Bookburners: Season One Volume One

by Max Gladstone

  Asanti remained calm. “Why haven’t we been affected by this mad desire?” she asked. “By all rules of magic, we should be running back in there as well.”

  Sal shrugged, figuring the question was rhetorical but answering anyway. “That’s your area. I’m more interested in finding the back door and getting away from this nuthouse.” She grabbed Asanti’s hand and started to skirt around the fights to access the alley. She had to dodge a fist here, a pair of grabbing hands there, and a rather frightening face, lips peeled back, preparing to bite her hand that held Asanti’s arm. Sal kicked that person in the knee and he fell, howling. Sal and Asanti hurried to the alley, which was remarkably empty.

  “Why aren’t they trying the back door?” Asanti wondered.

  “No one goes into a restaurant by the back door except for staff. People don’t even consider it. I’m betting very few people are dining and dashing, either. They want the full experience. And, by the way, the magic is working, I think. I am feeling very odd coming back here. We’re not supposed to be here.”

  “The magic has soaked into Glasgow gradually,” Asanti said, her voice barely audible over the crowd. “That’s why we’re not affected very much right now. It’s permeated the city slowly, without anyone noticing. That’s also why the Orb’s information was so sporadic. If we stayed longer, I bet we would feel it. “

  “It’s not slow anymore. I’m getting hungrier. I can feel the draw,” Sal replied, and hurried forward.

  The side door to Thistle on the Moor was propped open, with two busboys and a waitress smoking outside. The busboys wore white shirts with lavender aprons, streaked liberally with blood. One busboy, a burly lad who looked like he’d missed his calling as a bouncer, smoked his cigarette with a shaking, red hand. His face was pale with two bright red spots on his cheeks.

  “I can’t do it anymore,” he said, his voice high and shaking. “I’m so fucking tired.” He broke down and began heaving with exhausted sobs. It was like watching a mountain cry. The other two watched him impassively—not unsympathetic, but not surprised either.

  “You gotta pull it together, Mac,” said the waitress. “The fights started early tonight.” She peered down the alley and caught sight of Sal and Asanti. “Hey, you can’t be back here. All customers go in the front door.”

  Sal sent Asanti a meaningful look. “We’re not customers,” she began.

  “What?” asked the crying busboy, standing on the concrete steps and trying to hiccup his sobs back. “Everyone is a customer. Even we’re customers on our days off.”

  “Really?” asked Sal. “When was your last day off? You look like you haven’t had one in a while.”

  He looked confused for a moment. “I—I don’t remember rightly.” He looked to the other two for help.

  A face appeared at the door, a young woman in a chef’s uniform. She didn’t look as exhausted or harried as the others, but the staff froze when they saw her. “Break is over,” she said pleasantly.

  They jumped up as if shocked, and made to go inside, but the weeping man pointed at Sal and Asanti.

  “Chef, there are customers in the alley. They’re not supposed to be here.”

  “Hello, Mary Alice,” Asanti said.

  Confusion crossed the young woman’s face, and she opened her mouth briefly, then closed it. Her eyes flared a purplish red, and Sal took an involuntary step back.

  “Customers aren’t allowed back here,” Mary Alice said, her voice growing deeper. “Take care of them,” she said to her employees, and turned to go back inside.

  While these people were clearly under the influence of whatever magic was at work, they were not in top physical shape, and Sal felt guilty fighting them. The waitress, she now saw, had wrist braces on both arms, and the busboy who wasn’t crying walked on thin legs with a limp. But each of them approached with the energy of another world, an energy Sal was unfortunately getting used to.

  Asanti stepped forward, startling Sal, and met the waitress, reaching out her arm and clotheslining her. She went down into a heap, her head hitting the pavement.

  “You’re full of surprises today,” Sal said. The thin busboy was on her then, his hands reaching for her throat. She sliced inward with both forearms, trapping his arms between hers and squeezing, the pressure forcing him to loosen his grip. She stomped on his bad foot and was about to break free when Asanti slammed into her. Sal had been unable to see what the bigger busboy was doing to her friend, but clearly he wasn’t as easy to put down as the waitress was.

