Chapter Fifty
CHAPTER
Fifty
SOMETIME AFTER CASSANDRA descends beyond the archway, the door to the bookshop eases open. Roth strides in, cigarette pinched lazily between his middle and forefinger. With his other hand, he snaps his fingers and a flame appears. Just like that. Because he wills it.
He lights the cigarette and takes a drag—his first in two years, after a bittersweet fight to quit. Now, why bother? As if he could be touched by something so mundane as cancer.
“Take a look at me now, Dad,” he says, and laughs.
Like his shitty, mostly absent, money-chasing father could have ever touched this kind of power.
The walls shimmer around him like a heat haze. It’s all so insubstantial, he thinks. All just on the cusp of reality. How the others had cowered and fretted and bickered over these bookshops as if they mattered. Limited by their own self-importance.
It’s just books. And who gives a fuck about those, really?
Almost idly, without thought, he throws the cigarette behind him, the tip a bright, deadly orange.
It smoulders on the floor, and he glances back long enough to see the first flames ignite.
The thought barely has to pass through his head before they flare up, relentless and hungry.
In their shelves, the books tremble. But soon their whingeing is drowned out by the crackle of timber, a devouring roar.
When he returns, he’ll have his fortune back, and then some. He’ll have his magic. He’ll have the world in his fist, to squeeze and shape to his will.
All that’s left is to deal with Cassandra Fairfax.
Part of an old saying, found in the back of a book belonging to Lowell J. F. Sharpe
The Bookseller’s Calling by Anonymous, translated by Elias Chiron Clarke
O to you, who holds our fate most tight
We are but story made manifest
So when we are nowhere
We are everywhere.