Chapter Three
Chapter Three
Focus on the mission, I told myself. Step one—stop staring at Duke’s face. Easier said than done.
Step two—get Duke out of the speakeasy and back on track.
I shooed Koshka out of the top hat. “Go scout around, boy. Make sure there’s no…you know, kidnappers about,” I told him.
Koshka raced from the back room through the wall panel.
“Your hat,” I said. “Sorry about the cat hair.”
Duke dusted it off. “No trouble at all. Shall we have a drink somewhere? My place?”
“No time. You’re tracking Edith King, the socialite, right?”
He’d been adjusting his cuffs but froze when I said the woman’s name.
“Aren’t you a clever clock? This is a secret mission. How did you know that?”
“Long story,” I said, although Duke’s books were on the shorter side, about 250 pages each. “But it’s imperative you get back on the plot. I mean, the job. Yes? Say yes. You need to finish this job.”
It had been a few years since I’d read Empty Graves, but I remembered it well.
Edith King hadn’t been kidnapped at all but had arranged her own abduction to escape her wealthy, powerful, and very abusive husband.
The Duke of Chicago, instead of “solving” the case for her husband, ends up aiding in her escape.
“You saved me, darling. Your wish is my command. And if you don’t know what to wish for, I have a few suggestions.” He grinned devilishly as he lifted his trouser leg and slipped his knife back into his sock.
“That…that is not what…No.” Suddenly, I realized what was happening. I pointed at his chest and backed up two steps. “Wait a minute. Are you trying to seduce me?”
“Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I? You’re beautiful, brave, and, frankly, a little bizarre. All aces in my book. Everyone I meet seems so…so two-dimensional in comparison. You’re the realest girl I’ve ever met.”
The fictional character I’d had a crush on in high school, my book boyfriend, was trying to get me into bed? And not in spite of me being weird but because of it? Had I died and gone to Heaven? Was it Christmas morning? Did I save a genie’s life and get three wishes granted in return?
“Rainy?”
“Sorry, this is weirder than when Ebenezer Scrooge sent me a fruitcake for Christmas. I’m having an existential crisis.”
Duke waved it off. “Happens to the best of us. About that drink I mentioned, should we get it before or after?”
“Before or after what?”
“You tell me.” His intense eye contact was making me uncomfortable, but in a fun way, like when you bike across a wooden bridge.
“You don’t want to get involved with me. I’m a witch.”
“You seem perfectly charming.”
“I meant that literally.”
“I don’t believe it,” he said as he buttoned his jacket. “I’ve seen witches in books. Your hat is flat and you don’t have a single wart on your nose.”
“I’ll prove it,” I said.
“How? Turn me into a frog?”
“Look into my eyes.”
“With pleasure.”
He and I locked gazes. Duke’s dark eyes made it a little harder to read him, but as I tilted my head this way and that, trying to catch the light, I glimpsed the words still dancing across his irises.
“ They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered. This Side of Paradise. F. Scott Fitzgerald. That’s the book you’re currently reading.”
“Good Lord, I am. Last night before bed. How did you—”
“The book leaves an impression in your eyes. I can read it.”
“I’m dazzled. Absolutely dazzled. Let me buy you dinner so you can dazzle me more.”
“You have a mission.”
“Then we’ll meet for a drink after I find Miss King.” Thank goodness Koshka returned at that moment to remind me I wasn’t there on a blind date.
“It’s all clear,” I said. “We have to go. Now.”
“I respect your decision,” he said, “but if I cry about it later, don’t think less of me.”
“You’re incorrigible.”
“You started it by being so beautiful.”
Before I could say another word, he took me by the hand and headed for the door.
“They’re going to notice you holding hands with another man,” I whispered to him.
“Trust me, darling,” he said, “down here, they’ve seen everything.”
He steered us through the throng. Everyone looked a little too bleary-eyed to even notice who was passing, much less comment on us.
My plan was simple enough. Get Duke out of here so he could continue the story. In the now-missing scene, the Duke was supposed to spy on Edith King at the Bathtub, then follow her to the Lombard Hotel near Montrose Beach. All I had to do was send Duke to the hotel to catch up with Edith.
We reached the hat shop on the main floor. I scooped Koshka into my arms, cradling him to my chest as we made our slow way through the dark hat shop. Mannequin heads in fedoras and trilbies and bowlers seemed to stare at us as we passed.
