Welcome to Bordertown (30 page)

“Not offhand.”

“This is all about a book. If I go find a buyer for it, Nixi won’t have any reason to keep the pressure on us. Can you watch the place for an hour or two?”

Orient’s grin grew wider. “And lend you my charger to speed you on your way.”

So I rode off on his midnight-blue Harley, enjoying the cry of its spellbox and the wind in my fur, knowing the solution to all our problems was near.

Three Persimmon Lane was a purple, yellow, and green three-story Victorian mansion big enough to be a hotel or sanatorium. I didn’t remember seeing it before, which could just mean I hadn’t noticed it, or it could mean Teliamonde had used magic to build it overnight.

An old elf in a dark coat and breeches, white stockings, and buckled shoes opened the door. I held up a note: “Hello. I’m Ron Vasquez of Elsewhere Books. I hear Teliamonde is interested in
The Secrets of Seven Sages.
”

The elf said, “One moment,” and closed the door. I patted
The Secrets of Seven Sages
in my coat pocket. Maybe it vibrated against my leg. I wondered why anyone would make a magic book that seemed like it was alive, then remembered Milo. Sometimes people just do things because they think they’re fun. And they forget that one person’s fun is another’s ick.

The elf returned. “I’ve been informed that you are, quite literally, a cursed human. Be so good as to go to the back door.”

I flipped to a new page of my notebook and wrote, “Here’s more informing: no.” I started back down the walk. With each step, I wondered if I’d made the wrong call. My choice was half-pride and half-business: If you want the best price, don’t look like you need a sale, and bigots suck.

As I swung my leg over Orient’s bike, I heard a melodious feminine voice calling, “Mr. Vasquez!”

A tall elf stood on the porch. Her hair was indigo. Her silver eyes had a hint of sea green. She wore black cowboy boots and a belted knee-length blue dress printed with yellow javelinas. She smelled like cinnamon and apples. My fur tingled, which meant she was using glamour to make me think she was kind and attractive, but anyone who has been in business long in B-town learns to ignore glamour when money is at stake.

She came toward me, saying, “You must excuse my servant! He’s new to this land and has not learned all its customs. Please, you’ve brought this book, yes? It would be rude to send you away.”

The book whispered, so quietly I could barely hear it, “False face must hide what the false heart doth know.”

A question came to mind that sellers hate: What would Teliamonde do with
The Secrets of Seven Sages
? I thought,
Not my responsibility.
But if it wasn’t mine, whose was it?

Teliamonde interpreted my hesitation as polite respect. She said, “I’m prepared to pay fifteen thousand aurei for it.”

I thought,
Nixi, you lying bastard.
And then,
It’s a book. Be a bookseller and sell it.

But I could swear the book was shivering slightly against my leg.

After a moment, Teliamonde said, “You do know that the Highborn do not dicker?”

Everyone dickers, but nothing I knew about
The Secrets of Seven Sages
suggested I would get a better price. If I tried to buy time by asking for more, she would only get suspicious.

I nodded, then wrote, being very careful not to lie in case she had a spell to detect that, “Your price is fair, but I can’t deliver it to you now. The book isn’t at Elsewhere.”

Her frown made me wonder if she could sense it near. Then she said, “When will you bring it?”

I wrote, “Perhaps in a day or three. I need to convince the person who has it to sell it to you.”

Driving back to Elsewhere, I chose a route that took me by the house with the red door. I wasn’t feeling melodramatic enough to stop in front of it, but I slowed as I passed it.

The crowd in front of Elsewhere was up to forty or fifty people. Inside, Sparks was behind the counter with her foot up on a stool. She said, “Home is the hawker.”

I signed, “Without a sale to show. Need to do some more research on the book. Where’s Orient?”

“He had some things to do. I told him to go.”

“He left you alone?”

“After I hit him with my crutch. Twice. Nixi won’t let anything violent happen. It’d make him look bad.”

I signed, “Unless that’s the only way to get what he wants.”

After I carried her upstairs, I was going through our last box of unsorted books when I heard shouts of “Blood traitor!” and “You know he’s a traitor! He’s a cop!”

The elf who entered wore a burgundy business suit with black Beatle boots and a black T-shirt. His hair had grown in the last year or so. I wrote, “Afternoon, Detective Linn. What can I do for you?”

He said, “What’s the most costly volume in your establishment that an honest servant of Bordertown might afford?”

“What do you like?”

“Cowboy books.”

I almost laughed, but I was so damn grateful for him coming in that I didn’t want to risk offending him. Why shouldn’t an elf like cowboy books? I showed him a first edition of
Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads.
He paid me in doubloons. I handed him Kelton’s
The Day the Cowboys Quit
and wrote, “Take this, too. I could use the shelf space.”

Elves are funny about presents, but he nodded. Then he looked out at the protesters and said, “Give them what they wish. They’ll gloat, but they’ll go.”

I wrote, “Are you volunteering to work here?”

“Would that I could. However, I have a niece who would do well to learn something of the lives of others.”

“Did Orient send you?”

Linn nodded.

I wrote, “Tell your niece she has a job. The pay’s lousy, but if she likes books, the benefits can’t be beat. Can she be here tomorrow at noon?”

He nodded again.

Elves hate to be thanked. I said, “When you see Orient, tell him I’m grateful. As in, very.”

“That’ll be my pleasure,” Linn said. Then he walked blithely out of the store and through the mob.

I wrote on my slate, went outside, and showed them: “We hired an elf. She starts tomorrow.”

Everyone looked at Nixi. He did an eyebrow raise that he had to love in the mirror. “Who is she?”

