Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
With effort, she wrenches her attention back. Making sure she knows every word she says. Making sure it’s all she says.
Lowell escapes from behind the desk. He takes one look at Cassandra, then at the men.
“Aloysius, get them out of here,” he says.
Aloysius grabs a flat trolley, as though he’s done this a dozen times. Grunting with effort, he heaves their frozen bodies over the doorway and tips them out into the night. They sprawl in an ungainly heap on the pavement, their expressions paused in snarls of anger and confusion.
Cassandra keeps speaking, until she finds a snag in the narrative. A natural place to breathe. If it was a book, it would be a comma, or full stop. Then, as forcefully as she’d begun, she cuts it off.
The river whispers, keep going. Keep reading, and the power is hers to control. Keep reading, and dole out real punishment. Blood for blood. Keep reading, and let the world know what true fear really is.
But it’s a whisper she’s heard before, and it’s never been a seductive prospect.
She presses her lips together tightly as Lowell stands over the men, his face thunder.
“The river knows its own,” Lowell says, “and it knows its enemies, too. Don’t come back here again.”
The bookshop is a wreck. Paper strewn across the floor, books ripped from their shelves. New gouges in Lowell’s desk, after who knows how many generations of meticulous care.
But they’re alive. They’re safe.
Cassandra takes a deep breath, and the room spins with her exhalation.
She leans on the nearest wall, letting the sound of Byron and Lowell’s worry roll over her.
This is the problem with reading without a book; the world stays pliable, even after the reading’s ended.
Possibilities flow through her, and she bites her lip to prevent herself from manifesting any aloud.
She closes her eyes, lets the visions of other worlds—magic, no magic, underwater ballrooms and airships, cold winter air, lush jungle, a world with no light at all—pass through her.
Instead, she focuses on her hands, which are here.
Her feet, which are also here. The way the world smells now, blood and ink and sweat—and underneath, the vanilla scent of old books.
The uneven thump of her heart, still jack-knifing from adrenaline.
She’s Cassandra Fairfax, a solid, unshakeable person, present. Thief. Liar. Owner.
Piece by piece, she returns to herself.
When she’s sure of the ground beneath her feet—just scuffed floorboards, in a tired bookshop that smells like the aftermath of violence—she opens her eyes again. Byron is picking up books, but Lowell looks at her sharply.
“I’m fine,” she says, even if the room is still a little wobbly.
“What the fuck was that?” Byron says, and there’s no mistaking the tremble in her voice.
They all look at each other. But Cassandra remembers Eveline’s warning.
“The society,” Lowell says, beating her to it.
Byron frowns. “Are you sure? The society are… well, a myth, gossip—”
“A cult,” he says. “Or something like it. Owners. Not all of them, but… enough. Deliberately secretive. I suppose they consider themselves a higher authority. And judging from tonight, willing to exercise it.”
Cassandra’s head pounds, her mouth dry from the reading. She wipes her forehead and blood comes away on her fingers.
Byron sucks in a breath. “That looks nasty.”
Cassandra ignores her. “Lowell, what can we do to help?”
Aloysius fetches a broom from the back and starts to sweep up the shards of glass. The victim is one of the dark locked cabinets, empty cradles where the books were displayed. Carefully, Byron picks up the torn pages, victory fading from her expression.
Lowell gestures to Cassandra, and she follows him into the office.
“Did they take anything?” she asks.
Lowell rummages in his desk and reappears with a first aid kit. The sight of the green plastic in Lowell’s study seems incongruous with its sombre colour palette, and she forces back a laugh, even though there’s nothing funny about this situation.
“Sit,” he commands.
She shakes her head, even though it makes her woozy. “I’m fine.”
Really, she is. It’s a strange thing to admit to, but there’s a calm depth of clarity that hadn’t been there when she’d first rushed into the shop. The argument plays out again in her head, the words crisp. If she had a pain-free space to think—
Suddenly, Lowell grasps her shoulders, steering her towards the desk chair.
“Sit,” he says. “Please.”
It’s the please that she gives in to.
Lowell is painfully gentle as he pushes back her hair from the wound.
She tries very hard not to notice how warm and large his hands are, how reassuring it is to have someone make the decision for her.
His nose wrinkles as his glasses slip, and she has the sudden, insane urge to push them back up for him.
Lowell finishes cleaning the wound, and sticks a plaster over it, careful not to get her hair caught.
“You’re lucky. The wound is only small. But there’s a lot of blood, and you might have a concussion.”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but head wounds are like that,” she says.
He rolls his eyes. “I see the patient yet lives.” He pauses. “Your reading was very good, by the way.”