“Odd, isn’t it? All these mannequin heads?” Duke whispered. “Makes one feel like you’re—”
“Being watched?” a man’s voice asked.
We froze.
The overhead lights came on suddenly, making it impossible to hide.
Then the man stepped into our path. I recognized that stony face, those cold marble eyes.
He, too, was dressed for Gangland Chicago in a fedora and black overcoat with a fur collar.
And yes, he did, as Duke said, look like a man whose mother had never once kissed him good night.
“X,” I said.
“Hello, Rainy March,” the man said. “We meet again.”
He didn’t smile, but I could tell he was enjoying himself.
“That’s the blighter who got the drop on me,” Duke said, as he interposed his body between X and me. “Shall I thrash him for you? Do say yes.”
Duke’s voice was steady, brash, unafraid.
Classic male bravado. While set in the 1930s, Duke’s early books had been written and published in the late 1940s and ’50s, during the height of the noir craze.
Noir was a reaction to the societal tumult wrought by World War II, industrialization, women leaving home for the big cities and getting jobs.
Noir detectives were their own breed, devils on the side of the angels, fighting a losing battle against evil but knowing no life other than the fight.
That was part of the reason I’d fallen in love with Duke as a teenager—we’d both chosen the fighting life.
“She’ll say nothing if she knows what’s good for her,” X said as he pulled a gleaming, period-appropriate pistol from his jacket. “Now stay still. Time to burn the trash.”
“Trash? Are you speaking to moi ?” Duke said.
X shrugged. “What can I say? I don’t like your kind.”
“My kind? What is my kind?” Duke demanded. “Do you hate the English? If you’re Indian, Irish, or French, I’ll accept that answer but otherwise—”
“Shut up,” X said.
For the first time since meeting X, Duke’s charm faltered. “Do whatever you want with me,” he said, “but let the girl and her cat go.”
“That’s no girl. That’s a witch.” X pointed the gun in my direction before aiming it back at Duke.
“Those things are hardly mutually exclusive,” Duke said. “And if you hurt her, I will kill you. I might even do it if you don’t hurt her—”
“Yeah, sorry, no,” I said. “You can’t protect me. I’m supposed to be protecting you. Excuse me, please. Can you scooch back a bit, Duke? Thank you.”
I held my breath, took a step sideways, and moved into the gap between X’s gun and Duke’s noble heart.
“I’m not comfortable being defended,” Duke said.
“Get used to it,” I said. “I know what I’m doing. The pen is mightier than the sword.”
“True,” Duke said, “but he has a gun, darling, and you don’t have a pen or a sword.”
Technically true, but I didn’t have to admit it.
“X,” I began, “what’s the plan here?”
“Same plan as always,” he said as he bent down and lifted a small can of gasoline. He set it on the table by him and patted it like an obedient dog. “I’m going to burn this world down.”
It was as bad as I’d feared. When someone in the real world burns a single copy of a book, all they’ve done is make a mess.
The book still exists in other copies, other formats.
But when a Burner enters a story and burns it from the inside, the story itself will turn to ash and all copies in all formats in all the world will cease to exist. Even in the memories of readers.
It will be as if the book had never been published, never been read, never even been written.
“You can’t—” I paused and turned to Duke. “Can you cover your ears, please?”
“Why?”
“She doesn’t want you finding out you’re a fictional character in a book series,” X said, feigning shock. “Oh, dear. Did I say that?”
“Someone’s publishing stories about me?” Duke asked. “They must not be very good, because I haven’t seen them for sale anywhere.”
X waved the gun around the room. “This—all of this—is a book. We’re inside it right now. I thought you were supposed to be some sort of hotshot sleuth?”
Duke looked to me for help. “Do you know what this berk’s going on about?”
I wanted to lie, to tell him anything but the truth, but I couldn’t.
“We’re midway through the second book in your series,” I said.
“It’s how I knew how to find you. You weren’t supposed to be tied up—that wasn’t part of the story.
When I said I was a witch? I’m not the pointy-hat kind with the broom and all that.
I’m a Book Witch. I’m here to set the story straight. ”
“None of this is real, you’re saying.”
“Some of us are,” X interjected. “Just not you.”
Duke nodded. “Now I seem to be having an existential crisis.”
“It’ll have to wait,” I told him, then turned my attention back to X. “Why? Why this book series? Why the Duke?”
“Because it’s garbage,” X said. “Drivel. Poorly written hack work.”
