AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Cassie reached for Izzy with one trembling hand. “Come on,” she urged. They clasped hands and darted toward the toilet at the back of the deli.
“Just give me the books and I’ll let you go,” Barbary said. “Probably.”
“Did he kill them?” Izzy gasped in horror. “Did he kill that kid?”
Cassie didn’t answer. She slipped her free hand into her pocket and gripped the Book of Doors. She concentrated on a destination, a place far away, and she felt the familiar sensation in her arms and the pit of her stomach, the way the Book of Doors seemed to change in her hand, and then she opened the toilet door and saw a nighttime street, and she felt cold air on her face.
“Come on,” she said again, pulling Izzy through the doorway.
Drummond ran to join them, his lean body moving with surprising speed, his feet pounding the tiled floor and a grimace on his face.
“Close it!” Izzy ordered, as they watched Drummond racing toward them, the bald man farther back in the deli.
“Wait!” Drummond pleaded.
Cassie hesitated, unsure what to do, but Drummond seemed terrified, his eyes wide and white. She couldn’t leave him.
“Close it before he reaches us, Cassie!” Izzy said again.
Drummond jumped through the doorway and collapsed onto the pavement in front of them. Cassie slammed the door shut just as an expression of surprise crossed the face of the bald man in the deli, as he realized perhaps that they were not fleeing to hide in the toilet.
Drummond stood up slowly and brushed himself down. Then he exhaled heavily, relief flooding out of him, his arms trembling slightly. He looked down at them, frowning at his own body.
“I thought you’d leave me there,” he admitted to Cassie. “Thank you.”
“Okay,” Cassie said, after a moment.
“Do you believe me now that you’re in danger?” Drummond asked.
“Yes,” Cassie admitted. Suddenly her whole body was trembling, shock coursing through her, and she felt like she wanted to collapse at the knees or be sick or do both at the same time. “Yes, we’re in danger.”
The Woman
The woman arrived back in Atlanta on an overnight flight from London, eight hours stuck in a tube with too many people. She escaped the plane and hurried through the airport, every interaction grating on her nerves, and climbed into the car she had parked a few days earlier before her trip.
It was a short drive home, two hours north through Georgia from Atlanta, heading into the Blue Ridge Mountains. She didn’t mind driving; she enjoyed it, in fact, to the extent that she enjoyed anything, because it was something she could do without having to deal with anyone else. That was what she preferred. On those rare occasions when she had no choice but to be around other people—international travel, for example—the woman could affect a superficially normal demeanor to manage any human contact that she couldn’t avoid. But it was exhausting to her, tolerable only when absolutely necessary.
The trip to London had been disappointing, and it annoyed her that she’d had to endure all the pain of the journey there and back for little benefit. The only upside had been that one more book hunter was now dead. And she now knew that the woman—Marion—had at one point possessed the Book of Joy. And now it was in the Fox Library. Another special book locked away out of reach.
The woman didn’t know what she would have done had she beenable to obtain the Book of Joy. She would have added it to her collection, undoubtedly, because she desiredallthe books. But she wouldn’t have had much use for joy. Unless the book could have been used toremovejoy as much as to give it. That might have been interesting.
She considered the possibilities as she drove.
Her home was deep in the woods, in the north of the state on the edge of the Arkaquah Valley. The house was a large timber cabin that had been built in the late 1990s. It had three bedrooms upstairs and a big kitchen and a lounge and a utility room downstairs, and a wraparound porch where her parents used to sit on nice evenings. Both the woman’s mother and father were now dead, buried elsewhere in the woods on the twenty acres of land attached to the property. She didn’t grieve for them. She barely thought of them.
Most of the house was now neglected, rundown and falling apart, and from the outside it almost looked derelict. The driveway from the turn off the main road was overgrown and not maintained, but the woman didn’t mind that, because it meant the house was almost a hidden, secret place.
She pulled into the drive, killed the engine, and then climbed out into the thick, damp air of late morning. She climbed the stairs to the cabin, unlocked the door, and headed inside. The woman kept one room for herself, the smallest bedroom, which had always been hers. It was set into the roof with slanting walls and skylight windows, and it was spartan and clean to the point that a casual observer might describe it as empty. When she had been a child, the bedroom had held many more things, the bits and pieces of a girl’s life. But the woman was not that girl anymore. That girl was lost, and most of her belongings had been jettisoned many years before.
She opened the windows to let in the susurration of the trees. At night the area around the cabin was pitch black, and as a girl, that darkness had terrified her. She had refused to leave the house after dusk, especially not alone, hating the vast, inhuman emptiness of the countryside. She had always wanted to live somewhere brighter and more alive, somewhere with more people and laughter. Now, things couldn’t be more different. The woman liked being alone and she savored the darkness and solitudeof night in the woods. She hated the scratching irritation of other people, the noise and the activity, the smell.
The woman stripped out of the clothes she had worn on the flight. She enjoyed clothes and how they looked on her body. She enjoyed dressing herself and trying on different outfits, almost as if her body were a toy to play with, as if it wasn’t her own. In some ways, she knew, this was the truth. The body belonged to Rachel Belrose, and the woman wasn’t her anymore, not really.
She showered, washing off the smell of other people, and pulled on a simple nightgown. She removed four books from her purse—the Book of Speed, the Book of Mists, the Book of Destruction, and the Book of Despair. They were her favorite books, the books she used most often, at least in part because they were easy to use. They required nothing of her other than to have them in her possession. Other books required her to do specific things, or to give them to people she wanted to use them on. The woman preferred to be free of such restrictions, and she usually found her favorite books were all that she needed.
She padded back downstairs and then descended into the basement. Here were the guts of the building, the boiler and the pipes, old timber and tools. On one wall her father’s gun case hung, the weapons and ammunition still inside. Her father had always liked to hunt, but he hadn’t enjoyed it so much in those last few days of his life when the woman had hunted him with his own handgun. The woman had enjoyed using the gun on him, and on the others in the subsequent years. It had been a fun toy, until she’d had the books.
The basement was dug out of the earth, with a poured concrete floor. It was lit by a bare bulb hanging from a wire. The woman pulled the cord to switch it on and the bulb swung gently, the light sloshing back and forth across the floor. In one corner of the room an old mattress was pushed against the wall. The woman had used that mattress before, when she had kept people down here, experimenting on them. In recent years she had experimented with different ways to use the Book of Despair. That book always intrigued her—she relished the idea of using despair as a weapon; that spoke to her on some level. She thought back to using the book on the young child in London and her insides buzzed.It had satisfied her immensely. She had gifted that girl such pain, such enduring misery.
