“I realize that,” I growl as I try to pin a hissing, cussing, clawing Jackson to the floor. “A little help?”
I’ve got him down for all of two seconds before he somehow gets his knee and then his shoe between our bodies.
The young Librarian stands up as Jackson uses his boot to pry me off, sending me backward to the hard floor. I’m still on the ground, but Jackson is halfway to his feet when the Librarian rounds the desk and cheerfully plunges something thin and sharp and shining into his back. His eyes widen, and when she twists the weapon there’s a noise, like a lock turning or a bone breaking, and all the life goes out of Jackson Lerner’s eyes. She withdraws, and he crumples to the floor with the sickening thud of dead weight. I can see now that what she holds is not a weapon exactly, but a kind of key. It’s gleaming gold and has a handle and a stem, but no teeth.
“That was fun,” she says.
There’s something like a giggle in the corners of her voice. I’ve seen her around the stacks. She always catches my eye because she is so young. Girlish. Librarian is top rank, so the vast majority are older, seasoned. But this girl looks like she’s twenty.
I drag myself to my feet. “I need a key like that.”
She laughs. “You couldn’t handle it. Literally.” She holds it out, but the moment my fingers touch the metal, they go pins-and-needles numb. I pull back, and her laugh trails off as the key vanishes into the pocket of her coat.
“Stumble through the wrong door?” she asks just before the large doors behind the desk fly open.
“What is going on?” comes a very different voice. Patrick storms in, the eyes behind his black glasses flicking from the Librarian to Jackson’s body on the floor to me.
“Carmen,” he says, his attention still leveled on me. “Please take care of that.”
The girl smiles and, despite her size, hauls the body up and through a pair of doors built right into the curving walls of the antechamber. I blink. I never noticed those before. And the moment they’ve closed behind her, I can’t seem to focus on them. My eyes roll off.
“Miss Bishop,” Patrick says tersely. The room is quiet except for my heavy breathing. “You’re bleeding on my floor.”
I look down and realize he’s right. Pain rolls up my arm as my eyes slide over the place where Jackson’s knife cut through fabric and grazed skin. My sleeve is stained red, a narrow line running down my hand and over my key before dripping to the floor. Patrick is gazing distastefully at the drops as they hit the granite.
“Did you have a problem with the doors?” asks Patrick.
“No,” I say, aiming for a joke. “The doors were fine. I had a problem with the History.”
Not even a smile.
“Do you need medical attention?” he asks.
I feel dazed, but I know better than to show it. Certainly not in front of him.
Every branch staffs a medically trained Librarian in the interest of keeping work-related injuries quiet, and Patrick is the man for this branch. If I say yes, then he’ll treat me; but he’ll also have an excuse to report the incident, and there won’t be anything Roland can do to keep it off the books. I don’t have a clean record, so I shake my head.
“I’ll live.” A swatch of yellow catches my eye, and I recover my bandana from the floor and wrap it around the cut. “But I really liked this shirt,” I add as lightly as possible.
He frowns and I think he’s going to chew me out or report me, but when he speaks it’s only to say, “Go clean up.”
I nod and turn back to the Narrows, leaving a trail of red behind.
EIGHT
I AM A MESS.
I scoured the Narrows, but Jackson’s knife was nowhere to be found. As for the strange shadow I saw during the fight, the one with the silvery crown…maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me. That happens, now and then, with the ring off. Press against a surface wrong and you can see the present and past at once. Things can get tangled.
I wince, focusing on the task at hand.
The cut on my arm is deeper than I thought, and it bleeds through the gauze before I can get the bandage on. I toss another ruined wrap into the plastic bag currently serving as the bathroom trash bin and run the cut under cool water, digging through the extensive first-aid kit I’ve assembled over the years. My shirt is sitting in a heap on the floor, and I take in my reflection, the web of fine scars across my stomach and arms, and the bruise blossoming on my shoulder. I am never without the marks of my job.
Pulling my forearm from the water, I dab the cut, finally getting it gauzed and wrapped. Red drops have made a trail along the counter and into the sink.
“I christen thee,” I mutter to the sink as I finish bandaging the cut. I take the trash bag and add it to the larger one in the kitchen, making sure all evidence of my first aid is buried, just as Mom appears, a slightly smooshed but still cellophaned muffin in one hand, and the basket in the other. The muffins inside have cooled, a film of condensation fogging up the wrappers. Damn. I knew I forgot something.
“Mackenzie Bishop,” she says, dropping her purse on the dining room table, which is the only fully assembled piece of furniture. “What is this?”
“A Welcome muffin?”
She drops the basket with a thud.
“You said you would deliver them. Not drop them on people’s doormats and leave the basket in the stairwell. And where have you been?” she snaps. “This couldn’t have taken you all morning. You can’t just disappear.…” She’s an open book: anger and worry too thinly veiled behind a tight-lipped smile. “I asked for your help.”
“I knocked, but nobody was home,” I snap back, pain and fatigue tightening around me. “Most people have jobs, Mom. Normal jobs. Ones where they get up and go to the office and come home.”
She rubs her eyes, which means that she’s been rehearsing whatever she’s about to say. “Mackenzie. Look. I was talking to Colleen, and she said that you’d need to grieve in your own way—”
“You’re kidding me.”
“—and when you add that to your age, and the natural desire for rebellion—”
“Stop.” My head is starting to hurt.
“—I know you need space. But you also need to learn discipline. Bishop’s is a family business.”
“But it wasn’t a family dream.”
She flinches.
I want to be oblivious to the hurt written on her face. I want to be selfish and young and normal. M would be that way. She would need space to grieve. She would rebel because her parents were simply uncool, not because one was wearing a horrifying happy mask and the other was a living ghost. She’d be distant because she was preoccupied with boys or school, not because she’s tired from hunting down the Histories of the dead, or distracted by her new hotel-turned-apartment, where the walls are filled with crimes.
“Sorry,” I say, adding, “Colleen’s right, I guess.” The words try to crawl back down my throat. “Maybe I just need a little time to adjust. It’s a lot of change. But I didn’t mean to bail.”
“Where were you?”
“Talking to a neighbor,” I say. “Ms. Angelli. She invited me in, and I didn’t want to be rude. She seemed kind of lonely, and she had this amazing place full of old stuff, and so I just stayed with her for a while. We had tea, and she showed me her collections.”