Chapter 27
Heathcliff
People pour through the bookshop all morning, gawking at the pulled-up rugs on the first floor and stage-whispering about Ashley’s murder and Mina’s possible involvement.
I let them do it, because some things in life are inevitable, like death, taxes, and village nosiness.
By lunchtime, they’d stemmed to a trickle.
We even sold a Folio Society collection to Mrs Ellis for enough money to pay for a nice curry for lunch.
Mina mostly seems to have forgiven me, but I still haven’t talked to her about our idea.
I’m re-reading the same page for the eighty-seventh time while fantasising about the four of us in Morrie’s comfortable bed with the bamboo sheets, when I get a text from Morrie telling me I need to get away from the shop and meet him on the village green.
There’s even an exclamation mark. It’s a strangely urgent text from Morrie.
I try to tamp down my worry as I drop a box of engineering books on the desk and tell Mina to sort them while I head out. She makes a face but digs into the box. It’ll occupy her for long enough for me to check on Morrie.
I jog away from Nevermore, throwing a look over my shoulder to make sure that Mina isn’t following. Quoth hops along an outdoor table at the pub. I sit down opposite him, hoping no one can hear me chatting to a raven.
“What is it now?” I snap. “Did Morrie bring me here so I can pay his bar tab again, because I’ll—”
He’s not here.
“He’s not? But he sent me a text!”
Morrie’s not here, and neither is Lancelot. Peaches is still in the stable, though.
“Then why did Morrie tell us to meet him here?” I glance around the shops that surround the green.
All the shops are open, doing a roaring trade from the tourists who pour out of buses, wanting to see a real Biscuit Tin English Village.
Dog walkers and street performers stroll past. I cannot see a wayward and far-too-attractive-for-his-own-good knight anywhere.
“He has to be somewhere. We’ll split up.
We’ll cover more ground that way. Birdie, you fly out and look over the eastern side of the village.
I’ll take the west side, although it might have to wait until I’ve had a pint and some haddock and chips—”
“That’s not necessary…” Quoth’s eyes fix on a spot behind me.
I whirl around. On the other side of the green, a fitness bootcamp class has begun.
Only, it has a new teacher. One who is canonically built like the cover of a romance novel.
He stands before a group of bemused-looking women in spandex and men in questionably short shorts, wearing full plate armour.
His pauldrons sparkle. His red cloak flaps in the breeze.
Lancelot.
He has a job.
“The trials begin!” he shouts, raising his sword in the air. And his motley army drops into the dirt for planks. He walks among them, tapping shoulders with his sword to adjust form.
“Endure, madam!” Lancelot bends over to yell at a trembling lady as she struggles to hold a plank. “The burn is fleeting, but the glory of victory is eternal.”
“What are we going to do?”
I’m barely listening, my gaze momentarily preoccupied by one of the men, his lean muscles taut as he strains to hold the plank position, his shirt riding up to reveal a sculpted chest, sleeve tattoos of Victorian London snaking down his arms…
Morrie.
I smirk, even as I struggle to tear my gaze away from Morrie’s shoulders.
We should rescue him. Quoth spreads his wings, ready to swoop off towards the green, but freezes when he sees that I’m not following.
“I should get back,” I say as I stand and turn back towards Butcher Street. “I haven’t the constitution for leg day.”
But how am I supposed to help Morrie? Quoth wails inside my head.
“Bring him a protein shake?” I shrug. “Mina’s never going to join a bootcamp, so Lancelot is no immediate threat. And right now she’s alone in the shop, and we all know there are far too many secrets she could discover.”
Quoth stiffens. Fine. Go. His beady bird eyes fix on the horror scene unfolding on the green, as Lancelot demonstrates several wrestling holds on Morrie, who looks like he’s about to pass out.
Back at the shop, the door hangs open, and a couple of people are browsing downstairs. A woman takes pictures of books she likes and buys them on her phone from The-Store-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named.
