things aren’t going to go to shit.”
I purse my lips and stare down at the sign. My eyes burn, and it’s hard to hide the emotion welling up inside me. The fear of failure. The fear of the unknown.
“Hey, dude,” Renee says, grabbing my hand. “I know there’s a lot of uncertainty, but guess what?”
I swallow back the lump trying to grow in my throat. “What?”
“Uncertainty is the only place miracles can happen,” she says with a bright smile.
I chuckle. “How so?”
“If you plan your life so there’s no uncertainty anywhere, are you really leaving space for the biggest, most wonderful, unimaginable things to happen? And what if they come wrapped in a different package? Like, what if this warlock business is a blessing in disguise?”
I set the paintbrush down. “Like he blows himself up outside the shop and gets me national attention as the only bookstore to have someone self-immolate outside it?”
She blinks a few times. “That’s super dark, but yeah, something like that.”
I grumble and grab my phone to check the cycle tracking app. Ah, great…here we go again.
“What is it?” Renee asks.
I flip over my phone and put on a pleasant face. “Nothing.”
She cocks an eyebrow. “Really? ’Cause it looks like you just found shit in your bed.”
I turn the device back over and push it toward her. There’s a big half-crying, half-angry face over today’s date and a red line that runs through the calendar for about a week. She squishes her green-painted lips to one side as she wrinkles her nose.
“I’m in that time,” I say. “It’s hard to notice sometimes until I get called out.”
“Sorry,” she mumbles as she pushes back the phone. “Anything I can do?”
I shake my head. “It’s just this way. Sometimes better, sometimes worse.”
“Well, I’m here for you no matter what kind of day you’re having,” she says.
There goes the waterworks again…
I smile through the shimmering haze in my eyes and thank her before getting back to painting. After finishing our signs, we wrap up the materials for the day, and she tries to invite me out for karaoke night at her bar.
“I’m not really a public singing person on a good day,” I say.
“Yeah, no one else here is, either.”
We share a laugh, but she doesn’t insist, and I’m really glad I didn’t have to shut her down any harder. I walk her to the back door and sigh in relief when I can drop the mask and just let myself be as I am.
Suddenly, I hear the water turn on upstairs, followed by music. But not just any music.
It’s Bastian.
He’s singing.