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I’d been imagining a classic English castle tower, with modern bits. The arched timber door on floor three had a ceramic sign hanging on a hook:LIBRARY. The door itself was braced with metal and embellished with artwork swirls and shapes. It opened with a minor creak, despite the timber being as thick as the height of my hand, from wrist to fingertips.
Inside was a lovely small library with reading area featuring a sofa and three blue-upholstered chairs. The room was shaped by the form of the tower and had three of those tall windows with stained glass inserts. On the inner walls paintings were hung in baroque, glass-protected frames, along with framed fragments of pages, with words in a language I couldn’t recognize.
“You can come here and read any of these books, Charity, or write?”
Writing? It seemed a strange occupation on this island. There’d be no purpose with no audience.
A V-shaped flock of birds wheeled in the distance. This tower rendered a view of the sea and whatever might lie near the island. No other land had showed from the helicopter, but the white sail of a yacht sat, deceptively still, near the horizon. It gave me hope that others would land here. An island like this would make for an idyllic impromptu stay.
“Charity?” the doctor reminded me.
“Sorry? Oh! The books? Or do you mean my writing?” I nodded. “Perhaps.” I couldn’t see the point of writing stories no one could ever read. I also couldn’t see any monster smut section among the books. A pity. I could stomach only so much mystery and detective, or wartime stories, and those seemed the commonest from the titles on the spines.
“Ebooks?” I inquired. “And an eReader?”
“Hush. That’s blasphemy. There will be no eBooks.” He turned away, pretending to admire a painting he must have seen a hundred times before.
Huh. Had I struck a nerve? The doctor hated digital books.
Hands in the pockets of his shorts, Cassius stood staring out the next window, uninterested in the library. I toyed with the idea that he, too, liked monster smut, but graphic novels or spy stories were my bet.
“Do you read, Cassius?”
He turned to me, “If I have time and something is good.”
“Such as?”
“The Lord of the Ringswas my last one.The Sandmantoo.”
“I see.” I should stop underestimating his tastes.
As we made to leave, I noticed another heavy timber door blocked the stairs leading upward to the fourth floor. “Doctor? Is that the Inner Sanctum of the library?”
He squeezed my ass. “Move, Princess.”
The landing was small, and I’d halted in the doorway, preventing it from closing.
Without looking, I put my hand up to my shoulder, to quiet him, and he took it and bit. The zing from that bite, unexpected and arousing, almost made me miss the reply.
“Yes, that goes to the Inner Sanctum, and it’s off limits, for now. On pain of losing your soul, Miss Charity.” The doctor’s token smile added to the sting in his words. “I store my antiquities up there—books, specimens, my family history, and so on.” He set his back to the wall of the landing.
“My soul? As in my soul biting the dust?”
“Yes.”
Was that a dare or a promise? I wasn’t even sure I had a soul.
“What about those framed pages and the paintings, are they not antiquities?”
“Those are copies. Good morning, Roland.”
“Morning, sir.” The voice came from behind Cassius, and I swung, though my mind was still rambling through what had just been said.
Cassius was also looking at Roland, who stood framed by the library door. I recognized a staff member from the helicopter landing area.
Tall, with his long hair tied back and bushy eyebrows, the man wore dark pants and shirt, and looked grim as he scanned us. Was that a weapon in a shoulder holster? Yes, it was. He was as rigid as a board.
Where had he been hiding, and why was this place staffed by so many ex-military people?