  Sal ended up in a pile of garbage bags with the big busboy on top of her, his hands tightening around her throat. She struggled, but the lack of solid ground beneath her made it difficult, and the world started to go gray. Then she heard a clang, and the busboy slumped over her.

  • • •

  It was over by the time Sal had struggled out from underneath the boy and regained her footing. The three people who had attacked them were unconscious, slumped against the wall where Asanti was trying to position them. Grace stood in the middle of the alley, the bodies of four more kitchen staff around her. They must have gotten reinforcements, Sal realized. Liam came up behind Grace, his face twisted in fury. “Maybe now you will learn that you do your fucking job and let Grace do hers. Get in there and shut this down; it’s getting way out of control.”

  He definitely did not look like the gentle guy that Sal had spent a passionate night with, but she also found this kind of passion admirable. Most of his rage was directed toward Asanti, as he took the archivist’s elbow. “Menchú is waiting at the other end of the alley. You’re done here.” He pushed her gently toward Menchú and let go of her.

  Asanti smoothed her clothes and touched a cut on her head, frowning with annoyance when it came back bloody. She exchanged looks with Sal before she left. “You’ll take care of it?” she asked.

  Sal nodded. “Promise.”

  Grace went to open the kitchen door that had closed in the scuffle. She said something in Chinese that Sal would have guessed was not very nice. Sal stepped up beside her, and said something in English that she guessed was an approximate translation.

  Liam, looking over their heads, just said, “Fucking hell.”

  The kitchen, at first glance, looked as if it were made of meat. At second glance, she was sure. Made of meat. The countertops looked solid and white like bone, while the floors, walls, and ceiling were red flesh.

  It was meat, and it wasn’t, Sal thought wildly. You didn’t call living tissue “meat,” and yet a chef was at one wall, blood up to her elbows, slicing into it and carving out a piece to throw into a frying pan. Sal’s stomach did a slow forward roll.

  “There,” Liam said, pointing to the far wall. He was indicating a book that looked nailed to the wall above a whiteboard that seemed quite out of place in this room of gore. The book was hardbound and open, with a glowing red nail through its spine holding it to the wall. Sal’s target, Asanti’s bizarre inheritance, and the cause of all of this mess.

  The problem was that they had to move past the demon in the middle of the room to get to the book.

  Mary Alice Hunter had changed once she entered the meat kitchen. Her uniform had taken on a look of flames, and her skin had burnt black. Wings made of skinless meat and tissue had erupted from her back, and had unfurled as she looked at the open door with rage-filled eyes.

  Through the burned skin on her face, human eyes glinted, begging for help. But the mouth opened and howled, showing sharp, wicked teeth.

  “The kitchen changes her?” Sal wondered aloud.

  “Mine,” Grace said, and ran forward. Sal had never been happier to let someone else go first. Liam was right, this was Grace’s job. Sal’s job was to figure stuff—and people—out. She reminded herself to buy Grace a drink.

  Unlike her dexterous companion, Sal stepped forward into the kitchen and slid on the bloody floor. She swallowed heavily, reminding herself sternly that she had seen much worse while working with the Order, and
she would probably see worse again before her time was done, and made her way gingerly around the kitchen.

  The chefs and staff, bizarrely, looked at Grace lunging for their head chef, but didn’t stop cooking. They shouted instructions at each other, chopped, seared, and fried. The dishwashers were shoving the dirty dishes into the washers and then carefully removing the clean ones so the walls didn’t bleed on them. Sal watched, fascinated, as a drop of blood splattered from the ceiling onto a plate, and the dishwasher swore and moved it to the dirty pile again.

  The hostess came into the kitchen and yelled that Chef Hunter was in the weeds and needed backup. Then she returned to the front of the house.

  In this case, in the weeds meant being beaten up by Grace. The woman was making a show of exciting fighting, more ostentatious than Sal had seen before. She realized Grace was trying to draw the attention of all of the kitchen staff—the mostly mindless drones—to her, while giving Sal a chance to deal with the book. But once the hostess had yelled that Chef Hunter needed help, they woke up and moved to assist.

