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Cassie frowned and rubbed her head, wondering if maybe she was misremembering. A seedling of hope poked through the dry earth of her heart, but she refused to water it. She knew what she had seen. Nobody could survive such an injury.
She walked out of the ballroom, leaving the mold and the damp andthe memories of mayhem behind her, and found herself in a lobby space. She walked through it to what appeared to have been a grand entrance at one time, but all of the windows and doors had been boarded over. There was a single doorway cut into the wood, but it seemed to be locked from the outside. A padlock maybe, on a thick bolt. Cassie rattled the door, but it didn’t budge.
She stood there for a moment, surrounded by silence, and didn’t know what to do. She was struggling even to have a conscious, directed thought.
“Think, woman,” she muttered.
She patted her pocket then and discovered that she was still carrying two books. It seemed that whatever she had carried with her, whatever she had been wearing, had survived the place she had been.
She stopped, her brow knitted as she contemplated that place, thinking about it properly for the first time since having returned.
It was nowhere, a place no person should exist. It was somewhere outside creation, some different universe or reality. But she had survived.
“Because of the books,” she said. “The Book of Safety.”
She had survived and come back, from a different place, a different reality. It was the place the books had come from, she knew. It was the place themagiccame from.
All that magic, and Izzy still gone, she thought bitterly.
Cassie remembered the Bookseller then. She remembered the woman fleeing through the mirror when the violence started, shutting off Izzy’s escape.
“Coward,” she muttered to herself.
And she remembered Drummond, using the Book of Control to protect her, and her bitter heart warmed slightly. She wondered what had happened to him. She found she was worried for him.
And she remembered the woman. The monstrous, beautiful woman who had done awful things with the books.
Withherbooks.
Because Cassie knew now that the books were hers. Created by her in the nothing and nowhere.
The books were hers. And she couldn’t let the woman continue to use them. She wouldn’t allow it.
Cassie used the Book of Doors and stepped through one of the doorways in the ballroom and into the bedroom in the apartment she had shared with Izzy. It was a sunny day, she saw, a bright clear day beyond the window by her bed.
She hadn’t been in this room for over ten years, and in some ways, it felt that more time than that had passed again while she had been in the nothing and nowhere.
She shrugged off her clothes, not caring about anything anymore, and slipped into bed, closing her eyes and pulling the comforter over her head to shut out the world.
She slept.
When she awoke she felt more like her old self, whatever that meant, and then she remembered that Izzy was gone, and her insides dropped away into a bottomless pit.
“Oh, Izzy.”
She sat up, feeling heavier and emptier than she could ever remember, the bedclothes gathering around her waist. She sat there for a long time, trying to come to terms with the idea that Izzy’s light and life were no longer in the world. She gazed out the window. It felt as if a few hours had passed. There was still daylight outside, but night was coming. She could hear the reassuringly normal sounds of the city: traffic, car horns, people shouting. So wonderfully mundane.
Her eyes moved around to the bookcase at the bottom of her bed and landed on Mr. Webber’s edition ofThe Count of Monte Cristo.She smiled sadly to herself, remembering happy times over the past decade.
Why was she surrounded by so much sadness?
She forced herself up, had a shower, and then dressed in fresh clothes, taking a few minutes to enjoy rummaging through the wardrobe and drawers she hadn’t seen for a decade. It was such an oddly simple delight. Once she was dressed she slipped her two books into her pockets, ensuring they were always with her.
She padded through the apartment to the door to Izzy’s room. She stopped a moment before entering, taking a deep breath to settle her roiling emotions. The room smelled of her friend, a mixture of soap and shampoo and perfume, the scent hanging in the air like a memory. All that remained of Izzy, and that too would slowly disappear over time.
Cassie felt her emotions bubbling again as she stepped around the room. Her eyes caught on the pictures and postcards taped to Izzy’s wall—pictures of Izzy and Cassie over the years, at Kellner Books, on that awful trip to Florida. There were postcards from her parents—more because they were places Izzy wanted to go than because she wanted to keep the messages. And there were cuttings from magazines, images of models in expensive clothes that Izzy had particularly loved.
Cassie ran her hand along the top of Izzy’s chest of drawers, where she had kept all of her makeup and toiletries. It felt empty now, like some of her things had been taken, and Cassie frowned, wondering again if she was misremembering.
