Chapter Fifty-Three
CHAPTER
Fifty-Three
THE LAST FEW weeks have not been kind to James Roth. There are black bruises underneath his eyes, and ink trails across his skin. The golden tan has faded to a sickly greyish hue. He sucks at his teeth, and Cassandra catches the dark slick of blood and ink.
He has read too much onto himself. Too much power. Too much glory.
“Cass,” he says, with that easy, charming grin. “It’s been a while.”
Then he swings.
His fist catches her at the corner of her jaw. Pain fissures upwards through her skull. She falls hard on the ground, feeling every scrape, every bruise. The edges of the compendium dig into her chest as she wraps her arms around it.
“We could have been partners, you and I,” he says. “We could have done amazing things. But no, you wanted the river to yourself.”
Cassandra thinks quickly, running through her options. The river is already so fragile, especially here, where reading is at its most potent. If she reads, she’ll have no control over it. She could destroy herself before Roth—or worse, obliterate what remains of the river.
She has no weapons, nothing to defend herself with except her own two fists. And Roth is saturated in ink, empowered by inhuman strength and who knows what else.
This will have to be quick, dirty—a bar brawl.
Roth lets her stagger to her feet with the indulgence of a man who knows he can take as long as he likes. She wipes her mouth with one hand, tasting blood.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” she says scornfully. “As if I’d want to be anything like you.”
Roth’s grin widens. “Darling, you are just like me.”
“Actually, I’m better than you.”
Pointedly, she looks down at the compendium in her hands, and Roth’s gaze follows.
His grin fades. “What the—”
She drops the compendium. Then she lunges.
They topple into the river, Roth first. The thud of his head against the shallow riverbed makes a sickening noise, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
Possibly it has no effect on him at all anymore.
They wrestle in the water, a tangle of fists and limbs and pain.
Cassandra grabs a fistful of pebbles and smashes it against his face.
He roars, blood tinging the water red. But just as quickly, his wounds stitch together.
Panic, held at bay for so long, spills over her. If he can’t be injured, if he can’t be killed, this is a fight she’s already lost.
Unless she can read the compendium first—and rewrite the future.
She elbows him in the face and dives towards the book.
The water is too deep to run through, too shallow to swim in.
Behind her, she hears Roth’s furious shout.
She pushes herself to move harder, faster, but it’s like running in a dream, everything dialled back to half-speed.
A car crash in slow motion. The compendium glimmers in front of her, half-buried in the riverbed.
She’s so close. Her fingertips graze the book—
Roth hits her in the head.
There must be a split second where she blacks out because when her eyes refocus, she’s no longer anywhere near the compendium or the island, but sprawled on the shallow riverbed, stones digging into her back.
Before she can muster the strength to get up, Roth’s already there, inhuman movement powered by his reading.
He kicks her in the stomach and she gasps, hearing a crack deep within her chest. Fractured ribs if she’s lucky, broken if she isn’t.
“You don’t want the river? Bullshit. Why are you here, then?”
“Trying… to save it… from you,” she gasps.
“That book is mine,” he snarls, and the walls shudder with his anger.
The river tremors underneath her, the chill solidifying. Her body feels like lead, like it would be easier to lie down and let the river carry her away.
She was an idiot to think she would be able to walk away from this.
“Roth—”
He kicks her again and this time she’s unable to bite back the cry.
“I told you I would ruin you,” he says, his teeth slick with black ink. “And look where we are.”
He cracks his knuckles, his blue eyes almost black against the bright surface of the river. Cassandra braces herself for more pain, shivering from the river’s chill. How long, she wonders, does it take to break something beyond repair?
And then, abruptly, Roth is face first in the river. Lowell straddles him, elbow braced against his neck. Lowell, breathless and determined. Who shouldn’t be here at all. They catch each other’s gaze, just for a second.
“Get the compendium!” he shouts.
Cassandra dives for the book, as Lowell grapples with Roth in the water. From the sounds of the scuffle behind her, she guesses someone’s lost a tooth. She hopes it’s Roth.
Halfway to the compendium, she glances behind her and freezes.
Roth and Lowell are upright—but Lowell, only just. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, blood streaked across it.
Lowell is wiry and strong from years of bookselling, but nothing can compete with the power bestowed by a reading.
Roth grabs Lowell by the scruff of his collar. “Get out of my fucking face.”
He throws Lowell to the ground, scattering water everywhere. Lowell struggles upright, and Roth fells him with the ease of a sportsman. He punches Lowell once, twice, and blood sprays with the water. This time, Lowell doesn’t get up.
Cassandra can’t breathe.
Roth looks over Lowell, terribly still in the water. “Enough of this.”
Then he plunges his hands into the river.
“Give me what I lost. Give me my fortune.”
His pupils fill black, like they’re drowning in ink. The letters on his skin shift and glow, sentences wrapping themselves around his arms.
“Give me the world,” he commands.
And the river obliges.
Cassandra has never seen water luminesce like this before, but now it glows a blinding white.
The ground shifts, shudders, moves. The stone walls, thousands of millennia in the making, grind and crack.
She blinks and the river is a graveyard, the stones fragile skulls.
The song of the river sounds like a scream.
Blink and it’s a beach she doesn’t recognise, the sunset bleeding across the horizon. The air is hot and sticky, the briny scent of the ocean overwhelming. Palm trees clatter in the breeze.
It dissolves into a hospital room, the humidity vanished to a dry, stale air.
She has a glimpse of a bed with wires, an older man with the same nose as Roth.