  Grace was clever, allowing the demon to bat her aside and purposefully slamming into the sous chefs at the stove, which looked less like a health-department-approved gas stove and more like a stone sacrificial altar strewn with bones. The chefs took up the fight, chasing Grace as she ran toward the demon again.

  The demon herself leapt onto the counter and raised her wings, howling with her head tipped back. Sal winced and covered her ears as each of the kitchen minions followed suit, sending their heads back and joining the call. The crowd outside howled as one.

  “Oh good, they’re all following crazy demon chef,” Sal muttered, and got closer to the whiteboard.

  The workers in the kitchen were unlucky—when they paused to join their leader in her bellow, they opened themselves up. With ungodly speed, Grace ran from waiter to busboy to chef, stabbing each of them in the throat with two fingers. They collapsed, one after the other, choking and squeaking their outrage.

  The demon was ready for Grace by the time she returned, though. It threw a chef’s knife at her, which she sidestepped. The knife sank into the wall with a squelch, sending Sal’s stomach roiling again. She lost it at last, retching onto the floor. The sight of her vomit on the pulsing, bloody surface nearly set her off again, but she steeled herself and pressed on.

  Unfortunately, the demon heard her getting sick, and saw her for the threat she was—not only to her, but to her kitchen. Apparently blood and tissue on the floor—making the floor—was fine, but a bit of sick was out of the question. The health department might get angry, Sal thought hysterically. She blinked, dizzy, when the demon leaped from the counter and landed in front of her, a cleaver clutched in a clawed hand. Sal ducked the swing and slid underneath the demon’s arm. The demon righted herself and swung again, and again Sal dodged.

  The foul floor wouldn’t let her be so nimble every time, but the demon was quickly distracted by Grace, who had thrown the knife back at her, sending it straight into her neck.

  Sal knew a simple stabbing wouldn’t stop a demon. They all knew that. But that didn’t hide the fact that it was horrifying seeing the demon turn to face Grace with a bloody knife sticking from its neck.

  I’ve got to shut this down, Sal thought, her mind racing. She had reached the whiteboard, which had the specials of the day listed in oddly mundane English, but with runes running around the outside of the board.

  First, Sal tried to grab the book, but it wouldn’t budge. “It’s never that easy,” she admonished herself aloud, but she knew to always try the most obvious move first. She may as well have tried to pull a closed door off its hinges. She looked in desperation around the kitchen. Grace grappled with the demon, taking her to the ground and not seeming to care a bit about the gore covering her face, hair, and white blouse. Elsewhere, the kitchen minions were rising to their feet, slowly in some cases, but definitely rallying. They would be a problem again soon.

  Despite the living meatiness of the kitchen, Sal noted that it worked the way a kitchen was supposed to work. Before becoming a cop, she’d known some metaphorically demonic chefs; little separated some of them from Chef Hunter besides a lack of magic and a living kitchen. She had loved the hostess job that winter in Vermont, and it had taken some serious thinking to decide that police work was her future, not food. She made her decision one night while trying to help out in the kitchen: she burned the soup—literally burned it. She went back to hostessing and left food service when she entered the Academy. She missed it sometimes, and found herself oddly nostalgic now, albeit nauseated and frightened and angry as well. Her nostalgia was for the chaotic order that was a kitchen.

  And when a kitchen ran out of a dish, they would eighty-six it and let all waitstaff and chefs know.

  Sal picked up the red dry-erase pen and crossed out the first item on the list, salmon cakes.

  “Eighty-six salmon cakes!” she yelled to no one in particular.

  The entire kitchen automatically echoed her. “Eighty-six salmon cakes!”

  The runes drawn around the menu glowed bright for a moment, then dimmed.

  She struck out with the pen again. “Eighty-six black pudding!”

  Again, the kitchen echoed her, the runes flared and then dimmed.

  “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it!” shouted Grace from underneath the demon. While she seemed to be in the vulnerable position, she had her legs wrapped around the demon, which was struggling to free itself. Its face was a mask of pain, and Sal got back to work.

