Chapter Forty-Four
CHAPTER
Forty-Four
IT HAD BEEN a long day, and now it was looking to be a longer evening.
Cassandra had dressed accordingly for the event—a black designer dress that she’d stolen from an upscale shop, armed with a little ink magic and just enough confidence to swing the rest. She was aware that this was a particularly important event, but no one had told her what for, exactly. Just that her services were required.
So she went.
She circulated, smiled dutifully at the compliments paid to her dress, smiled a little less when one of the owners had remarked how much he’d like to see what lay underneath.
Gleefully, she noted the absence of Roth and his ilk.
This was an evening with a higher calibre of client: senior booksellers, with decades of experience built into their lined faces and calloused hands; one or two elite dealers, who had somehow stolen their way into the present company’s trust; a handful of owners.
And there he was: Arthur Sharpe.
She wishes she remembers him a little better. But he was just another face at the party, nicely dressed, confident, authoritative. Maybe a little more exuberant than her usual clientele. A restless, fitful energy, like it was an achievement to get him to stay in this room at all.
“You would have liked him,” Lowell says.
“I already did.”
Her eye had only been drawn to him because of how boyish he’d seemed, how unlike the other owners with their dour faces and greyish skin, like venturing outside was a rare novelty. He looked like he belonged in the sun.
Then her gaze had drifted, or he’d turned away to get a drink, or to talk to the person she would later recognise as Edmund, and that was that. The only introduction she’d ever get for Arthur Sharpe. There and gone, a ghost in his own recounting.
Once the drinks had been served and the canapés devoured, the room had settled into an expectant hush. All of them ready for the reason they’d come together. An owner had steered her to the front of the crowd.
“It’s just a little experiment,” they’d said. “A game, if you will.”
The experiment was this: an owner, writing in a book with a different kind of ink—one that had been mixed with river water, maybe already read over, so that its attributes had been altered.
More powerful. Cassandra’s job was to read onto him as he wrote, a loop of power not unlike the infinity of the river.
She wishes, here, that she’d asked to see the pages, or the ink. That she’d asked what they’d really intended, beyond a little “experiment.”
God, how she wishes she’d walked out that door.
But she’d been paid not to ask questions. And here was the chance to be paid like that again, if she pulled this off in front of the owners.
And maybe, just maybe, there was that small voice in the back of her mind, the one that she pretended didn’t exist. The one that whispered to her about the life she used to have, and the world that was forever millimetres from her fingertips, but never quite there, and the man who had given it all to her, and then just as easily taken it away.
“Sounds fun,” she’d said.
The reading had started out as most readings do: ink and blood and needle. She’d had the ordinary ink, the ordinary taste lingering on her tongue. Arthur drank the other vial, grimacing as he swallowed.
The society would have known the risk. But would Arthur have known?
He’d started first, kneeling on the floor so that everyone could see him. Cassandra stood behind him, one hand on his shoulder, the other with the book that she was to read from. Already there was that thread of power, strung between them.
She’d started the reading easily enough, feeling the leonine stretch of the river as it roused itself. The tug of the story as it gained purchase on Arthur’s skin, how she’d been careful to enunciate so its attention wouldn’t stray elsewhere.
She’s not sure where it went wrong. Her focus had been on maintaining control, so that when the reading sprang from her grasp, vanishing all at once, she’d thought—
Then she’d heard it, delayed. The scream.
“My God.”
“I—I’m sorry, I’ll stop.”
“No. I want to know. Just… keep going.”
It happened in thirty seconds, maybe less.
But those thirty seconds felt like an eternity.
She’d looked down and seen arterial red.
His skin, splitting, then knitting itself together, then splitting again.
His face blurred briefly, flickering with a dozen different selves, all with the same terrified expression.
Too many possibilities to be contained in one body—so the body was ripping itself apart.
Then the reading slipped from his mouth, and his wounds remained.
He had lost… a lot of blood by then. Beneath the red, his face was white, his lips tinged blue.
The world hammered down to a single point: two people in a room; one living, one dying.
If someone behind her shouted, if others fled, or called an ambulance, or texted their private coroner to remove the evidence, then she can’t remember.
What she does remember is this.
She held his hand, so cold, cradled his head in her lap. Because there was nothing else she could do. She tried to make him a little more comfortable. She leant down to listen as he whispered to her, just once—an airless gasp, really. His eyes fluttered shut; the grip on her hand slackened.
Then Arthur Sharpe, eldest son of eldest sons, was gone.