Chapter Four
Chapter Four
It happened that fast, like someone had clicked a button on a slideshow. One second we were in the hat shop and click —we were somewhere else entirely.
Duke, Koshka, and I were in the middle of an office. What office? I couldn’t tell. The only light in the room came from a gas streetlamp burning outside the window.
Duke walked over to a desk and switched on a brass lamp with a green shade.
“How are you, darling? All in one piece?”
I gasped, slapping a hand over my mouth when I saw the door. It had a panel of frosted glass with a name painted on it in gold letters. And although the letters were backward, I knew what they said.
I lowered my hand. “This is your office. This is the Duke of Chicago’s office.”
“You’re far more impressed by that than you should be.
Perhaps if we were in my bedroom…” he said with a wink.
Then he shrugged off his coat and hung it on the rack.
In his pin-stripe vest and shirtsleeves, he looked slightly less intimidating but even more handsome.
He came behind me and helped me off with my coat, which I enjoyed much too much.
He hung it up next to his on the rack. Our coats, side by side. I’d had dreams like this…
“Where did our friend go? And what on earth was he saying?” Duke asked while I tried to calm my racing heart.
“X? He’s back in the real world,” I said.
“How on earth—”
“It was a spell,” I said. “For some reason people tend to think Latin works better for magic.” While we Book Witches used umbrellas to delicately and carefully go in and out of stories, Burners used lighters to burn holes in and out. Another thing to repair once I got back home.
“So he’s gone away? We’re safe?”
In the lamplight, I gave myself a once-over. My suit was pin neat, not a speck of dust to be seen. Koshka leapt onto the desk and began to groom his paws. But that was only force of habit. He was fine too.
“Gone for good, I hope, but at least for now. You scared him off with that earthquake stunt.”
“Thank God,” Duke said. “I was dying to be alone with you. And you, comrade.” He bent and gave Koshka a little pat on his head, then rose up and looked around. “How the devil are we in my office? Did you do this with your”—he wiggled his fingers in the air—“ book witchcraft?”
“I have some interesting abilities, but this kind of scene change is not one of them,” I said.
“Burners can destroy stories and Book Witches can restore them, but only a fictional character can take over a plot from the inside and change it like you did. Which I appreciate. I really did not want to be burned again.”
“Again?” He spun and faced me.
“Oh, I was burned in a story once. Didn’t enjoy it. Don’t recommend it. Zero out of five stars.”
“Were you injured?”
“A little,” I said and pulled up my sleeve. “Not much.”
The burn scar was about the size of a playing card, pink and smooth and not very pretty.
His eyes widened. “Rainy, that’s an enormous scar.”
“We don’t call them Burners for nothing,” I said and started to roll my sleeve back down. Duke caught my hand and held it.
“May I?” he asked.
“If you want.”
He pulled my sleeve back again and touched the scar tissue. A third-degree burn, it had left me with no sensation. A shame. I would’ve enjoyed feeling his gentle caress.
“Nobody burns The Grapes of Wrath on my watch,” I said, trying to sound bold and brassy. “Or the Duke of Chicago.”
He kissed the back of my hand and whispered, “My hero.”
That was, of course, when Koshka bit my ankle.
“Ow!” I shouted. Duke started. I looked down at Koshka at my feet. “You were supposed to bite him when he got flirty, not me.”
He didn’t apologize, but that’s no surprise. In The Last Unicorn, the legendary fantasy author Peter S. Beagle writes, “No cat anywhere ever gave anyone a straight answer.” Well, no cat anywhere ever gave anyone an apology either.
Duke only laughed softly and released my hand.
“Have a seat. Can I offer you a drink?” he asked.
Most noir detectives had drinking problems. It comes with the territory. Duke was a rare exception. He drank but not heavily and rarely on the job.
“It’s Prohibition,” I teased, as I sat in the chair facing his desk.
“Your point?” He dropped into his office chair and threw his feet on top of his desk, crossed at the ankles.
“The truth is, I can’t drink.” I petted Koshka, who was handling this shift of scene far better than I was. “Or eat. Or sleep. I could be stuck here if I did.”
“Oh no,” he said, feigning shock and horror. “Anything but that.”
“You’re flirting again.”
“You’re hardly one to talk after that speech you gave about being in love with me.”
“No, no, I didn’t say that. I said I was in love with your books. That’s different.”
He nodded. “So you weren’t in love with me?”
“Well, I didn’t say that either.”
He laughed softly. “I knew it.”
“I had a teenage crush on you a long, long, long time ago.”
