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“How...” Drummond started, but then he stopped himself, as if perhaps realizing that there was no point to any questions. He swallowed once and she saw him reordering his thoughts. “You’ve waited ten years?”
She shrugged. “There was no other way.”
He absorbed that for a moment, then asked, “Where did you send him? Barbary?”
“I did to him what he did to me,” she said. “I’ve sent him into the past. He was so keen to live in the 1970s so I put him back there. Let’s see how he likes it.”
“What if he comes back?” Drummond asked. “You did.”
Cassie thought about that for a moment.
“I had to live through ten years and that was hard enough. He’d have to live through fifty years. How old would he be now? Ninety?”
Drummond shrugged.
“If he lived that long,” Cassie said, “I don’t think he’ll be any threat to us.”
Drummond patted his damaged face some more. “I’m sorry,” he said finally.
Cassie nodded. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said.
He looked at her. “Are you sure?”
She sighed. “I don’t know, Drummond,” she said. “It’s just good to see you after all this time.”
After a moment he nodded, accepting that. He studied Cassie quietly for a few seconds, his eyes moving slowly over her face, obviously seeing how changed she was.
“I can’t believe it’s been ten years for you,” he said quietly. “How have you survived? How did you keep going?”
“I had help,” she admitted. “I’ll tell you about it sometime. But right now we need to go to Izzy. I haven’t seen her for a decade and I really,reallywant to see her again.”
“I don’t know where Izzy is,” Drummond admitted. “I don’t know what happened to her. I’m sorry.”
“I do,” Cassie said.
Drummond looked a question at her.
“I struck a deal,” she said. “With the Bookseller. She gave me the Book of Safety so I could deal with Barbary. And she promised me she would send someone to look after Izzy.”
“Barbary talked about a Japanese man,” Drummond said. “Probably Azaki. And whoever he was with.”
Cassie shrugged. She didn’t know the details.
“In exchange for what?” Drummond asked. “What deal did you strike?”
Cassie held up the Book of Doors. “In exchange for this. I’m sorry, Drummond, but if you want the Book of Doors, you’re going to have to buy it from the Bookseller first. I promised I’d give it to her if she kept Izzy safe.”
The Forgotten Place
In a forgotten place on West Twenty-Seventh Street, Izzy watched the book hunters arrive for the Bookseller’s auction as the minutes of the day slowly crept toward midnight.
She was on a mezzanine level in a space that had once been a bar, a floor above the art deco lobby of the former Macintosh Hotel. At the front of the lobby the once grand entrance was now shrouded with plywood, sealing it off from the world. A single door had been cut into the boards, and as it opened a gaunt old man with white hair and leathery skin stepped through. His eyes were cruel and judgmental, Izzy thought, and he looked as if everything he was seeing was just as awful as he had expected it to be. He was a man who liked to be disappointed in things.
“Who’s that?” she asked.
“That is Pastor Merlin Gillette and two of his awful children,” the Bookseller said. “I don’t mean that only some of his children are awful. They all are. But today he brought only two of them.”
The man had been followed into the lobby by two younger adults who looked like twins, one man and one woman. Both were tall and thin and blessed with flowing and lustrous blond hair.
