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“Not a single one,” Moe said cheerfully. “I switched languages on the learning app when I got bored.”
Too bad. “You’ll read the English books then.”
He punched the air. “I won’t let you down.”
I hugged him with one arm. “I know you won’t.”
Ram rolled his eyes, clearly not convinced. He strolled past us and down the row of shelves. “I’ll just see what books call to me.”
I was going to do the same. “Elliot, you’re the librarian here—”
“Volunteer prison librarian, who was fired,” he corrected.
“That counts. You figure out the organizational system and find volumes for you, Jag, and Moe to look at.”
We spent the entire day searching the library, living off wake and food potions from Evanora. When the librarian came downstairs to tell us the library was closing, we hid with an invisibility spell until she decided we must have already left.
While taking breaks from struggling to remember bits of Ancient Egyptian, I checked social media on my phone. It had the Screech app linked to a burner account with the name Wile E. Witch, which Ram, or one of his cronies, had clearly made up. The local news was full of posts about a dozen missing people and the appearance of portals that spit crazy shit or sucked people in.
And among it, notices to watch out for six escaped criminals.
Among the missing were Juniper and her three boyfriends. On The Magical Rooster’s page, someone named Sapphire, who I think was the vampire who had cussed me out at a diner years ago, had posted that the shop would reopen soon. After all, she wrote, Juniper wouldn’t let her customers stop coming.
I squeezed the phone so tightly it hurt and blinked back the prickle at the back of my eyes. Then I put the phone down and got back to work.
At three in the morning, I found myself hunched over a parchment tome on a wooden table. Elliot sat at my side, reading a pamphlet that was browned with age.
Moe slept with his face on the desk, snoring softly. For some reason, normal doses of the wake potion didn’t do much to give him energy. It only worked if he drank an amount that would have sent anyone else into a mental breakdown but only sent him bouncing off the walls.
Jag had gone to the bathroom, while Ram had wandered off somewhere, chasing the books that called to him.
I couldn’t fucking believe I was counting on him—hell, trusting him—to rescue Juniper. He could so easily decide not to mention anything he found. No one would be the wiser unless the answer happened to be in a book in English, Spanish, Punjabi, or Babylonian. Internet translations were notoriously inaccurate for anything magic-based because of all the made-up terms and weird poetry old-timey witches loved.
I groaned and rubbed my hand down my face before biting my thumbnail. Ram was going to screw me over, wasn’t he? I would never save Juniper, the Eclipses, and the other missing Silver Springies.
Paper rustled as Elliot placed his pamphlet on the table. “I think this is about the dangers of using portals for sex. Like standing really close to one and sticking your penis through and into someone on the other side.”
I laughed. “An interdimensional glory hole. The writer thinks cocks are longer than they are.”
“It does seem terribly unsafe. There’s no mention of how to open the portal, though.” He carefully refolded the old paper. “I think it might be satirical, but I lack the context to know who they’re making fun of.”
“You’d be surprised by the weird sex shit witches do,” I said and suddenly felt very sad because Juniper was an expert in that field. And now she was missing, maybe dead, if Free Jinx had imploded since I last caught a glimpse of her.
“I… ummm… oh,” Elliot sputtered.
I ignored the sting in my chest, like a little abyss slowly opening in my heart each time Elliot pulled away.
“I wasn’t hitting on you,” I said gently. “It’s just true.”
Elliot sighed, probably in relief. “I was thinking about your favorite book.”
My stomach felt like I had just entered zero-g. I leaned back in my chair so I could watch him from the corner of my eye. I grinned. “Is that so?”
“I think it’s a fantasy epic. Something with magic but magic that’s different from yours, otherwise it’s not escapism.”
“What makes you think I want escapism? Maybe I read to learn about the human condition.” I didn’t but I wanted to tease him.
“It can be both,” Elliot said. “Your favorite is probably something kind of dark and complex with a happy ending and…” He rubbed the back of his neck. “You know… hotness.”