“Did you ever…” Duke wiggled his fingers again, as if performing a magic spell.
“Did I ever what?”
“Visit me before?” he asked. “Lurk in the shadows, blow kisses at my back?”
“Oh, no, never,” I said. “That’s completely against the rules. We can’t go into a book unless we’re on a mission.”
“But you were tempted, yes?”
“Every single day.”
He laughed his warm, delectable male laugh, a laugh that could make a nun break her habits.
“So tell me how this works, darling,” he said. “Your magic. Are you Book Witches born or did you sell your soul to someone? Do you cast spells? Own a cauldron? Can I see your wand or should I buy you dinner first?”
“You really want to know?” I asked.
He took his feet off the desk and faced me.
“I want to know everything about you,” he said. From any other man that would’ve sounded like a line, a pickup. But I could tell Duke meant it. I knew I should be getting Duke back on the plot, but I couldn’t tear myself away from this conversation. Not yet. This was a teenage dream come true.
“Some Book Witches are born into it, like me,” I said.
“Witchcraft often runs in families. Otherwise, we put enchanted recruitment posters up in libraries and bookstores and coffee shops. To normal people, the posters look like someone’s selling gently used tractor tires.
To anyone with latent magical ability, it says we’re hiring people to protect and defend stories. ”
“Fascinating. So no soul selling? That’s all anti-witch propaganda, I assume?”
“We don’t sell our souls to anyone, although we do, usually, owe our entire paychecks to the local bookstore. To get in and out of stories, we use little spells. No cauldron, but I do have a coffee mug in the shape of a cauldron. And my wand, so to speak, is in the alley outside the Bathtub.”
“How did you know that Burner person had infiltrated my world? Magic, I assume?”
“We have a whole coven that monitors books for damage. Someone discovered a blank page in your book. X had you tied up in a basement so you couldn’t finish the plot, and the story started to die.”
“Die?” He sounded aghast.
“You pull a plant from the ground, it’ll eventually wilt and die. It’s kind of like that. But I rescued you so he decided to—”
“Eighty-six me on page eighty-six?”
I nodded. “But now that X knows I’m watching your books, he likely won’t try it again for a long time. And once you get back to your mission with Edith King, and I leave, the story will go back to the way it was, the way your author intended it.”
“And if I don’t finish the mission?”
“You saw the blank pages,” I said. “That blankness will spread through the rest of Empty Graves, then all copies of Empty Graves, and then finally…people who read the book will forget it ever existed.”
“Dastardly. Well, we shan’t let that happen,” he said, lifting his glass to salute me.
“You’re handling this well,” I said. “Finding out you’re a fictional character would do a number on most people.”
“It’s good news in a way, really,” Duke said.
“How so?” I asked.
“My brothers,” he said. “You can never die if you’ve never lived, yes?”
I knew his backstory as well as he did, but listened as he recounted his brothers’ fates. His oldest brother, David, died in the Great War. Charles, the second-oldest, caught typhus in the trenches two years later. Edmund died by suicide.
“Eddie had been suffering from shell shock,” Duke said, his voice soft.
“Poor lad. But you say this is a novel, yes? Then it didn’t happen, did it?
My brothers didn’t go to war. They didn’t witness horrors.
They didn’t die for naught and in vain. It was all just lines in a book. I find that strangely comforting.”
While Duke was reciting the litany of his tragedies, Koshka had trotted over to him and pounced into his lap.
“This,” he said, stroking Koshka under the chin, “is also strangely comforting. I wish my writer had given me a cat. No, no, I’m not bothered at all to learn I’m pure fiction. It explains so much.”
“Does it?”
“I don’t seem to age. Time passes very slowly. If I get shot—which I do more than I should, I think—I tend to heal completely by my next case. Always seemed slightly suspicious to me. I solve every case I take on. And I’m tragically unattached. You’d think a duke would at least have a steady girl.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Fictional detectives are almost always single.”
“Surely not.”
“Miss Marple? Single. Poirot? Single. Sherlock? Sam Spade? Easy Rawlins—he’s after your time—he was married but got divorced.”
“Glad to know it’s not anything I’m doing wrong,” he said.
“You do everything right,” I told him. Then blushed. “I mean…your character does all the right things. Like focusing on solving cases instead of dating. That’s what I mean.”
“Edith King again?” he asked.
“You do really need to finish your story.”
“But I’m having so much fun with you, Rainy. You…you’re not fictional, are you? You’re real. You’re more real than anyone I’ve ever met.”
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“The same way I can tell a diamond from a story about a diamond.”