Page 58 of Demon's Bluff
“The ever-after hasn’t been remade yet,” Elyse said, voice distant. “My God. You’re going to bargain with Newt?”
I nodded, shoulders easing when no one shouted for us to stop. I had to reorganize my day. The I.S. would be a major presence downtown for a while. Good time to catch some sleep. “I would have been home by nowwith that mirror if you hadn’t butted in.” I couldn’t go to the church, but there were other places to catch a nap, and no way was I going to face Newt tired and fatigued. “This way.”
Elyse’s pace bobbled as she glanced over her shoulder at the bus depot before meeting me stride for stride. “Where are we going?”
“The library. Ancient book locker.”
“For some spells,” she guessed wrongly. “Good idea. But don’t they usually keep them under lock and key?”
“Yep.” Good thing I knew where Nick stashed it.
Chapter
14
I wasn’t sure if itwas the scent of coffee or the sound of sliding pages that woke me, but I stayed where I was despite the painful crick in my neck, slumped in a chair and smiling at the thought that I must have fallen asleep in Trent’s office again.
Until a feminine, very un-Trent-like voice whispered, “Oh, that can’t be legal.”
My eyes flashed open, my smile fading at the sight of the rack of old, musty books.Not Trent’s office.It was the ancient book locker.
I sat up, stifling a groan as I patted my pocket to assure myself that the broken stirring rod was still there. I was sore, stiff from sleeping in one of the ratty rolling office chairs that had been dumped down here. Elyse barely glanced up from her book, her butt in the other rolling chair, her institute-bland sneakers on the round table at the center of the small room. My jacket hung from the corner of a low bookshelf. Guess she was done with it.
“Good afternoon,” she said, her high voice only slightly mocking.
“Is it?” I practically whispered. The book in her hand had been written by a demon, if the lack of a title meant anything. She had two paper cups of coffee beside her, and a sticky-looking pastry in her hand. “What spell?” I asked when she didn’t respond, and I took a slow breath. She was getting crumbs on the pages, and it bothered me. “What spell can’t be legal?”
“Freeze someone’s blood in their veins. I thought it was an expression.I’ll have to come back for this one,” she said, her gaze never leaving the ancient text. “I know how to freeze inanimate things, but this one works past auras. I had no idea Cincinnati had such a treasure of illicit dark magic under her streets.”
That tends to happen when you’re one of the oldest cities in the U.S.I stretched, feeling my calves ache and my feet twinge from being on the cold concrete. My spiffy red shirt was wrinkled. One of the sequins was loose, and I jerked it free, flicking it to the filthy carpet. “What time is it?”
“Almost noon? You’re the one with the phone.” Elyse ate another bite, brushing the crumbs off when I pointedly noticed them. “I got you a pastry from the vending machine before the library opened. That coffee is yours, too, if you want it.”
My neck cracked when I shifted my head, and I stood, feeling like a zombie as I shuffled over. “Thank you.”
“I didn’t know what you liked, so I got you a black, two sugars.”
“Perfect.” I dragged my rolling chair to the table. One of the casters was busted, so it took some effort.
“You’re welcome,” she added sullenly.
Wow. Just wow.I was too fuzzy to try to figure out what her problem was, and I sat down in my chair and took the coffee in both hands. The pasty was one of those nasty cinnamon rolls wrapped in cellophane, but it was the coffee I really wanted, and I tapped a line and warmed it up with a quick word. It had been sitting for a while.
Elyse’s attention returned to her book. Her feet were still on the table, but I could sense a rising tension in her. The ancient book locker sat at the end of a long hallway in the basement of the university’s library, safe behind a chain-link fence with a mundane lock and a magical deterrent they put in about a year ago after a particularly nasty break-in. Industrial lights hummed overhead, and my aura prickled at the hint of power.
A faint musty smell fought with the scent of burnt amber rising from the room’s more valuable books. A cracked cement-block wall with a broken glass cabinet took up one side, books on the other three. Several moreracks of books stood between our cozy ten-by-fourteen space and the chain-link fence and hall to give the occasional user less of a feeling of being in a cage. That was why the table and chairs. Nothing was supposed to leave the ancient book locker.
But it did,I thought, grimacing at the broken cabinet and the black stain below it as I wrestled with the pastry to try to get the cellophane to break.
Finally I got it open, and the scent of syrupy sugar made me a hundred times hungrier. “Thanks, I’m starving,” I said as I pulled off a strand of dough and ate it.
There was a black hoodie on the back of her chair. It went with her gray sweats better than my sequined jacket, and my eyebrows rose. “You didn’t get that from a vending machine.”
“Nope.” Elyse turned a page, playing with her coven pin as if it was a talisman. “I got it from the employees’ break room along with your breakfast. And before you say anything, it was in the lost and found. They weren’t even open yet. No one saw me.”
I bobbed my head. If anything got us caught, it would be the scent of coffee.
Elyse slowly lost the chip on her shoulder at my silence, but the tension remained.