by Tricia Owens
I soon heard the soft click of the lock opening. I tried the door and was able to push it in. Though I was afraid this might be some sort of test to see how much of a nosy neighbor I was, I quietly entered the shop.
Tomes was huge inside, easily outclassing any "normal" bookstore I'd ever entered. I wouldn't have been surprised if Orlaton admitted that magick was behind it. Aisles and aisles of bookshelves stuffed full of old and dirty books stretched every which way back into darkness. It was a veritable maze of bookshelves, with a good chance there was some grizzled Minotaur camping out somewhere within it. The place stank of leather, rotting paper, and sage, the latter which was burned for purification purposes. I headed for the very center of the shop to the rotunda where rituals were often held. I was relieved to see that today the area was empty.
Rugs covered the floor. I resisted the urge to lift up the edge of one to see if the wood floors still held the scratches from the exorcism rite we'd attempted to perform on Vale. It wasn't my fondest memory, to say the least. I was amused to note the rearing dragon statue that now sat in place of the manticore one that I had destroyed that night.
"I always knew you were a sucker for dragons, Orlaton," I said to myself as I walked up to it and ran my fingers along a bronze wing. It was a European dragon, so visually it wasn't much like my dragon, but that was just nitpicking. Melanie had joked that Orlaton had a crush on me. Maybe she wasn't wrong. Or maybe the dragon had been the only statue on sale the day Orlaton had gone shopping for a replacement.
I stood for a long moment, ears straining to hear sounds of movement. Just when I was about to deem the place empty, I heard the distant rustle of cloth.
"Orlaton?" I called out.
To my surprise, the sound of a faint moan drifted to me from between the stacks.
Oh, great.
I followed the sound, my heart rate picking up its pace. I wasn't in the mood for any more scary surprises. I was tempted to turn around and walk out. But of course that wasn't an option. Not after standing by and doing nothing while Kleure was taught his lesson.
Emerging from the stacks, I came upon Orlaton sitting sprawled on the floor. His legs were extended in front of him and his hands lay slack between them. Books lay scattered around him, disgorged from one of the shelves that had been tipped over. It had hit the wall with one corner, keeping it suspended at a sixty degree angle to the floor.
I hurried around to kneel by Orlaton's side. His chin nearly touched his chest but his eyes were open, staring ahead.
"Is it…is it closed?" he whispered.
"Is what closed?"
"The…menace."
Frowning, I traced his line of sight to the old metal trunk that was partially hidden in the shadow cast by the tipped over bookshelf. The trunk appeared old and weathered, with rusted metal bands wrapped around it. It would be the perfect decoration at a pirate-themed party. When Orlaton had pointed it out to me previously, it was to illustrate the danger of working with dark magick. But he'd been vague, not actually telling me what was so frightening about the thing.
That vagueness should have spurred me to write it off, however sometimes you didn't need a threat to be spelled out for you to recognize its danger. And that was the case with this trunk. The haunted look on Orlaton's face as he'd explained how he'd only barely bested whatever was contained inside it had stuck with me like a ghost story.
Orlaton was seventeen, but he dressed and acted like he was fifty years-old. His maturity was unnerving. So was his general appearance, which was of a pale, thin man with an overly large head and eyes. When he was afraid, like now, he resembled the figure in Edvard Munch's painting, The Scream.
A sense of terror was climbing up my spine. It was exacerbated when I noticed that the big padlock that normally bound the trunk now lay open on the floor alongside two chains and two smaller locks that must have been recent additions. I'd thought the big lock was only a visual deterrent to keep the curious from opening the trunk, but maybe I was wrong. I could feel the ominous tickle along my senses that told me the magickal locks on the thing had been recently opened as well.
"Orlaton, I think it's open," I hissed urgently. "How did it get open?"
He chuckled weakly. "I wanted to see if it was still active."
"You couldn't have just kicked it?"
He rolled his blue eyes up at me impatiently. The Orlaton I knew and sorta liked was coming back. "It's not a puppy in a crate, Miss Moody."
