City of Magic (Happily Ever Afterlife Book 1)

by Patricia Thomas

  "You're married?" I asked in surprise, looking down at his ring finger. He wasn't wearing a wedding band.

  Marc caught my look and raised his hand up, examining the empty finger for himself. "I lost it on the last night I can remember. It’s a long story. But yeah, happily married. Very happily. We were coming up on our first anniversary. And all I’ve been able to think about since I got here is that Meg probably showed up in the city where she was supposed to, and is looking for me. She’ll have no way of knowing I'm here, maybe halfway across the planet. And by the time we get out of this place, is there going to be any way at all for me to find her?"

  I looked over at Devon and the two of us shared a guilty look. Yeah, okay, Marc had been a jerk all day. But it was possible that there was more going on underneath the surface than I'd given him credit for.

  And I was a little jealous that he had someone who would be waiting for him. At least my parents would have each other, but Darren would be all about finding Kelsey. I wager he hadn’t even thought of me since he’d arrived in the After.

  If anything, I should've felt guilty about how little I’d thought about my friends and family since I'd woken up in the After. Were my parents looking for me? My friends from work, from school? Or were they all still just trying to figure out their own lives? Would they think I'd abandoned them to go back to the story we'd come from? I might never know for sure.

  How many people reconnected with everyone they'd known before when they arrived in the After? Did people move on and start afresh?

  If I could find my book, I could start to piece some of my life back together.

  Together, the three of us left the row of shelves we'd been occupying and stepped into a what seemed to be an endless aisle. I noticed Devon was still hanging onto his Texas book, but didn't say anything else. Worst case scenario, some poor librarian was going to get stuck re-shelving it, adding a little extra work to their already daunting task. And since the Archive was open to the public, I imagined that was something they often had to do anyway.

  We walked and talked for a while, and I was surprised to find that Marc was the one with the most to say. His storytelling clipped and abrupt, Marc gave us a play-by-play of him and his partner catching a serial killer on the mean streets of Chicago, bringing his story and his city to life with ease. Anytime I tried to jump in with an anecdote from my own life, I seemed to come up short. I told myself that it had more to do with my life being all too boring compared to Marc’s, but it was hard not to feel like I really should have more to offer.

  I loved my life before, at least everything before things with Darren came to a screeching halt. Reliving my memories seemed more important than ever, and yet I came up with next to nothing. I could vividly remember the first time I met Darren, in line for coffee after teaching a morning class. He’d been stressed about work, wound tight and anxious. But after we talked for a few minutes he visibly relaxed, and laughed along with some stupid story I told about one of the older women in my classes who refused to give up on mastering a particularly troublesome pose. But sharing that with Marc and Devon, especially when Marc was reliving what had to be the darkest time of his life, seemed trivial and silly. Something about the idea of coming from a romance book was already making me feel like I was less than the people around me. The focus of my story, of my life, had been about falling in love and relationships. And in the end, I hadn’t even been able to do that much. I decided to let the guys think I was just a little more on the private side than they were.

  Most of what Devon had to say was all about meeting those teenage girls at that one party that one time. No one said it out loud, but I think even Devon realized what that said about him. The story he’d been in wasn't his. He had been a side character, and the story had continued without him, leaving him to go back to his regular life like nothing had happened. One memorable night, and that was it.

  I knew I was more than that, knew I'd met Darren on multiple occasions and we'd been together long enough for me to fall in love with him. Even if he was falling in love with someone else at the same time. And I could remember long dinners with my family, and how close I felt to them. But what if that was all there was to me?

  The three of us hushed our conversation a little as we passed a group of women who were chatting excitedly, passing books to one another. They barely noticed us as we walked by but it was enough to pull me back to my new reality.

  "Okay, I'm definitely lost," Devon said as we turned and found yet another endless row of books. "Do we backtrack, or just keep going and hope we find something we recognize?"

  "I vote we soldier on," I said. "Not like we have anywhere we need to be."

  Just then, two men came around the corner, and to my surprise I recognized them both. By then, I could’ve recognized Grayson just about anywhere. He was walking with Jonathan, the other male councilor I'd met the night before. Neither one of them was talking, and Grayson had his nose buried in a book he was holding in front of his face.

  "Well hello," Jonathan said. Grayson looked up, startled by the other man's voice. "Didn't expect to see you three wandering about."

  "Joanna set us free," Marc said hastily like he was worried he’d be banished back to his room if these two didn't think we had permission to be where we were. "We're just checking things out," I said, adding a little elaboration just in case we were in trouble. "We're trying to figure out our way around this place but aren't having much luck."

  "What is it you're looking for?" Grayson asked. His brown eyes had locked onto mine and he tilted his head slowly, like I was a puzzle he was trying to decipher.

  I blushed a little. It's not like I had anywhere specific I could ask him to direct us to, or any real reason for wandering the Archive at all. "Nothing really, just trying to get acquainted enough with the place that we can get to anywhere we need to be without getting lost for a few hours at a time. Where we are now?"

