Chapter Fifty-One
CHAPTER
Fifty-One
LOWELL SHARPE IS thinking about fairy tales when the door to the bookshop bangs open.
Namely, he’s thinking about the fairy-tale reading at the Templetons. How quickly Cassandra had recognised what happened, how confidently she’d assessed the situation. It was the first time he’d felt a sliver of doubt in himself. That perhaps Cassandra would make something of an owner, after all.
Do you ever consider that you were wrong about me, Lowell Sharpe?
He’s also trying to ignore Edmund, which is going less well.
Speaking of fairy tales. His brother, normally so allergic to the bookshop, has stubbornly lingered, terrorising Aloysius when he isn’t terrorising Lowell.
Second sons aren’t supposed to make much of anything in fairy tales, but now Edmund is finally getting to step into the role of eldest.
It’s hard not to feel resentful. Even after what Cassandra’s told him about the bookshops, his brother hauling his weight and reputation around is a difficult thing to watch.
Edmund asking for records he hasn’t wanted to look at in months, or demanding changes that Lowell has already enacted, or decided against for other reasons.
Like he knows what he’s doing, or that it matters.
A blue streak barrels through the door, shattering his concentration. Byron. Her eyes are wide, panicked.
“It’s Cassandra,” she gasps. “Lowell, you’ve—”
Edmund cuts her off. “It’s not his problem.”
“—got to come.” Byron shoots Edmund a nasty look, before continuing. “She left. She lied to us. She’s gone down to the bookshop below, alone.”
Lowell’s stomach drops. “She’s going to try it.”
The ink reading.
He snatches his car keys and his coat before he strides towards the door.
Cassandra can’t do the reading; certainly not alone.
She might be a legacy of the river in more than name, but every owner and bookseller has been touched by it somehow.
Arthur had drunk a full cup in the ascent to owner, raving for weeks afterwards while the river thrashed inside of him, and he’d still died.
Do no harm to the river. But Cassandra is flesh and blood; it’s too much of a risk.
A mountain falls over him, blocking the exit. Edmund.
“You can’t go. You already went for her once, and look at what you got in return. The bruises are still healing, for God’s sake.”
Lowell opens his mouth to explain that he’s free to make his own choices, and anyway it’s not as if Cassandra herself fought him. He feels his entire body winding up for a fight. Then he sees Byron’s anxious expression, and remembers that there’s a clock ticking.
“I have to,” he says.
“Hand over the keys to the bookshop, then.”
Lowell looks at his brother, whose eyes have gone flinty with anger. His hand is out.
“You would throw me out,” Lowell says, disbelieving. “Over this?”
“The bookshop always comes first,” Edmund says.
The bookshop always comes first. It’s what Lowell had told Chiron, on their last encounter. It’s why he’d been unsurprised to see the letter, sitting at his desk—just that it had come so late. Too late for him to sign his bloodied name on the contract. Too late to inherit its ghosts, its memories.
He’d thought Lady Fate had been playing the worst kind of trick on him. Now, he considers that perhaps Lady Fate had her eye on other prey.
“And who’ll look after it?” Lowell gestures around him. “Do you even remember what it’s like to work here?”
“Aloysius can inherit. He’ll take over.”
“Of course he will.”
Aloysius, who he’d never wanted to look after, who Edmund had foisted on him in what had seemed, at the time, like a rare moment of leadership.
You can’t run the bookshop all by yourself.
And quite frankly, you’ve pissed off a lot of people.
Aloysius can smooth things over, show you’re willing to be a part of the community.
What Edmund hadn’t mentioned, but Lowell had guessed, was Aloysius’ usefulness as a spy.
Edmund had been nervous about Lowell’s success, and his ambitions.
There aren’t many ways to remove an owner, as they both well know.
“The bookshop is meant to go to you. It was always meant to be yours,” Edmund says, with the same infuriating calm. “But it requires you to behave like a real bookseller.”
Lowell laughs without humour. “The river is failing, Edmund. There’ll be no bookshop left.”
And no Sharpes, either. Every one of them, dead within a year.
It seems impossible, with Edmund standing so solidly in front of him.
He’s always thought of his elder brothers, both eldest just as he was the eldest, once, as diametric opposites—and maybe that’s why they were accepted as offerings in the first place.
Edmund, solid as stone, just as reliable, and just as warm.
Arthur, who perhaps had never wanted to be eldest of anything, bright and funny and overconfident, a lightning strike of a person.