  When she had officially canceled all the specials for the day, the nail in the wall stopped glowing, and Sal yanked the book free and slammed it shut.

  4.

  The cookbook incident was unlike other jobs, because in this one they stayed in town after the book had been contained. First, Asanti insisted on making sure that Seamus’s niece was unharmed after her ordeal, and second, she wanted to attend a proper wake for her mentor.

  Liam and Grace waited in the alley while Menchú and Asanti spoke to the shaken and confused kitchen staff. Sal checked the front of the restaurant, where the police were telling the crowd—now bewildered and unsure where they had received their injuries—to go home. The police officers were barely holding it together, and looked as if they just wanted to be done with the whole thing. The front-of-house employees looked deflated—sagging and limp. Whatever magic sustained them had left when the book closed.

  Liam had relaxed back on the concrete steps above the garbage bags and watched Grace walk to and fro. Sal returned to the alley and sat next to him at a companionable-but-not-intimate distance.

  Grace, covered in pieces of meat and streaks of gore, ranted as she paced, switching from Chinese to English and back again. It was pretty obvious Grace was lecturing her. The snatches of English she could catch were “stupid” and “team” and “trust.”

  Liam pulled out his phone. “Sal at least left us a clue,” he said, holding out his phone to Grace, who ignored it.

  “Telling you she was going to Glasgow with Asanti and asking you to Google for good restaurant recommendations is hardly a clue,” Grace snapped.

  “You’re just mad you thought I was wrong,” Liam said, smiling.

  “I’m really glad you got that,” Sal said. “I figured if it was nothing, then you wouldn’t find anything weird, but if you did think something was weird, you’d know to follow us.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell us?” Grace asked, wheeling and staring Sal in the face. “Leaving little clues is inefficient. Someone could have been hurt, and that would have been a complete waste of my time.”

  Sal wordlessly pulled a tissue from her pocket and handed it to Grace. The woman took it and wiped some blood off her face.

  “Because I’m new. I made sure you all trusted Asanti to do what was right, and when I was satisfied you were happy with her loyalties, I went with her in case she needed backup. And I left a clue to see if you would think she needed backup
too. For what it’s worth, thanks for showing up. We couldn’t have handled this on our own.”

  “It’s worth nothing,” snapped Grace. “You put yourself and Asanti in jeopardy. What if we hadn’t gotten here in time? And you never consulted with me about her loyalties.”

  Sal shrugged. “Menchú told me not to bother you during your off hours. I figured you didn’t want to see me. What would you have said, anyway? Do you think she’s loyal?”

  “Of course she’s loyal, that much has never been questioned,” Grace said. “There is more than loyalty here. There’s common sense, and trusting that we have formed this team for a reason. If you had included all of us, then Liam could have done better recon. Did you know you were walking into a gluttony demon’s lair when you came here? Liam did.”

  Sal glanced at Liam, feeling a bit guilty. He grinned at her.

  “You clearly couldn’t handle yourself in a fight with possessed restaurant workers,” Grace continued. “And how do you think you would have fared against that demon on your own? Menchú is in there cleaning up your mess.”

  “Doesn’t he usually do that? And I thought most of the meat had dissolved to ash,” Sal said.

  “I was not speaking literally,” Grace said coldly. “When we work as a team, we work well together. We are efficient. There are fewer injuries. And we do not waste time.”

  Sal sighed and rubbed her sore neck. The adrenaline would wear off soon, and she needed a burger and a beer. Perhaps two. At a restaurant that was loud and

  dysfunctional and very, very normal.

  “You should know that this is nothing compared to the lecture you’re going to get from Menchú,” Liam said close to her ear.

  Sal nodded. “I figured.”

  • • •

  Asanti’s history with their target changed one more aspect of their trip; despite the battle, they were there for her to say good-bye to her mentor, and so Menchú allowed one more day in Scotland to attend Seamus Hunter’s funeral and to assess Chef Hunter to make sure she was unharmed from her ordeal. They got rooms in a hotel and returned to clean up.