“I know.”
“I know you know,” he says, but his mouth tilts upward. “Still, that was… impressive.”
Unusual, he means; she can tell. And it’s true she hasn’t read like that in over six months, after she’d vowed to never call on the river so deeply again. But vows, like rules, are very easily broken.
Lowell’s expression shifts, his smile fading. “Where is it?”
Cassandra looks up at him. Though she can’t place every emotion, expectation is written all over his face. But she waits. She wants to hear him say it. Even though the plaster is in place, Lowell’s hands still linger, warm on her forehead.
“Cassandra,” he says, with unbearable patience.
Even she knows when she’s finally lost. Quietly, she reaches into her coat—Chiron’s coat—and pulls the book out from the pocket.
She sets it on his desk and braces herself for the thunderous accusations, the irreparable fracturing of something she has only just begun to cherish.
But Lowell’s hand only slips down the side of her face, as he searches her gaze.
“You could have asked,” he says quietly.
But she needed it. And he might have said no, or asked why, or any number of questions that she doesn’t have the time or inclination to answer.
Thieving was straightforward. And it had been so freeing to let herself be Cass Holt for just a second and hold all that power, with no one to pry it from her.
To walk away with something flawlessly, even under the eyes of all that security, just because she could.
“Still think you’re right about me, Lowell?” she says bitterly. “Or are you reconsidering?”
“If you’d been caught—”
“I don’t get caught,” she says, then exhales. “I wasn’t caught.”
“Except by me.” His hands fall away. “You shouldn’t have come, but I’m grateful you did. If you hadn’t…”
The rest of the conversation hangs unspoken in the air.
Cassandra had no obligation to come here.
Even if Lowell hasn’t voiced it, she can see the question working on his face: why?
Why, when every single instinct would have her do the contrary?
Why, when she has more than once gleefully dreamed of Lowell Sharpe being taken down a peg or two?
Why, when his book would be hers for the taking?
“You should invest in a good bodyguard,” she says instead, busying herself with the loose threads on the bottom of her shirt. “I hear they’re all the rage.”
“Cassandra,” he says again.
She looks up. Underneath the weariness, there’s an intensity to his expression that sends her frayed nerves fizzing again. Colour rises in her cheeks, but she holds his gaze.
“Why were those men here?” she asks.
He glances at the door. “Research.”
“Oh, come on—”
Lowell puts his hands up, placating. “I’m serious.
When Chiron broke in—” Cassandra winces “—he wouldn’t stop talking about the river, or the books he was after.
So I started looking into it.” He hesitates.
“Just quietly, asking a few questions here and there.
But the answers I got were too vague, if I got answers at all.
“That’s why I was at Maud’s. Alongside her other specialities, she has an interest in the river’s history. The book I bought at the auction was one that Chiron mentioned. And that’s why the…” He gestures to his black eye.
She can already picture it: Lowell asking the difficult questions, not taking no for an answer. Lowell, an inconvenience, then a problem.
“I might have upset a few people,” he admits.
“A few? Lowell—”
“They were here tonight to try and take the book by force,” he says.
“That’s when I realised I was right. I don’t know why, but something’s wrong with the river, like a sickness, or a wasting of sorts.
I couldn’t believe it at first. The river is…
well, you know. We all know—it just is. Does gravity get sick? Does time?”
He looks at her, and there’s something vulnerable in his expression. The tiniest sliver of doubt from Lowell Sharpe, who never doubts anything.
“You’re not wrong,” she says.
And she could be mistaken, but his shoulders unknot ever so slightly. Even though it comes with all the worst implications imaginable.
A world without the river, without magic.
“I’m keeping the book,” Lowell says, returning to his brisk tone, and Cassandra tenses. “But you can borrow it.” He pauses. “As a friend.”
She doesn’t even realise the weight sitting on her chest until it lifts. She hasn’t broken this.
“Is that what we are?” she asks, teasing just a little, and is rewarded by a soft snort of incredulity.
“As effective as it’s proved, I doubt either of us will fall for the strip-tease again,” he says, and the hitch in his voice is so slight that she would never notice it if she didn’t already notice everything about Lowell Sharpe.
But Lowell isn’t finished. He turns to her, serious. “The society saw you help me. They’ll come for you, too.”
Cassandra had known this the second she decided to intervene. She’d bought herself a little time by playing the hapless bookseller before, but now they know what she’s capable of. Now they know it’ll take more than a few casual threats to make her hand over Chiron’s bookshop.
Cassandra holds his gaze. “They can try.”