Arthur had been their favourite. Without him, it’s hard to say what’s left.
But stone doesn’t just… vanish.
“I’m working on a solution,” Edmund says tersely, in the same voice that he would say, it’s none of your business.
“A solution? Like the society?” He’s gratified to see his brother flinch.
“You left me to run this bookshop. And Arthur before that. What did you think I was doing?” He levels his gaze at him.
“I knew it was you, in there, under that mask. I know what you tried to do to Cassandra. Ask me again about the bruises.”
They glare at each other, brother against brother.
“If you leave, you’ll never set foot in here again,” Edmund says. “Even if Cassandra succeeds.”
Lowell looks around him, at the bookshop he’s loved so much for so long.
He’s catalogued every book, dusted every shelf, polished the floor with his bare hands in the small hours of the morning.
He knows the best place to sneak away with a cup of coffee and a book, the time of the day when the sunlight hits the brass fittings just so, and everything sparkles with radiant brilliance.
If the bookshop is a vessel, then he is everything contained within it.
How much he loves it.
Then he pictures Cassandra, going down those stairs alone. His book thief, stealing a future for them all, and letting her own vanish in front of her.
Lowell puts his keys into his brother’s outstretched hand. Then he breaks into a run.
He smells it before he sees it: the black cloud of smoke tinting the horizon. Ash flutters down on the windshield as he jerks the car to a halt on the street. He gets out, his heart plummeting into his stomach.
“Oh God,” Byron is saying. “Oh my God.”
The bookshop is on fire.
Byron gets out of the car, horror enveloping her expression. She runs towards the bookshop, but she only manages the bottom of the stairs before the heat becomes too much to bear. Lowell chases after her.
“Stay back,” he warns.
Flames escape through the windows, all shattered. The bookshop is a roar of sound: paper crackling, the pop of lightbulbs and glass, the groan of metal. He had no idea fire could make a noise like that.
He turns to Byron. “Can you read?”
She shakes her head, her eyes wide. “Not well enough for this.”
“Then take my car,” he commands, pressing the keys into her hands. “Get help.”
But Byron stays where she is. “There’s no one else,” she says helplessly.
“Then be the help, okay? We need someone on the outside, if…”
If things go bad.
“It’ll be okay,” he lies. “I promise.”
He can fix this. He has to.
Lowell makes sure Byron’s turned the corner before he flips his coat over his head to protect himself.
He takes a breath—a mistake; the smoke sears his lungs, even from here—then he eyes the front door, yawning open.
Beyond it, the archway to the bookshop below is just visible.
Even if he had time to read from a book—a book that he’d have to get from the bookshop from which he’s now exiled—he doubts there would be enough of the river left to enact it.
So he runs.
The heat is searing, relentless, instantly intolerable. He winces as flames jump at his feet, his shoes tacky and too warm as the soles melt. Smoke chases him from underneath his coat, and he fights the urge to pause and cough. If he stops now, it’ll be all over.
His lungs burn. His body is slick with sweat.
Then he’s through the archway, into the cool bliss of the stairwell.
His coat is black with soot and singed beyond repair, but he made it.
He tries not to think too hard about what it means for the feasibility of either of them returning.
Instead, he takes the stairs two at a time, downwards to the bookshop below.
He has been here just once before, when the archway still appeared at midnight in Sharpe’s.
Jimena had taken all three of them, one per night, to introduce them to the Keeper and the hidden world of the river.
He has never forgotten the immense awe he’d felt, or the conviction that he’d carried, even then, that he’d be an owner one day.
The atrium is mostly how he remembers it, though the glass ceiling above him is feathered with cracks. Water drips constantly, sluicing down the bookshelves. And it’s suspiciously quiet—no sign of the travellers anywhere.
His attention turns to the Keeper and the breath punches out of him. A body, slumped over the desk. Dark hair spilling like ink across its surface.
Oh God. Oh God no—
Then he notes that the hair is too long to be Cassandra’s, the colour a pure black, rather than Cassandra’s fading blonde. Ink pools underneath the woman—or blood, dark enough to be confused for the former.
It’s not her.
He exhales, a terrible mixture of relief and guilt. Relief because it’s not Cassandra. Guilt because of the relief.
Beyond the Keeper, there’s a hallway, the lights flickering erratically, the floor slick with water. A smear of blood lingers on the edge of the hallway, bright red—the Keeper’s blood, Cassandra’s… or someone else’s.
Steeling himself, Lowell descends deeper.