Chapter 2
Ewas on her third big glass of her Two Buck Chuck wine.
Sadly, the chuck wasn’t even two bucks anymore, so she’d been saving this bottle for an opportune time.
A time like right then, when wallowing seemed like the best option.
She gulped the dregs of the serviceable cabernet in her glass and reached for the bottle on the coffee table.
Sitting cross-legged on the small, fluffy couch in the middle of the living room made it somewhat difficult, so she ended up toppling forward, smacking one hand down on the coffee table as her head careened toward it.
A yelp, then a harsh laugh ripped through the small apartment as she corrected her position and gave herself a figurative pat on the back for managing to save her head and her wineglass at the same time.
“Maybe I don’t need this,” she muttered as she stood with the wineglass in one hand and the nearly empty bottle in the other.
Feeling sorry for herself wasn’t new to E, but it also wasn’t a habit.
She had a shitty life at times, and wallowing felt good when it got shittier.
Knowing she’d dust herself off in the morning and get to work figuring out how to survive for two months made it not feel nearly as pathetic.
Maybe she could get a new credit card and max it out?
Deal with the consequences later. She already had a solid chunk of debt to deal with thanks to two years in NYC, so why the hell not?
Gritting her teeth, she imagined big, cartoony bags of money labeled “debt” in her head, with a tiny cartoon her being squashed by all of them.
“Fuck it,” she said, either to the debt or the wine, because she brought the bottle to her lips, and in a few strong pulls, finished it off.
Her balance faltered as she threw her head back, making her stumble.
Maybe it was a good thing she had no more wine in the place, she thought.
She’d obviously had enough. Not drunk, but not exactly sober, for sure.
“Thanks, grad school,” she said with a mock salute of the empty, red-stained wine glass in her hand to the equally empty room at large.
It was true that college and grad school gave her a slightly higher alcohol tolerance over the years, which helped when she wanted to drown her sorrows but didn’t want to go overboard.
Then again, it didn’t make her a cheap date any longer either, and she needed to pinch where she could.
Her feet and legs were heavy, unwieldy, but not completely unmanageable.
She bent to put the wineglass in the sink for later, right beside her one, lonely dirty fork and the red-stained Tupperware which had held her dinner leftovers.
Cheap pasta, canned sauce, and powdered parmesan went a long way for someone on a budget, and she’d managed to stretch it out over four days of dinners that week.
A snort escaped when she thought about what Mitchel might have had for dinner that evening.
Expensive sushi, maybe. Or a nice dry-aged steak at a frou-frou place like Delmonico’s.
E only knew about Delmonico’s because Lisa’s parents had taken her with them for a celebration dinner when they’d both gotten internships at their top choices, a once in a lifetime treat for someone like her.
With a combo of anger and sadness and self-pity welling up inside, she tossed the wine bottle into the recycling, her shoulders bunching when she heard the deep clatter and bang of the heavy glass hitting the bin.
At least the tinkling of broken glass didn’t sound, so she shrugged it off and moved with slow, plodding steps toward her alcove.
Lisa was gone, had been for months at this point, and E had the apartment all to herself.
Despite this, she still pulled her makeshift privacy curtain tight against the city lights outside the living room windows.
A small, muted grayscale world of bed, desk, and bookcase spread before her.
Her clothes, hanging above her bookcase thanks to the box store rack and shelf system she installed when she first moved in, swayed slightly when she disturbed the air.
She had little there; everything in similar colors and styles to easily mix and match.
Lisa had talked about how smart capsule wardrobes were when she’d first seen it, which made E’s face flame with shame.
She wasn’t trendy, just poor. Something Lisa, bless her kind soul, didn’t know anything about.
She burrowed into the oversized t-shirt she’d won at a trivia night in college and the red-and-black pajama bottoms she’d had since high school.
One good thing about keeping clothes for an absurdly long amount of time: threadbare t-shirts and flannel pants were comfier than new.
She crawled into her bed, which thanks to Lisa once again, was comfy.
Her friend had bought the thing, claiming she’d wanted it to keep for guests at some point.
It hugged her like a cloud, warm and loving and making her miss Lisa, who would have drunk the bottle of wine with her, uncorked a second, and railed about the unfairness of it all, even when she couldn’t fully comprehend what it meant or how it felt.
E moved to get under the comforter, her leg slipping a bit and bumping her bag.
She muttered to herself as she hefted it off the bed and placed it on the old wooden chair at her desk.
A thump sounded behind her, and she whirled, staring a moment at the slim book she’d found earlier.
E could’ve sworn she placed the thing on her desk, not back on her bed, fully intending to get it back to work somehow without anyone noticing.
She definitely didn’t need people thinking she’d stolen it.
Mitchel might be more wary of her intentions when it came to such things.
Rich people often were when they found out someone they knew was poor.
But, in all honesty, with her looks and clothes and general demeanor, he probably knew how poor she was long ago.
Her head was hazy, running through such weird, paranoid thoughts as she stood staring down at the small book.
The thing shimmered against the hardwood floor, as if it emanated its own light.
Ridiculous, she knew, so she scooped it up to place it on her desk.
But now, with lots of wine in her system, she was intrigued.
E turned, taking the two whole steps back to her bed and laying down across the width, her upper body rested but her feet still planted on the floor.
Holding the book up over her head, she flipped through the pages, the scent of old paper and binding smacking her in the face.
E breathed the smell she loved deep, happy to have it here when she was feeling so down about her life, her choices, her options.
This book was like all the ones she’d helped over the years; all the books she could potentially bring new life to one day.
If she just got through these bare days.
“I will, damnit. But money’d sure make it a helluva lot easier,” she muttered to herself.
The book slipped from her grip, crashing down on her face.
“Shit!” She yelped, rubbing her now-sore nose as she sat up in bed.
Her hand held the book open to a beautiful page.
E blinked up at it, noting the gold and green filigree that appeared remarkably preserved, even to her tipsy eyes.
At the top, in the squared but elegant medieval script so often used in books from this period, was an oddity.
The Middle English title read “To Somne Moneye for to Multiplie.” She didn’t know much Middle English, but this was close enough to modern English she got the gist.
Shooting upright in bed, she pulled the book close to her face, skimming the lines beneath the title. It was Latin. She got some of it. The first bit talked about gods and monsters and whatever else. The rest, though? It read like a spell. Damn, Anne’d been right.
She’d encountered a few spell books in her work.
They were rare, because witches kept their books to themselves, passed down from witch to witch within a particular coven.
Even though witches were known for writing a lot of things down, something other supernaturals like vampire and werewolves didn’t exactly do, it stayed within their group.
Much like all supernatural things, they stayed within their own clusters.
Hell, E didn’t blame them, what with their bloody history with humans.
She’d met more supernaturals in NYC than she had in Ohio.
A handful of vampires and witches. They were cordial, if aloof, so she knew the basics of each group, but that was it.
Now even more fascinated, E flipped the book over in her hand, looking at the binding and title again.
From the little she knew of spell books, it was abnormal for one to be written in both Middle English and Latin.
Latin seemed to be the given, although she’d heard tell of older tomes in Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Didn’t matter much, because the coven usually included their own translations and notes and such.
Which was why they rarely were found outside covens.
They held too much knowledge and history to be forgotten or discarded.
Hell, even the purges after the supernaturals revealed themselves to humans didn’t mean any passed down to human museums or libraries.
When they burned a witch, they burned all her books, too.
Those types of humans always took the books along with the people, or even took the books before they started taking the people.