He rises from the bed, his skin transforming from a slate grey to a golden tan, the lines falling away from his face, before the world shifts again.
A dark bedroom, two bodies slumped against one another.
Another beach, a woman leaning over with a forced smile.
A bar, the man sitting next to her saying, “It’s the movies.
They never get our outfits right,” and a voice on the other side, unmistakably Roth, saying, “If you’re willing to do one more job, there’s this woman who—”
Another hospital room. A ski lodge. An alleyway.
The world is trying to rebuild itself to match his vision, she realises. But there’s not enough strength in the river to match Roth’s hunger. He has wanted too much for too long, his appetite monstrous.
The world shivers and melts once more—and she’s back in Roth’s flat, before the debt collectors, before she’d smashed his expensive glass vase.
Instinctively, she grabs the countertop to keep herself upright.
And her hands touch it, as solid and real as herself.
Air conditioning whirs quietly in the background.
When the world doesn’t immediately shift again, she searches for Roth or Lowell.
But this vision is for her alone, it seems. She scans the room, every breath laced with pain.
There’s the white chaise, pristine again, backlit by the panoramic view of a midnight city she doesn’t recognise.
The artwork, slightly altered, shifts each time she looks away.
When she glances through the glass doors to the library, a terrifying darkness sucks at the edges of the doorway.
“I suppose this’ll have to do.”
She whirls around. Roth, idly playing with one of his expensive chef’s knives, stands at the other end of the countertop.
He looks as he did before, with his golden tan and easy, tousled hair.
His smile is white, unsullied by ink magic.
But there’s something not quite right with his eyes.
A black beyond black, like the void in his library.
“I saw your father,” she says, searching for something, anything, to buy time. “You didn’t tell me he died.”
Roth’s eyes are dark. “I think you have me confused with someone who wants to fucking talk, Cass.”
He snaps his fingers. The river obliges, and just like that, Lowell is sprawled out on the floor between them. There’s an ugly gash on his forehead and his eyes are closed, but she sees the rise and fall of his chest, the clear pulse at his throat.
“I can take him away just as easily,” Roth snarls.
“You must miss your father,” she persists. “Maybe the river would let you bring him back.”
There has to be some humanity left in Roth, she thinks desperately. Some way to reach him or convince him to let them go, if nothing else. Every second they stay here is a second of the river’s power being siphoned away.
A vein bulges in Roth’s temple. “Oh, Christ—pay attention.”
He clicks his fingers again and Lowell screams, the sound a terrible, terrible thing. Then it cuts off, and its absence altogether is suddenly much worse.
“Enough!” she shouts, too sharp and urgent to hide her desperate fear. “Stop. Please.”
For a terrifying, panicked second, she thinks Roth will hurt Lowell again—or worse. Instead, he steps over Lowell, as though he’s so much flotsam. But his gaze turns to her, a new, calculating gleam in his eyes.
“I could offer you a deal,” he says, and there is an odd inflection in his voice, the sound of a deeper, more ancient tongue slipping underneath his words.
“Be at my side, as my servant. I’ll even consider saving your boyfriend.
” He glances to Lowell, terrifyingly motionless. “Well, if he can be saved.”
The words ring out like a hammer. Compulsion.
But she’s of the river, and the river protects its own.
Roth might have found the bookshops, might have ingratiated himself into the society, might have learnt to siphon magic from books, but he still has no idea how any of it works.
Still trying the same cheap tricks as he had that night in his flat.
Her chest burns with every inhalation, but she manages to laugh hoarsely. “I’d make a lousy maid.”
“There are other ways to repay my generosity.”
He touches the side of her face and she recoils. To live as Roth’s pet reader and worse. To walk into a cage meant just for her, and close the door on herself.
He sees her shudder and his mouth drags down into a snarl.
“You really going to turn me down?” He leans close to her, his breath reeking of blood and ink. “We are just the same, you and I. Think about it.”
Cassandra meets his gaze, unflinching. It’s the truth.
They have been the same, in so many ways.
They’ve lied and stolen, done irreparable damage in the process.
And even if intention matters—she’s not so sure anymore—it still leaves her far too close to the man who has hunted her from shady bars to here, at the end of the world.
The monster who would make a new world for them because he’s bored of the one that exists now.
Maybe that makes her a little dangerous, too.
“Eat shit,” she hisses.
She headbutts him.
He staggers back. Cassandra groans, blinking stars from her eyes. When her vision clears, Roth is climbing to his feet, murder in his gaze. But there’s something not quite right—
He stops, stares at his hands. Ribboned with the slick black of ink.
“What the hell—”
His skin luminesces, as though lit from within. He screams.
The lights in the flat go out. Something structural groans. Cassandra throws herself over Lowell, a protective barrier.
If he’s hurt because of her—if something happens—
But Roth is too preoccupied to pay them mind.
He claws at his face, ink washing black down his limbs.
Between the flashes of light, his features shift in quick snapshots.
A flicker of movement, and there is the surly, softer face of Roth as a teenager.
Flicker: the heavily lined face of an old man; the soft cheeks of a young child; Roth, scarred and middle-aged. Roth, barely more than a skull.
Cassandra edges backwards. Around them, the walls of the flat are collapsing, the river’s chill returning in force.
Light throws itself from his body and Cassandra flings one arm over her face to shield herself.
She squeezes her eyes shut, finds Lowell’s hand and holds on to it with everything she’s got.
Roth’s skin shivers and splits. He is coming undone, unable to bear the weight of the possibilities he’s tried to absorb.
Because no one—thief, owner, millionaire, mortal—is infinite.