Chapter Twenty-Seven
CHAPTER
Twenty-Seven
FOR THREE NIGHTS, Cassandra waits until midnight, when the archway appears in the wall like a magician’s trick.
There’s something about the way it slides into existence, not there and then unquestionably, firmly there, that sends her stomach roiling, so she averts her gaze until she’s certain the transformation is over.
Since that first night, she’s gone down three times more: first, in quiet desperation, to politely ask the Keeper if there was another way to stop the bookshop’s lights from flickering on and off tauntingly while she tried to work; secondly, to discuss a book that wouldn’t stop emitting a poisonous gas that had already killed its last two owners.
Both times she had felt woefully inadequate under the Keeper’s gaze, but at least she’d tried.
The last time had been the night before, when she’d gone down to ask the Keeper about the river.
But the Keeper had only shrugged and said, “All things must end.” Just the kind of vagary that Chiron would have espoused.
Cassandra might have pushed harder, but she hasn’t forgotten the Keeper’s anger, so tightly held in check—and what it might look like if she loosened it.
The thought of the river weakening is unfathomable. But if Eveline was lying, a small voice whispers, then why did Roth try to recreate the river? Why did Maud’s disappear?
Cassandra is still mulling this over as she picks through Maud’s ledger, trying to decipher her impossible handwriting—not that she knows what she’s looking for.
From what she can tell, it looks much the same as Chiron’s.
A list of sales and requests, most of them fulfilled. The prices each book went for.
Sprig of rosemary from mother’s grave.
Two kittens, one black, one white.
Two molars and one incisor, self-extracted.
Cassandra winces at the last one, though she’s somewhat less sympathetic than she thought she’d be to the self-extraction.
She’s already received several teeth—some human, some decidedly not—one set of which was in exchange for a book that would grant the bearer an extra burst of energy, to be used as they saw fit.
The man who had come in was grey with exhaustion, dark circles underneath his eyes.
He had explained his predicament: three young children; a wife in ill health; two jobs, and no way to balance them both and his family.
With no easy solution, a couple of teeth probably seemed like fair payment.
“Only a page at a time,” she had warned, handing the book over. “Never more than once every forty-eight hours. Precisely.”
Recently, the man returned to the bookshop with a bouquet of wildflowers.
Though the problems hadn’t gone away, he’d regained some colour in his face, and the dark circles weren’t quite so dark.
To her surprise, he thanked her profusely, even though the gaps in his smile were an all-too present reminder of his price.
And the glow of satisfaction still lingers in her chest, weeks later.
The gratitude. The sense of that thief and bookseller scale, tipping ever so slightly back into balance.
As for the teeth, she’d slipped them into the rocky pool of water at the back of the bookshop, where they’d lingered at the bottom for three days, until the river saw fit to carry them away.
Cassandra is still working her way through Maud’s ledger when she turns the page—and stops. Chiron’s scrawl, slightly more comprehensible than Maud’s, on a piece of paper. A list of acquisitions, annotated between them. And each title is on ink.
Like the book he’d tried to steal from Lowell. Cassandra thinks back to the vial still at Sharpe’s, Roth’s monstrous failure of creation in his flat.
Errata twines around her legs, his pupils round and pleading.
After some experimentation, mostly at Byron’s insistence, they’ve discovered that Errata is, by and large, partial to cat food, but also scrap paper, the ends of erasers and pencil shavings.
It’s hard to say how much of this is down to just being a cat.
But other attributes are decidedly more magical.
His ability, for example, to traverse between the bookshops, which Byron had discovered after finding Aloysius’ grocery lists in the reading room, punctured by needle teeth.
The way that the bookshop seems to bend around his presence, so that Cassandra often finds him on a shelf with just enough space and a blanket that Byron swears doesn’t belong to her.
Cassandra reaches down to pet him absently, at once feeling both fur and the solid, slightly velvety spine of a book. The duality of realities elating and dizzying.
“How about it?” she whispers to him, and is rewarded by a rolling, satisfied purr. “Shall we go book hunting?”
Once a month, the book fair opens its doors at 2 a.m.
Cassandra has always known where it lives: the cavernous, disused tunnels of the Underground, accessed through a normally gated alleyway in Covent Garden.