Where is Mina? Why isn’t she stopping this madness?
As I’m stomping on the woman’s phone, I hear a sound from upstairs. A sound suspiciously like the storage room door swinging open.
I flip the sign to CLOSED and race upstairs. Sure enough, the storage room door is ajar, and when I pick my way through the boxes, I find the door to the room housing our Occult section open a crack.
Ignoring the terror creeping up my spine, I shove it open. Inside, everything is as it should be – the shelves stacked with ancient volumes, many of them chained to the walls since they are too dangerous to be left free. Herman’s book lies on the pedestal in the centre.
It’s open.
And towering over it, squinting at the blank pages while Grimalkin winds around her legs, is Mina.
“What are you doing in here?”
She whirls around, her hair whipping over her shoulders.
“Don’t get your knickers in a twist. Grimalkin snuck in the doorway behind that stack of boxes and I thought—”
“You thought you’d snoop around in my private property?” I storm towards her, terrified of what she might have unleashed, how this room could hurt her. “How’d you even get the lock open? Is Moriarty teaching you how to be a criminal mastermind?”
“The door was open, and I followed Grimalkin in here. I didn’t realise this was private. I thought it was just old stock or something.”
I grab her wrist. I need to get her out of this room, away from these books that could hurt her. I knew I never should have left her alone in the shop. “You shouldn’t be in here. These books are dangerous.”
She wrenches her arm from my grip. “Why? They give wicked paper cuts?”
“I don’t know why! All I know is that when Mr Simson left the shop to me, he told me to keep this room locked and not to let anyone in here.
Not even Morrie or Quoth have been in here.
” I point to the lintel over the door. Mina leans in to squint at the symbols carved into the wood.
“He placed these runes there to contain the magic within this room and stop anyone passing. How did you get past it?”
“I’m telling you, the door was open. I didn’t even see those runes. Maybe Morrie taught Grimalkin to pick locks with her claws.”
“This isn’t funny.” I try to quiet the panic making my blood run too hot and too fast.
You could have been hurt. We could have lost you.
Her shoulders slump. “You really believe in all this occult magic stuff?”
“I never did until I woke up in this shop. If you discovered your entire life was just words in someone else’s book, would you believe in magic?”
“Fair enough. And Mr Simson believed as well.” Mina’s gaze moves upward, to the pentagonal ceiling. “Do you think this room’s shape is significant? I know pentagrams have meaning in pagan rituals. I’ve seen The Craft.”
“Even if it is, this isn’t your concern.”
“Of course it’s my concern. I want to help you figure out how you got here. Maybe if we uncover the secret spell or whatever, we can reverse it and send you back.”
“Why?” The word comes out in a harsh snap. I’m too raw and afraid for this. “You want to get rid of me.”
“Excuse me?”
“You want to send me back to the life where my greatest love dies and I turn into a vicious sociopath who kills dogs and abuses children?” I’m shaking now, struggling to contain my horror.
I thought we had something, but all this time she’s just wanted to send me back. “Is that how little you think of me?”
“No, I didn’t mean—”
“None of us wants to go back. We can’t go back. If we could go back, Wuthering Heights would end at chapter nine, and no one would have heard of the Reichenbach Falls. It’s too late for us – what we want to do is stop this from happening to other characters.”
“Okay, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Why are you even here?” I know I’m going too far, but I can’t help it.
I am who I am, and no amount of warm green eyes will change that.
“You’ve crawled back to Argleton with your tail between your legs because of a single wanker’s harsh words.
You’ve come back to this bookshop because you want to pretend you’re a child again, sitting in a corner, reading her stories and waiting for someone to come along and save her.
Only now, you’re using our lives, our stories, to distract you from living your own.
Hear this, Mina. Life goes on after tragedy.
Time marches onward. This shop is not a place out of time – it will not save you any more than it will save me.
I have glimpsed my future, and I am incapable of being saved.
