I looked up, shoe in hand, to see the shop owner holding a heavy wooden walking stick. He had muttonchops; jowls; small, piercing blue eyes; and incongruously pink cheeks that would have been perfect on Santa, only he didn’t look like Santa. He looked like what he was: a guy who ran a magical secondhand shop and intended to make a sale.
“Gaylord!” he told me, on a little explosion of air.
“Uh. What?”
“Gaylord. That’s what we call him. He’s a rotter.” He bent over the book and buckled the buckles. “I can show you some much finer tomes, Lady, including several first editions.”
“What’s wrong with that one?” I asked, because I’d never seen anything like it. I knew ghosts could haunt things as well as places—I was wearing proof of that around my neck—but that . . . hadn’t felt like a haunting.
At least, not a normal one.
“Oh, nothing,” he said, waving it away. “They get like that when you leave them in too long.”
“Leave them in . . . where?”
He looked at me through little half-moon spectacles that, again, would have looked good on Santa. Only the eyes behind them weren’t nearly so nice. And neither was the oily smile that he clearly thought was charming.
“Sorcerers sometimes imprison ghosts in books, to use their souls to power an enchantment,” he informed me. “They typically let them free after a while, once they no longer need a perfect lock or an unbreakable cypher or what have you. But sometimes they forget.”
I swallowed hard and stared at the book. “You’re saying that somebody didn’t let Gaylord . . . out?”
“No. The mage died, y’see, quite unexpectedly, and his relatives inherited the house. Only they had no use for the contents and sold the lot to me. Some good items—most went fast, as the better sort usually does. But Gaylord here—”
“But if the sorcerer died,” I interrupted, because I didn’t care about his stock issues. “Shouldn’t that have broken the enchantment?”
“For a regular spell, certainly,” he agreed. “Once there was no more magic being funneled into it. But Gaylord isn’t a spell. He’s a power source, bound to the book with no one to set him free, since the only one who could have done it is dead.”
I stared. “That’s horrible!”
“Yes, indeed,” the shop owner agreed. “Ruins the resale value.”
Billy Joe whispered something rude and stared at the book, probably remembering his time in a necklace at the bottom of the Mississippi.
Even unbound ghosts could only go so far from their resting places. For most, that was a graveyard, where the life energy shed by visitors kept the hungry ghosts going. But for some, like Billy, it was an enchanted item, like a talisman, that collected enough power to let a ghost survive. Although survival kind of loses its luster when you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, buried underneath a river.
Billy had been lucky; some fishermen had trawled up the gaudy ruby necklace he lived in, which had eventually ended up in the magical junk shop where I’d stumbled across it. But what if they hadn’t? And what if, instead of being able to explore the area for fifty miles or so around his home—his usual range when I wasn’t topping him up—Billy had been trapped inside, all alone, for who knew how long? Only to slowly realize that the person who had put him there was dead, and that he’d never get out?
I felt a hard shiver go down my spine.
I guessed Billy did, too, because he rippled all over, just once, like a gust of wind had blown through him.
“Cassie—”
“I’ll take it,” I told the salesman, who had started toward a large bookcase, the tome under his arm, but at that he turned around.
And, suddenly, I was looking at Santa Claus after all. The man was positively beaming. “Oh, of course, of course. So useful for . . . any number of things. I’ll add it to the pile, shall I?”
He looked at the counter, which a delighted bunch of little girls had already piled high. I nodded, and he started off again, only to have me call him back a second time. Because the pouf was losing its tiny cotton mind.
“And that,” I said. What the hell. I’d gift it to one of my bodyguards if it was too much of a nuisance.
“Excellent choice,” the salesman said, his eyes gleaming, and hurried off before I changed my mind.
“Thanks,” Billy told me quietly.
I nodded and bent down to pat the little hassock, which started running around in circles excitedly, as if it somehow knew it had found a home.
“Lady?” That was Rhea, my acolyte.
Rhea was in jeans today, too, having been persuaded—not that it had taken a lot of talking—to give up the white, Victorian-looking dresses that the Pythian Court had worn for more than a century. I’d been told they were an improvement on what had gone before, but found that hard to believe. The girls were now dressed in shorts, because Vegas in the summer is scorching, and various brightly colored tees with cartoon characters on them, because they were kids.
Rhea, on the other hand, was nineteen, and could choose her own clothes. And, somehow, she’d continued to look serene and otherworldly despite the lack of traditional attire. Her long, dark hair was in a messy chignon today, and her jeans had been paired with a soft blue lace shirt with a high neck.
If you didn’t know her, you’d never guess that the neckline was to cover the scars from a recent “accident” in which she’d been held captive while a dark mage tried to blackmail me with her life. So Rhea had taken what she’d thought was her only option. And my timid, soft-voiced, sweet-faced acolyte who wouldn’t hurt a fly had cut her own throat on his knife blade to ensure that he didn’t have anything left to bargain with.
Yeah.
People aren’t always what they seem.
Only, at the moment, Rhea was looking a little less timid and a little more outraged, which probably meant that something was up with the kids. She was the type who would never stand up for herself, but was a lioness in defense of the talented tots who made up the court. She had, after all, been one herself once.
“What is—oh.” I stopped, after glancing behind her. Because of course. “Hilde?”
Rhea nodded, looking over her shoulder at my not-at-all timid, frequently-made-other-people-timid acolyte Hildegarde.
Hilde was . . . something else.
The exact opposite of Rhea’s soft motherliness, Hilde could have been a Valkyrie in another existence. Admittedly, the cap of silver white curls and the wrinkles—not many, despite her almost two centuries, because the body was, um, sturdy, and filled them out—might have worked against her, but the ’tude would have gotten her in anyway. Hilde was a force of freaking nature.