"How would I know? You've never told me what's in there."
Frustratingly, he didn't rise to the bait. "No, and you don't need to know. Help me to stand."
I hooked one of his thin arms around my shoulders and helped him to his feet. After a few seconds he pushed me away, determined to stand on his own, which he did, albeit like a scarecrow battered by gusting winds. It bothered me to see him wipe a trickle of blood from his bottom lip where he must have bitten himself.
The color had returned to his cheeks but he still looked sickly to me. Granted, Orlaton's default look wasn't exactly sunny and healthy but he looked worse now, like one of the kids from The Flowers in the Attic.
"It called to me," he murmured as he stared at the trunk with equal parts fascination and horror. "It tricked me. How could it trick me?"
I felt itchy all over, and kept glancing over my shoulders at the shadows. "Jesus, Orlaton, would you just tell me what it is already?"
He turned to me then, and it was like locking gazes with a prisoner of war. "Why would you want that nightmare in your head?" he asked me softly.
"Damn you." I rubbed ferociously at my arms, trying to rub away the goose bumps that had broken over my skin. "I'm your neighbor, you know. I think I have a right to know if something godawful is across the street from me."
"And what would you do about it if you knew?" he challenged me.
He had a point. I wasn't ready to close up Moonlight Pawn just yet. Not even for mysterious pirate trunks.
"Maybe I'd bolster my defenses or something," I mumbled.
"You should be doing that anyway," he muttered, and to my alarm, strode boldly toward the chest.
I caught his arm. "What are you doing?"
He looked down at my hand, then up at my face. And then he just stood there, staring at me, until I let him go. The balls on this kid.
"I'm going to ensure it is properly closed," he told me. "Assuming I have your permission…"
I threw up my hands. "Have at it, Orlaton. Knock yourself out."
But I watched him warily, ready to call up Lucky should he be needed. Orlaton wasn't a magickal being. He was simply an ordinary kid with an obsession with the occult. Frankly, it was amazing that Orlaton had been allowed to know as much as he did. Had someone vouched for him to the Oddsmakers? I made a mental note to dig up information about who his parents were.
Today he wore another cardigan—navy blue this time—and a yellow bowtie with black dots. Combined with his pale, fine hair that under certain lightning made him appear to be balding, Orlaton looked like a high schooler playing his dad in the school play. But appearances were deceiving in this case. Despite his age, Orlaton was no child.
He stopped about four paces from the trunk and carefully tipped the bookshelves upright again. He must have tried to bury the trunk with the closest thing at hand. An act of panic, probably, which didn't do my nerves any favors.
He made some motions with his fingers while he murmured words I didn't understand. I knew zilch when it came to the occult arts. Too many formulas and rules, too much studying and paying attention to detail. I was a bit ADD when it came to magickal constructions. Probably in Orlaton's eyes that made me an unsophisticated pleb.
"Somewhere around here should be a bottle of blessed water," he said without turning to look at me.
I found the bottle buried beneath the piles of books. It was about the size and shape of a container of cough syrup. It was stoppered with cork and appeared to be half full. Or was that half empty?
Cautiously, I approached with the bottle held out at arm's length. "Right behind you."
He didn't turn, just held his hand out like a surgeon in the middle of an operation. I noticed with dismay that his hand trembled. I placed the bottle carefully in his palm. The cork came out with a cheerful sounding pop but that was where the cheer ended. When Orlaton flung the contents of the bottle over the chest, the thing wailed.
Several voices twined together to create the sound, like a chorus of tenors. But these were glee clubbers from Hell.
"You will regret this…"
"We'll tear you apart!"
"Kill him! Kill them all!"
I "heard" the wailing threats not through my ears but in my chest. I actually clapped my hands over my breastbone as though I could stop the reedy vibration of my heart. It was a whir like a dentist's drill boring through my rib cage. I twisted with discomfort as Orlaton splashed the trunk with more of the blessed water, inciting a fresh round of wailing and threats.
