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Eighteen
Monday morning, after a quick walk with Pansy, I was ready to descend into Song and retrieve my book. I wore my big black coat, even though it wasn’t cold, and went down to Song in a way I’d never gone before. It was a lot of walking, but dawn was not the time that anyone was up in Song, other than a couple of drunkenly singing vampires who knocked over a garbage can as I was walking by who found themselves hilariously funny.
I kept the collar of my coat up and kept walking. It was good to see the vampires laughing and messing around because that probably meant that they weren’t at war. It would take me ages to get through the city if it was war torn, even at dawn.
I got to the Scholar’s lab through a side door past the waterfall near my office. Well, what had been my temporary office. I couldn’t think about it in any kind of possessive way, or it would be over. ‘It’ being my freedom from the claws of dragons and vampires. Even if Cross was deluded enough to think that Michael could protect me from the demons, no one would protect me from him. He was too hard to kill. I’d never be with someone I couldn’t kill. That was logic. Or madness. Either way, I had to stick to my ideals or I’d lose myself entirely.
I climbed up to the balcony, peered in the window and heard a low voice muttering in ancient Egyptian. That would be Trombull then. She was probably sleeping on the couch with a book on her chest, mumbling the way she did when she wasn’t working. Perfect.
I crept in, careful to open and close the door silently before I tiptoed past the human. I held my breath until I reached the door, and then carefully started to turn the knob when it turned under my hand and was flung in, barely missing me.
I stared at Sultry who stared back at me, her face the most startled I’d ever seen it.
“You’re here?” she demanded.
“Ah, I was just leaving,” I whispered, trying to edge around her.
“How long have you been here?” She frowned past me at ‘my’ office, then at me. “You’re leaving?”
“Sh. She’s sleeping. I don’t want to wake her. I’m just going to the vault.”
Her expression cleared, and she stepped out of my way. “The vault? Oh, that’s right, Pepshaw was complaining about it. You aren’t leaving. That’s all right then. You’ve been here all night?”
“Not all night.”
She gave me a weird look that I returned before I flashed a stunning smile and continued tip-toing into the hall. She stuck her head out and watched me walk down the hall, like I was as interesting as Ancient Armenian.
I waved back at her, but she only watched me like I was a truly inscrutable puzzle, or a crazy person. That was a distinct possibility, considering that my bed was full of oranges.
I turned the corner and then walked more quickly away from Sultry’s suspicious stare. When I got to the vault, the door was barred from the inside. I knocked loudly against the iron door, demon metal, probably with a core of heavenly gold. The Scholar certainly had the finest vault I’d ever seen, although everything could be improved. For a second I smiled, remembering his words, but then Pepshaw peered out at me, golden eyes widening before he opened the door enough for me to slip in past him.
“Hi there. I’m just stopping by to pick up my…” I trailed off once I got a good look at his situation. The unstable demon book had just about melted through the demon chains holding it, and swirls of purple were spiraling around, glowing and flickering with evil. It was very high-drama, but some books were like that.
“As you can see, I have a situation. I’m afraid that you couldn’t make it to your book currently. Come back later.”
I ignored his dismissal, instead putting my hands on my hips and walking up to the thick line of salt he’d drawn in a circle around the dangling book.
“What does the salt do?” I asked.
“If you don’t understand the purposes of clarifying salt…”
“With a book like that? It’ll just leave a goopy residue when it’s done with it, which is so difficult to get out of rugs, but I can see that you have unseamed basalt in here, so it should be fine. You’ll just have to scrape it off. I like to keep a snow shovel handy, you know, the really sturdy kind they ship from Maine.”
I dropped down on my heels and held out my hands like a frame, getting a clear visual of the book in its space. Thick clouds of dark smoke had filled most of the room except where Pepshaw kept it clear near the door, so I couldn’t even see my book.
“Look, girl, I don’t mean to be abrupt, but it’s a dangerous time to be in the vault, and the Scholar will have my head and my hands in separate bottles if any harm comes to you.”
“It’s just a book.”
He rubbed his forehead over his deeply furrowed brows. “It’s just a book, she says,” he muttered under his breath. “How can I combat such ignorance? Do you see my face? These claw marks? That ‘just a book’ did that to me!”
“Claws? I hate it when they do that. Look, you all call me the librarian. You should trust me with books.” I flashed him a smile before I stepped over the salt line and summoned a pail of chalk dust that I flung up in just the right shape so that it stayed aloft in the rune I’d formed, holding the purple smoke in place. I did half a dozen chalk runes until the book stopped smoking as the runes took hold of the entire space inside the salt circle.
I walked towards the book, pushing the runes of floating chalk dust out of my way, which had bonded to the purple glowing and crackling smoke, so it was pushed away as well. The book was just sad, bloated, spitting sparks, and those were definitely vicious claws curling out of the cover.
“You know, Goblin, I think we’re going to need some lamb’s blood.” He didn’t answer me. When I turned to look at him, he was staring at me in absolute horror.
“Come now, quickly, quietly, before it devours you,” he whispered.
