Chapter Twenty-Eight
CHAPTER
Twenty-Eight
CASSANDRA TAKES THE book from Lowell home, biting back the guilt every step of the way.
At her desk, she examines it thoroughly, curiosity winning out as it always does.
She needs this book, she reminds herself.
If Chiron had found something in here—had died for it, or at least turned down that dreadful road because of its contents—then she’ll have one more piece of the puzzle.
And she’s fast running out of ideas otherwise.
For that, she can tilt Lady Fate’s scale, just a little.
And Lowell? a small, stubborn voice whispers to her.
Even though dawn is peering through the windows, and she hasn’t slept thanks to the fair’s nocturnal hours, she opens the book and begins to read.
As dawn bleeds into day, the bookshop swells and sighs around her.
Byron lets herself in at midday, but Cassandra barely hears her.
When she nips upstairs for her fourth cup of coffee, jittery with exhaustion and caffeine, she comes back downstairs to discover a thick patterned blanket draped over the chair and Errata inserting his paw into the empty inkwell on the desk.
It’s dark again by the time she finishes the book.
She closes it carefully, feeling the weightlessness of too little sleep tug at her thoughts.
But crowding out every other feeling is bitter disappointment.
The book is exactly what it says it is: a list of recipes and experiments around ink, annotated in several different hands, each somewhat ominously picking up where the last one leaves off.
Ink to magnify an already powerful reading, ink to breathe life into inanimate objects—a change of handwriting, a cautious advisement that the cost heavily outweighs the benefit—ink to change colours at whim, like an exceptionally frivolous mood ring.
Yet nothing that would hint as to Chiron’s interest in it specifically.
Though, equally, nothing that might tell someone like Roth how to sacrifice a man in his climate-controlled library.
That alone should be a relief, but Cassandra can’t help but feel that she’s once again disappointed Chiron, made all the worse that he’s not here to intervene.
She rubs her face wearily. Maybe if she had more clues to go on, or if she was less tired, or smarter, she would know. Maybe she would have already solved it, with no need for subterfuge, if she knew Chiron as well as she thought she did.
You stole the book for nothing. You betrayed Lowell’s trust for nothing.
She’s just about to head upstairs when someone bangs on the door. They’re closed, and she has every intention of ignoring them, but then she hears a familiar voice. She glances at the frosted silhouette against the windowpane.
“Ignore it,” Byron says from the back, then yells, “We’re closed!”
Outside, there’s another knock, and a muffled voice. “Cassandra—you have to help—”
Setting aside the ledger, she goes to the door. Aloysius stands on the threshold, soaking wet from the rain. His eyes are wide with panic.
“I didn’t know who else to go to—I don’t even know if you can help, but he said something about Maud, and some guys and—”
A terrible, twisting feeling submerges her.
“What’s happened?” she says.
“It’s Lowell,” he says breathlessly.
Cassandra pauses as she relays Aloysius’ panicked words again.
Lowell, who is stubborn enough to defend his bookshop to the last, and stupid enough to not ask for help when he needs it most. She thinks about the heft of the men who’d come into Maud’s bookshop, how their hands had looked made for ripping limbs apart.
And how, weeks later, Maud isn’t returning her phone calls.
Cassandra glances at Byron. “Get your coat and close up.”
Cassandra flings on Chiron’s oversized jacket, hung up by the door. At the last minute, she grabs the ink book and shoves it into a deep pocket. If she can steal without leaving a trace, then it should hardly be a test of her skills to put a book back unnoticed.
Lowell’s grey car is idling outside on the street, and they pile in.
Cassandra barely has time to buckle her seatbelt before Aloysius slams on the accelerator.
The car veers alarmingly down narrow streets and twisting alleyways.
Multiple drivers honk as the car fishtails onto a main road.
Cassandra grips the underside of the seat, knuckles white.
Next to her, Byron is muttering a litany of swear words.
But neither of them tell Aloysius to slow down.
They reach the bookshop in a storm of spray and exhaust smoke, juddering to a halt outside.
As soon as Cassandra steps out of the car, she knows something is wrong. The bookshop’s door is wide open, every light blazing, but there’s no one standing watch over the entrance. The knot in her gut tightens.
Without waiting for Aloysius or Byron, she strides towards the bookshop and over the threshold.