“If you don’t like the Duke of Chicago books, don’t read them,” I said. “But leave them for the rest of us.”
“I’m sparing you from your own bad taste,” X said.
“When we’re finished with our work, there won’t be any books like this left in the world.
Only the true classics. The Odyssey. The Iliad.
The Aeneid. Shakespeare. Chaucer.” He smiled.
“When the right people read good books once again, the world will be perfect.”
“Perfect? You know Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were written during the Black Plague.”
“Perfection is a state of mind. The world fell apart when people turned their backs on great literature. When we’re done, all the garbage will be taken out and only the classics shall remain. Starting here and now.”
He pulled a paperback book from his coat pocket and held it up.
“Is that…about me?” Duke asked.
“ Empty Graves, the Duke of Chicago book two,” X said. He tossed the book to me, and I caught it awkwardly. “Soon we’ll call it Empty Pages. ”
Pages eighty-six and eighty-seven were now blank.
Koshka hissed, and I swore violently.
“Rainy, darling,” Duke said, scandalized. “Where did you learn that word? Down the docks? Wherever it was…say it again.”
With a casual wave of his hand, X knocked the can of gasoline onto the floor, where the liquid swiftly spread.
“X,” Duke pleaded, “I’ll stay if the girl and her cat can go.”
“They can go,” X said. “I’m not stopping them, only you.”
“Koshka, run for it,” I ordered. “Find another witch. There has to be one somewhere in this town. Maybe the one who cursed the Cubs.”
But Koshka stayed and so did I.
“Noble, if misguided,” X said. “There might be stories worth dying for but not this historically inaccurate and poorly written nonsense.” He gave the can a kick and more gas splashed out.
Our eyes watered from the stench. Koshka gave a soft cry of distress. I tried tucking his head into my coat to protect him from the fumes, but I would never be able to shield him from the flames.
“Duke, I need you to do me a favor,” I said through my tears. “I need you to knock the gun out of his hand—which we both know you can do—then get to the Lombard Hotel by Montrose Beach and catch up with Edith King.”
“That’s two favors, actually,” Duke said, ducking his head into his collar. “And I’m not leaving you behind.”
“We’ll be fine,” I said, although I wasn’t sure if it was true.
“No, they won’t,” X said, patting his pockets. “Now where’s my lighter?”
The fumes were making me cough, but I forced myself to speak.
“Ignore him, Duke. You have to go. Now. You have to finish the story. Listen,” I said.
“I’m nobody. But you…you’re the Duke of Chicago.
Even decades after your books came out, they’re inspiring people, entertaining them, comforting them.
And I know because I’m one of them, all right?
I fell in love with your books when I was sixteen, and I still love them.
It’s why he hates you,” I said, pointing to X, “and when people like that hate you, you know you’re doing something right.
Please…I’m begging you, finish your story. ”
I met his eyes, imploring him, willing him to leave me behind and get his story back on track.
He looked at me and a strange expression crossed his face, one even his own author might have struggled to describe, but it seemed as if some kind of seismic shift happened behind his dark eyes.
The floor began to quiver under my feet. The windows rattled in their frames. Hats fell from their mannequin heads.
A different four-letter word escaped my lips. Duke’s too. Then X’s.
“What is happening?” X said as dust filled the air.
“You’re the one who told the Duke he was fictional. Now he’s self-aware, and he’s taking over the book,” I said. I’d heard of this happening. Writers had complained about it for centuries, about characters taking control of the story, but I’d never seen it in action.
“I am?” Duke yelled.
“Yes! And you need to stop it!” I told him, lurching sideways. Koshka jumped out of my arms and ran for cover in the doorway.
“I can’t!”
A ceiling tile crashed near X, who jumped away from the falling debris. That gave Duke the chance he needed to grab the gun from the Burner’s hand. Duke raised it, planning to coldcock X.
“ Si vis pachem, para bellum, ” X chanted. He flicked a silver lighter on and disappeared into a puff of smoke.
“Damn,” Duke said. “I was hoping to crack his skull. Rainy, what do I do?”
The earthquake grew stronger. I fell to my knees as the hat shop crumbled around us.
“What do you want to do?” I called out. “To move a story forward, fictional characters need to want something. Have a goal! A purpose! Will it into being!”
Duke pulled me to him, covering my head with his arms as more of the ceiling crashed down around us.
“I want us to be safe somewhere together!”
And suddenly, just like magic, we were.