And you—” I jab a finger at her chest. “You will go blind, but if you don’t step out those doors, then you’ll become the footnote of your own tragedy. ”
Tears well in her eyes. She deflates at my cruelty, sinking into herself. Cathy would have fought me, her tiny fists raining down on my back as she flung even crueller words back at me. Because we were terrible for each other despite how fiercely we loved each other.
But Mina only pulls my words into herself, making them part of her. And if I hated myself before, I loathe myself now.
Mina backs up against the plinth, her hands scrambling for something to hold, for anything to put distance between us. I think I’m scaring her, but I’m too angry to stop, to back off. I need her to see herself the way I do.
“I don’t want to be in the world if I can’t see,” she chokes out.
I see red. I am so fucking angry. At the world for making her think that she only has value if she has eyes, at myself for my cruelty, my nature. If I were a better man, I could comfort her, but I don’t know a thing about comfort. The only thing I know is cruelty.
“Plenty of pleasures in this world don’t require the use of your eyes,” I shout.
She laughs through her tears. “That sounds like a really bad pickup line.”
“It is the truth. I’ll not see you give up even a moment of your life in order to give me back mine. That’s not in my future. I forbid it.”
“You can’t forbid me, you idiot. You forget that I’ve read your story, too.
‘If he loved you with all the power of his soul for a whole lifetime, he couldn’t love you as much as I do in a single day.
’ You said those words, didn’t you?” Tears shimmer on her cheeks.
“There are not two people alive who share a love like that. You may think I can’t imagine what it is like to lose that, but I can.
I know what it is to have your passion severed.
It’s as if a piece of yourself has been cut out and tossed away—”
I kiss her.
I kiss her so that she’ll shut up.
I kiss her because maybe then she’ll see herself the way I see her.
And most of all, I kiss her because some deep, wanton part of me has to believe I’m no longer him. No longer that Heathcliff, but one who is capable of real love.
And as my tongue slides over hers and her mouth opens to me and she grips me with tiny, fierce fingers, her body melting into mine like we’re made for each other, I think that maybe I could love this woman.
I cup her cheek, angling her head to mine, bringing her closer so I can go deeper, so I can swallow her, so our bodies can become one. Everything about this moment feels inevitable, as if from the moment she stepped into Nevermore Bookshop, we were destined to end up here.
Nobody – not even Cathy – has ever seen the dark places of my heart and run towards me.
And then I think of Morrie with his face in the dirt of the village green with Lancelot screaming over him, or Quoth’s sad, hurt eyes when he finds out what I’ve done, and all that love becomes brittle between my teeth.
I was supposed to tell her about our plan. I was supposed to propose that we share her. This…this tightness in my chest, this fire in my veins, it’s supposed to be for all of us. And instead, I’m kissing her, trying to keep her for myself.
I can’t do this.
I’m too cruel. I’ll drive her away, and them, too, and I’ll end up completely alone again.
I tear my lips from hers and lean back, fighting to catch my breath, to bring some control back to the situation, even though it’s now wildly out of control.
“Heathcliff?” Mina’s eyes are warm, curious, teetering on the edge of hurt.
We want to share you seems like the exact wrong thing to say in this moment. So I back away.
I can’t do this. I have to be alone.
“Stay away from this room,” I growl, dragging her out the door and slamming it shut behind me. “And stay away from me.”
Mina’s face twists into a cruel symphony of emotions. I feel every one of them like a knife in my gut. Finally, she settles on anger.
“You stay away from me.” Mina balls her hands into fists. “You’re my boss. You can’t do this.”
She shoves past me, elbowing me in the ribs. I feel it like the stab of a sword, straight through my heart. She flees the room.
“Mina, don’t run away from me.” I bolt for the stairs.
“You just told me to go!” she screams, slamming the back door behind her. And as my heart shatters loudly and hatefully in my chest, I know that I’ve made a terrible mistake.