"To Hell with you!"
"You will weep and you will bleed…"
"You will suffer worse than any have suffered!"
Their voices and their threats were a million times worse than those uttered by the cursed cameos in my shop. These were malicious. These wanted to hurt Orlaton in ungodly ways.
"S-Stop," I chattered. The voices were rising in pitch, creating a fine vibration that threatened to reduce my skeleton to powder. I clenched my teeth together. They rattled dangerously and I was afraid I'd jar my fillings loose.
Orlaton, white-faced, ignored me and my suffering. He emptied out all of the water, tossed the empty bottle, and then swiftly kneeled and began yanking the loose chains around the chest so they crisscrossed the lid. The trunk twitched. I thought I saw the lid begin to crack open, thought I saw the light glinting off the tips of needle sharp fingernails. I pointed wordlessly at that widening seam of darkness and what was coming out of it, unable to voice my horror. Orlaton worked faster, perhaps having seen what I had. I saw his hands begin to shake more violently. A bead of sweat slid down the side of his face.
Just as I took my first step backward, he lashed the chains tightly over the lid and snapped it shut. Three padlocks later, the awful chorus of wails stopped vibrating within my body.
"What the hell was that?" I demanded breathlessly as I massaged my chest. "It sounded like, well, I don't know what it sounded like. It was horrible!"
"Pray you never hear its voice with your ears," he murmured, and visibly shuddered.
"I heard more than one voice."
He ran a hand down his face. "Yes."
"Dammit, Orlaton, throw me a bone!"
He rose to his feet and by his hesitation I could tell he considered kicking the trunk. The fact that he thought better of it told me volumes. He hugged himself as he faced me, a picture of fragility. But steel was in his voice as he said, "I don't owe you anything, Miss Moody. Why are you trespassing on my property? You don't have an appointment."
"Be glad I forced my way in, Orlaton! What if I hadn't roused you? That thing was starting to open."
He waved off my irritation. "I would have recovered and locked the trunk eventually."
"Or you would have continued sitting in a stupor while whatever's inside that thing ate the place!"
"It wouldn't have—" He sighed impatiently, like he was dealing with a recalcitrant two year-old. "Why are you here?"
I mentally shook off the episode with the trunk. One nightmare at a time. "I need to talk to you. I need your opinion."
"Mmm," was all he said before he abruptly turned on his heel and strode down an aisle and out of view.
I wasn't about to be left behind in this spooky place. I followed him, ignoring the sigh of annoyance he emitted when he noticed me. There seriously had to be thousands of books here, and each was unique. I ran my fingers across brown leather, red leather, books bound in burlap and other rough cloth, bindings that were made of pressed leaves or bark, books covered in fur and hair and spikes and thorns. They could be as thick as four inches or as thin as a comic book. Some reeked of herbs or smoke and some appeared to be wet or oily. Some—
"Ow!" I wagged my finger before holding it up to the light. I saw tiny teeth marks in my skin. "One of these books just bit me!"
Orlaton glanced back, though his disinterest couldn't have been more obvious. "Did it draw blood?"
"No."
"Then congratulations. You're not infected."
"Infected?" I glared at Orlaton's back as he continued down the aisle, perhaps a bit more cheerfully than before. "A warning would have been nice, you know."
"So would keeping your hands to yourself."
Grumbling and tucking my hands beneath my arms, I continued following him. The labyrinth seemed to go on forever and Orlaton showed no signs of stopping. Irritated and stressed, I breached the reason I had come.
"Did you know my uncle? Uncle James?"
"Tomes has been in operation for just over three years, Miss Moody."
"Wow, so your parents gave this to you to run when you were only fourteen?"
The sigh he heaved sounded like it weighed as much as an elephant.
"I made my request at that time, yes, and they wisely saw the value in acceding to my wishes."
Are your parents afraid of you? I longed to ask, but I knew that wouldn't get me on his good side. Also, the answer might alarm me.