Almost immediately, she pinpoints the wrongness.
An argument is in full swing, raised voices shattering the stillness.
Glass shards litter the floor, along with hundreds of torn pages scattered indiscriminately, like blood at a murder scene.
The shelves shiver and rumble with ominous restlessness.
Dread floods through her, as she edges her way towards Lowell’s office.
The first thing she catches is Lowell’s voice, calm to within an inch of icy. “We’ve had this conversation before, gentlemen. But my answer hasn’t changed.”
“You will change your mind tonight, Sharpe.” The crack of knuckles, gleeful anticipation of violence.
Before she can stop herself, Cassandra steps into the frame of the doorway.
She only has a second to process the picture in front of her—Lowell, backed up behind his desk, although his demeanour would suggest utter control; two men practically bursting out of their coats with muscle—before Lowell’s eyes catch hers.
Shit.
The men swivel at almost the exact same time.
“Who the fuck are you?” one of them asks.
“Blake,” the other one says, warning.
“She’s no one,” Lowell says, with convincing disinterest. “A customer.”
Cassandra ignores him. “I reckon you guys should leave.”
The larger man—though they are both so impossibly large—shoulders his way forward, towering over her. She resists the urge to take a step backwards.
“What’s it to you?” he growls, inches from her face.
What is it to her? She’s spent the last few weeks being asked that very question, in so many different ways. From Lowell, from Roth, from Eveline. And she’d played nice because that’s what an owner does. An owner is supposed to handle things diplomatically. An owner is supposed to compromise.
The man pushes her backwards, and her feet slide against the polished floorboards. Rough enough to make a point, to add fuel to her imaginings of all the ways this could spin out.
Lowell breaks. “Cassandra, please—”
Fuck compromise.
“I said you should leave,” she says.
Behind her, scattered footsteps come to a halt. Byron and Aloysius, the latter brandishing his wet umbrella.
Several things happen at the same time. Lowell darts out from behind his desk, an ornamental paperweight in his fist. The larger man, Blake, pulls his arm back for a swing—Cassandra sees every millisecond in slow motion, courtesy of the adrenaline coursing through her—and she responds with the first line of self-defence she was ever taught.
With as much force as she can muster, she drives her knee upward, into his groin.
He roars.
Lowell brings his fist hard down on the smaller man. Cassandra ducks.
She’s not fast enough; Blake’s elbow connects with her head, hard. Pain flares, and black spots dance in her vision. Something hot and red sings in her. She responds with a glancing blow to his knee. Another to his face. Anywhere with tender flesh.
He shoves her on the floor and slaps her across the face. Her forehead burns and something wet trickles down her face; a ring glints on the man’s finger, the edges oiled with her blood.
“We told you to stay out of it,” he hisses. “But you’ll see what happens when the Moon has—”
Aloysius cracks him over the head with an umbrella and he topples sideways, releasing his grip. Cassandra scrambles upright, every nerve ringing.
Even though the men are physically outnumbered, there’s no way she can win this fight. Not without destroying half of the bookshop. She glances at Lowell, already with that nasty black eye. None of them are fighters.
But there’s one more card up her sleeve.
She grabs the bottle of ink on the desk and smashes it, liquid trickling in her fist. When she presses her fingertips to her mouth, they taste bitter and metallic, in the way of all stories.
Then she takes a deep breath, and summons every ounce of her belief.
Feels the world expand inside her ribcage alongside her lungs, then past her body, past this room.
Feels possibility itself, past and present and future and all the sideways worlds where magic is more than a book and some ink, or less than a dream inside a dream.
She lets it all balance inside her head, impossible and true.
Then, without any words in front of her, she reads.
The river rushes through her, laced in every word.
She reads in a language she doesn’t recognise, and doesn’t try to.
The language of the river itself. The room shivers, shifts sideways.
Out of the corner of her eye, the river rises around her, both there and not there, in a phantasmal mist. The bookshop shudders at the pressure.
Books are just stories, after all. And there’s more than one way to tell them.
The men halt, as time rolls to a sluggish pace around them. One mid-punch; the other stepping backwards, trying to regain purchase on the situation. Cassandra watches, fascinated, as the dust particles hover around them, caught up in the reading.