Chiron had taken her often enough as a young protégé.
Despite that—and Byron’s insistent asking—she hasn’t gone once since becoming an owner.
Not enough money, she’d claimed, which is mostly true, and too busy, which is mostly a lie.
This time, as they approach the alleyway, Cassandra is a little surprised to see it lined with at least three different security guards.
They’ve never had guards before, or any kind of security, really.
The alleyway leads to a disused service tunnel, which in turn leads to the book fair.
Cassandra’s stomach clenches as she glimpses another man in uniform, flat gaze raking over her.
“More precautions this year,” Byron says, an unusual hard note in her voice. “Because of the thief. Cass Holt.”
Cassandra’s smile freezes on her face. “I see.”
Byron starts recounting the details in that same strange, hard-edged tone.
But Cassandra is suddenly months away—almost an entire year away, if she puts her finger on the calendar.
Far back enough that she’s still Cass Holt, lounging in a flat that didn’t belong to her, but whose keys had mysteriously fallen into her pocket while the owner was on holiday.
Cass Holt, leafing through one book idly then another, feeling that itch of boredom rouse yet again from hibernation.
Cass Holt, who is reminded of the biggest book sale in London, and decides to sweep it all just because she can.
It was, in some ways, the last heist she ever did.
A thousand books, with no stall left untouched.
Some had gone to Roth—and he’d moaned about the prices, as usual—but so many of them had disappeared into the pockets of other collectors, and yet more unfamiliar hands from there.
It hadn’t occurred to her how those hands might have used the magic inside the books, whether they’d been amplified with the aid of a reader.
Who might have got hurt, to satisfy Cassandra’s boredom.
Her ears are ringing. Something unpleasant thrums in her chest.
If she hadn’t done it—if she hadn’t needed to lay low afterwards—she might never have felt herself getting bored again. She might never have taken up more dangerous readings. And he might never have—
“They didn’t fire any of the booksellers when it happened here,” Byron says. “Not that I was paying attention.”
“They should never have fired you. Cass Holt was… she had an unfair advantage,” Cassandra says suddenly.
She almost slips into the fault line of truth—and worse, almost wants to.
Over the last few months, it’s grown harder to watch Byron wave cheerfully each evening before she leaves, knowing that there’s another timeline out there where Byron is quite happily in her last job, with no silver-fingered thief to intervene.
But Cassandra’s spent too long trying to bury Cass Holt.
If she has to live with her guilt, well, perhaps that’s Lady Fate’s way of tilting the scales back in balance, even if they’ll never be truly level.
“Yeah, the unfair advantage of being a goddamn ghost.” Byron exhales. “Anyway, I’m trying not to be bitter about it. Oh, look,” she says, pointing across the platform. “Finally.”
Cassandra watches Byron head towards a stall with the precision of an arrow, the radiant blue of her twists making her easy to spot amidst the buyers and sellers.
The platform stretches out around her, a cacophony of stalls and severe-looking booksellers propping up tables laden with books.
Even the tracks—less desirable retail space—are full.
If the river’s whisper is absent, then it would barely be audible anyway over the susurration of magic, and the constant chatter of the books.
That’s why it should have been a challenging theft—impossible, even. But for Cassandra, it had been easy. The thieving has always been easy.
Her stomach knots again at the thought of Byron, supremely talented, dedicated, unfailingly kind—and jobless. Cassandra tries to remember what she’d stolen over the last few years, whether she’d met Byron before. But she had never concerned herself with the booksellers or the owners.
She breathes out and tries to collect herself. It doesn’t matter anymore. Byron’s no longer unemployed; Cassandra’s no longer a thief.
Instead she surveys the crowd. There’s that pale-haired owner again, along with a handful of others, their authority obvious from the way their assistants swarm around them, clutching tomes of various sizes.
Then she spies Eveline. Eveline gives her the barest of nods, that infuriating curl of her lips the only sign that she’s also thinking of the conversation between them.
The other owners turn to look at her, and there’s nothing friendly about the way their eyes narrow.
Perhaps members of this mysterious society Eveline mentioned; perhaps not, and it’s simply envy that she’s slipped into such a covetable position at their expense.