  Grayson looked around him and I got the impression he hadn’t been paying that much attention where he’d been walking. "Fiction. The whole first level is general fiction. The next floor up as well. Stories about life and how we look at it."

  "Good to know." Standing there in front of two of the most influential people in the Archive, I felt like a bit of an idiot. I didn't have anything intelligent to say, or anything to add to the conversation. So instead, I decided to take a chance. "I wonder if this is where my book would be. The one I came from. Or maybe, there's a romance section?" I finished off the sentence, rambling but hoping someone would jump in and save me from myself, filling in some of the blanks as they went.

  "There is a romance section, but there's plenty of romance down here too." Grayson was still watching me, curious and wary. "But your book won't be out on the shelves yet."

  "Oh, I know," I said, trying to sound casual, like this hadn’t become the most important thing in the world to me. "But eventually… It would be kind of cool to find it. Is there anyone here who could help me with something like that?" I knew I had already asked, but it never hurt to get another perspective. One I’d like the sound of a little better.

  It was Jonathan who spoke next. "I wouldn't worry too much about it. The longer you wait, the easier it will be to track down. And with everything else going on, we had to pull people off shelving, so it could be a while."

  "I'm happy to help out, since it looks like I'm going to have more than enough time to myself."

  The younger man shook his head. "Only librarians, sorry. There's a lot of training involved, a whole system. Thankfully, if you're looking for something to do, there's always a good book around," he said, and chuckled, but I got the impression I was being dismissed.

  My disappointment must have shown on my face, because Grayson was looking at me with far more sympathy than he had even the night before when he'd saved my life. "You never know," he said. "It will turn up eventually, and it's not like what's written is going to change. Be patient."

  The five of us sta
red at one another for a while, until it got too awkward to handle. "Well, I guess we'll see you guys later."

  "Sounds good," Grayson said, voice soft. "Let us know if you need anything. I know it's a big adjustment." At the last second, his gaze flitted to Devon and Marc as well, including them in the offer.

  I gave a quick nod and mumbled a response. Even I didn’t know what I was saying.

  As soon as they were out of earshot, Devon turned on me. "What's up with you and that Grayson dude?" he said, eyebrows wiggling.

  I shook my head. "Nothing. I met him yesterday, he kind of saved my ass."

  "Nope, I know these kinds of things. There is something going on there."

  "You're crazy." But I couldn't help but smile a little at the idea, even though I wasn't exactly sure what he was suggesting.

  And of course, Devon caught the smile. "See," he said, drawing the word out. "There's something there. And the dude is seriously hot, so you could do a lot worse." I went to laugh it off, but something Devon said grabbed my attention instead. I stopped moving, and gave him a suspicious side eye. "Wait, what? You think he’s hot?"

  Devon pursed his lips together in mock guilt. But then he looked over at Marc, waiting for his reaction before saying anything else.

  Marc shrugged. "What?"

  "Well in that case, yes. I do think that man is viciously attractive. I think a lot of men are all kinds of attractive. Did I not mention that in Devon one-oh-one?" He winked, and then quite literally jumped up and clicked his heels together before continuing off in the direction we’d been going, dropping the subject entirely but leaving me grinning.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  When I woke up the next morning, the mantra of our time being our own seemed to have been forgotten by the councilors.

  After breakfast, I handed in the questionnaire I’d been given, and by lunch time I had already sat through an extended interrogation with Marissa about each of my answers—though the older woman never said so much as a single harsh word to me the whole time.

  It felt like I was being screened for some kind of secret service, but without any of the cool gadgets or secret missions.

  The librarians were more intent on getting information from us than teaching us anything, but the guys and I were still picking things up along the way, sharing information about what we learned and who we met at every chance we got.

  After eating lunch by myself—Devon, Marc, and I having stood in the corner of the cafeteria the night before, looking like we were deep in conversation until we observed enough people to figure out the clearly magical boxes where they were getting their food—I returned to the main library. But there was no sign of anyone I knew, leaving me to wander for hours, feeling both lost and like an intruder at the same time.

  The appliances we'd noticed Eliza using before had turned out to be essentially refrigerators, and they were called as much, even though they didn’t quite look to be the versions I was used to. And the Archive’s fridges could keep things at any temperature at all. Each one was tied to a similar-looking machine in a restaurant somewhere in the city. They probably worked a lot like the passageways that I’d discovered with Harper. One side was hot, one side was cool, and the restaurants restocked constantly throughout the day, adding in new bottles of water, jugs of milk, freshly made tea and anything else in demand. Different restaurants had different specialties, but the compartment used for pizza seemed to get the most action.

  It was on my fourth day in the Archive that I finally woke up to find that no plans had been made on my behalf, giving me some real time to myself. Both Devon and Marc had already gone to appointments with a counselor in the morning when I rolled out of bed.

  I had nowhere to be, but I knew exactly what my body needed other than to escape my assigned bedroom. It was the only place I could be guaranteed any privacy, but I couldn't stay there a minute longer than I had to. Nothing about it felt like home.