"Uncle James was running Moonlight then," I said. "So that means you probably met him at some point."
"I met him. We interacted very little. A handful of occasions to inform me of book purchases which he believed would interest me."
Disappointment made my shoulders heavy. "Then he never shared with you anything concerning what he was up to when he wasn't running Moonlight?"
"No."
I wasn't especially surprised. It was a long shot that Uncle James would have told Orlaton anything. Why would he share important information with a teenager?
"He did visit me once for a reason other than to sell me something."
I perked. "Yeah, why?"
Orlaton glanced back at me from over one shoulder. "He wished to purchase a magicked journal. One that would translate whatever he wrote into poems by Emily Dickinson."
My jaw dropped so low a June bug could have landed comfortably on my tongue. "I have that journal. He gave it to me the day before he disappeared."
"You enjoy Emily Dickinson?"
"She's alright. I just thought it was sweet that he'd copied her poems by hand for me. That was the real value in it for me." But maybe there was much more value to be gleaned from that journal. My heart began to pound. "How do I translate the poems back into text?"
"A blood wash will do it. One part blood to twenty parts water."
Gross, but I'd slice a vein if it would tell me where he'd gone or what might have happened to him.
We finally exited the bookshelves and entered what looked like it might be a lab. Or a kitchen. With all those bottles full of bits and pieces of who knew what it could have been a laboratory as easily as it could have been where Orlaton prepared his meals. Rectangular windows sheeted with white cloth shades allowed plenty of natural light inside. A long stainless steel table, disconcertingly ridged (was it an autopsy table?) stood in the middle of the small room. Atop it sat six bowls of varying sizes, each holding something soft, wet, and lumpy, like porridge. Except this porridge was different shades of pink.
I closed my eyes and breathed deeply for a moment, willing my gag reflex back under control.
"What. The hell. Is. That?" I demanded from between clenched teeth.
"A recipe for a conjuring which doesn't concern you."
I cracked my eyes open but I fixed them on Orlaton rather than on his creepy oatmeal. "Is it for conjuring something bad?"
Something in my voice caught his attention. He'd been about to dip a pipette into the bowl nearest to him but instead he turned to regard me steadily, the way a teacher does when he
's trying to determine if you actually know the answer or simply made a lucky guess.
"It's for fertility," he said quietly. "Hence, why I don't share the details with anyone who asks. It's a private matter for a client."
The muscles in my neck slowly unclenched. "That's good. It's just—I had a pretty rough night. I guess I'm a little skittish. A little…squeamish." Orlaton was only seventeen, but suddenly I felt that he was older and would understand. "I saw someone destroyed in the most awful of ways."
He didn't turn pale and his mouth didn't thin, but his eyes ticked quickly to the windows and back. "The Oddsmakers?"
I nodded. "It was a lesson."
"It sounds as though it was a memorable one."
"It wasn't meant for me. Well, not entirely. But I-I didn't come here to talk about that. I need to know how people feel about me and my family. I get that they don't like dragon familiars in general, but I'm talking about disliking us personally. My mom and my uncle."
"They're both gone."
"Yes," I said with passion, "but why? Dearborn killed my parents for my mother's bones. But what of Uncle James? Are there people—shifters or other beings—that hated or feared him? Enough to get rid of him?"
A sigh that would have filled the sails of a clipper ship. "Miss Moody—"
"Can you please just call me Anne?"
He startled. I'd sort of yelled at him and I regretted it, but I was strung out. Hearing that other magickal beings believed that my relatives were henchmen for the Oddsmakers, and seeing with my own eyes what the Oddsmakers were capable of, had filled me with fury and frustration. No way had my family, at any time, willingly supported the horrors that the Oddsmakers were capable of committing. If other people believed that, I needed to know so I could spread the truth.
Orlaton stared hard at me, perhaps torn between wanting to tell me to get the hell out and humoring me by calling me by my first name. He avoided both.