  Instead, I found an open sitting area on the fifth floor, with four couches sitting across from one another and a coffee table sitting in between them. It took a little work to get the coffee table out of the way, but at that point my body welcomed the extra effort. I spent the next hour going through my usual morning yoga routine, as my body groaned in protest and thanks. It wasn't long before I lost focus on the Archive around me and finally felt centered within myself again. There was still so much that was wrong, so much that I didn't know. But at least this much was entirely me.

  Finishing things off, I moved forward to touch my toes, enjoying the stretch in my back. I let out a long happy sigh and held the position.

  "Oh crap, excuse me." A voice came from behind me. I shot upward in an instant, spinning around to see a guy I didn't recognize standing behind me, a pile of books in his arms. Two of them tumbled from the top of his stack to the ground as he shuffled backward.

  "I'm so sorry, I didn't know someone was up here. This floor is usually dead this time of day." The guy had brown skin that looked like it didn’t see much sun, and black spiky hair, the same color as the rectangular glasses that sat on his nose. His eyes were a pale, unnatural looking blue, which I tried not to look directly at for any longer than I had to, despite the friendly expression they held.

  "My bad," I said. "You don't have to go. I just needed to find some space." I trailed off, not able to admit that I needed this space to work out because I wasn't allowed to leave the building. "Impromptu workout. Sorry about that."

  Finally, the guy seemed to relax. "I just wasn't expecting…" His eyes trail down my body. I didn't have any workout clothes with me, so I was only wearing track pants and a t-shirt, Eliza had given me, but I suspected the view he'd gotten when he'd first walked into the section had been less than wholesome.

  "Forget it, I’m done now anyway. Was just feeling kind of cooped up and needed to stretch it out. Probably not the best place."

  "Don’t worry about it. Usually you can go for hours in here without bumping into anyone. Just bad luck, or maybe good luck on my end," he said the last part with a cheesy wink, making me laugh out loud. "And to be fair, that’s not even the weirdest thing I’ve seen hanging out here."

  "Oh?" I asked, moving forward to help him collect the books that had fallen. It looked like if he tried to move even an inch to get them, he’d lose the rest in the process.

  I put the books down on the table, feeling like an idiot all over again since it was pretty obvious I’d moved it out of the way in order to create my own personal workout space.

  "Yeah, you know how it is. Authors."

  "Uhh… sure?" I realized a second too late that maybe I should have been covering so I didn’t sound completely clueless, but the guy didn’t seem to think anything of my response.

  "Here’s the theory," he said conspiratorially. "No matter where you go in the After, there are things that are always going to be better than the versions we were created from. I mean, look at you," he said with a curt nod. "You’re gorgeous," he said, like it was simply a fact and not a huge compliment, and I did my best not to react, though the conversation was getting stranger by the second and I could already feel a flush of heat in my cheeks. A second later I was all too glad I hadn’t thanked him or something. "But gorgeous isn’t that unusual here. We’re looking at a world built from the imaginations of others. You don’t get a lot of ugly main characters—maybe the occasional girl who is plain but who everyone is inexplicably attracted to anyway. And love interests that aren’t ridiculously attractive? No way. Sure, a lot of the secondary characters or whoever aren’t inhumanly good-looking, but the averages are way off."

  "Huh," I said, considering his idea. "Same with ages, right? Pretty people in their prime are basically a dime a dozen."

  "You’ve got it. Most people never even stop to think about how these things might affect the world we live in. But I can guarantee that even deep in suburbia, our world does not look like theirs. Whoever they are."

  "Good to know," I said, grinning. "
Do you work here?" He wasn’t wearing robes, but the things this guy was talking about made him sound just like the Archivists Eliza had mentioned.

  "Nope. No stupid looking robes for me. I just like books… another one of those things. I bet there are way more readers in the After because authors by definition probably have a thing for books, so they write that into their characters. It’s like their go to character trait when trying to make someone more interesting."

  "Okay, wait a second. How did we even get here?" I laughed a little, realizing how quickly and comfortably our conversation had gone off the rails. "You were trying to make me feel better about getting caught working out in between the stacks."

  "Right!" the guy said, moving to sit down at one of the couches. I moved to the one beside him and leaned against the armrest, not wanting to crowd him but entirely curious about whatever tangent he was going to go on next. "Haven’t you noticed that people here… well, it all comes down to quirkiness. When authors are creating characters, there's only so much back story that they can include. So, what I’ve noticed is that a lot of them try to give their characters these memorable character traits. Everyone is a photographer, or has a wicked temper, or does origami in their spare time. Or, you get the real weirdos who do yoga in the middle of public buildings."

  I opened my mouth to defend myself but realized that probably wasn't my best strategy. There was no excuse I could give him that wouldn't out me as a random essentially living in a library. I shrugged. "Guilty as charged."

  "No judgment here. I've noticed that for some of us, it doesn't matter how long we stay in the After, or how much we do to change who we are as people, there are always some things we can't shake. And usually, it's those weird traits that don't always feel like they make sense with who we are that are forever a part of us."