I wrote, “Meet her tomorrow.”

Copperjean shouted, “We’ll be back!”

Nixi quickly said, “Indeed. We will.” It wasn’t a great line, but it reminded his followers who was first among equals here.

That evening, I made pizza with asparagus, and we talked over our options with Milo. He had no idea why Teliamonde wanted the book, but he promised to spend the night poking through his library. I couldn’t figure out a way to avoid eating a candy made from Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train,” which I have to admit was pretty good.

After Milo left, I put the book back on the shelf over the front window and signed, “Sweet dreams, book.”

It said, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

I signed, “Yeah, I hear that. Round well, you.”

Around three in the morning, I woke with the certainty something was wrong. Make that, more wrong.

Sparks said, “Did you hear something break?”

Which was when my dog nose shouted, “Smoke!”

Pulling on a robe, I ran to the window. Two bikers in red leather sped away on Mock Avenue. This was not a good time to tell Sparks she’d been right when she said we should have an escape ladder. But even if we had one, could she have managed it with a broken foot?

I heard a scream: “Though little fire grows great with little wind, yet extreme gusts will blow out fire and all!”

A ball of flame burst from the front of Elsewhere. Sparks gasped. I’m betting I did, too.

I carried her in her penguin pajamas to a side window and glanced down. Nothing looked soft below. I set her on down and leaped. I was right—nothing was soft—but I rolled as I landed and came up fine. I signed, “Jump!”

She leaped, I caught her, and I carried her to the far side of Mock Avenue. As I did, she said in wonder, “Ron? The fire’s out.”

Elsewhere was perfectly dark. I sniffed. The night carried no more than a whiff of charred wood. The glow of the corner light revealed the only signs that there had been a fire: A long scorch mark streaked the street before Elsewhere’s shattered front window.

I signed, “Fuck. I never thought Nixi would go this far.”

Sparks said, “And risk damaging the book? It had to be kids who heard we hate elves.”

I shook my head. “Bloods. I saw their jackets. You’re spending the night with Orient.”

“Thanks. He’s cute, but I’ll stick with you.”

I laughed. It wasn’t funny, but combine any joke with not being dead, and laughing is easy.

As I carried her into the store, Sparks looked up and whispered, “Book? Thanks for saving my wolf and me.”

The book answered, “A hundred thousand welcomes: I could weep, and I could laugh; I am light and heavy: Welcome.”

Sparks squeezed my hand, saying, “I think we’ll be safe here.”

After I carried her upstairs and kissed her goodnight, I went down to the basement to get plywood, paint, and cleaning supplies. Broken eggs and graffiti decorated the front of the store. As I paused between scrubbing the wall and boarding up the front window, a question came that made me play statue: When Nixi thought about the book, did he also picture a house on Dragon’s Tooth Hill?

The sun was rising when I finished painting over the graffiti. I went back up. Sparks was asleep. I watched her snore in our bed with the chipped headboard and the quilt that she’d made.

Her eyes opened. She said, “Lobito? Why aren’t you in bed?”

I signed, “I was thinking about that house you like.”

“Which one?”

“With the red door.”

She frowned.

I signed, “And the turret.” The frown deepened, so I added, “Up on Dragon’s Tooth Hill. Near Knockabout Park.”

She smiled. “Oh, yeah! It’s great.”

“You said you dreamed of having a house like that.”

She nodded. Then added, “Or a houseboat. A red houseboat. But the best would be a gypsy caravan, with two horses and a goat. We could explore the Nevernever and come back whenever we felt like it. Why? You don’t like it here? I mean, before today?”

“I love it here.”

“Good.”

I told her what I’d been thinking about. I expected her to say I was an idiot and I should go to sleep. Instead, she said she wanted to paint the sign.

I carried her down. She painted big swooping letters on the plywood: “Welcome to the Elsewhere Public Library. Got a book? Leave a book. Need a book? Take a book. Donations welcome, but no obligations! All books are free!”

As she underlined “free,” something thumped inside Elsewhere.

We looked at each other, then went in. The store was dark thanks to the plywood, but a shaft of morning light fell through the front door.
The Secrets of Seven Sages
lay on the floor.

I heard, “I can no other answer make, but, thanks, and thanks.”

The book’s pages fluttered as if a wind flipped through them. The dark cover crumbled, and the pages unfolded, opening outward again and again as seven signatures became seven sheets that folded into origami creatures: a crane, a dragon, a wasp, a Pegasus, an eagle, a griffin, and a butterfly. As they flew around us, the book’s voice—or seven voices together—said, “Untie the spell.”

My fur felt as if I’d stepped into an electrical storm, and then something changed. Everything around me looked and felt and smelled the same, but I felt as if a cool breeze had rolled in after a hot day.

The voices said together, “The elements be kind to thee, and make thy spirits all of comfort: fare thee well.” Then the seven paper creatures whipped past us and rose into the sky, racing toward the Border and Faerie.

After a minute or ten, Sparks said, “Did you expect that?”

I shook my head and pointed at her.

She shook her head. Then she took my hand, and I carried her up to our bed.

We slept late. I made waffles with pecans and wild rice, enough to share with Orient and Milo when they checked in on us. I was washing the dishes when Linn’s niece, Dew, arrived. She had a strong streak of the haughty Trueblood thing, but she liked Twain and wanted to read more books by humans, so I knew there was hope for her.

I was outside scrubbing the scorch mark when Nixi came running up. He said, “I heard about the fire! Did the book survive? And how is Sparks, of course! I’m glad you’re fine! You know I never meant for anything like that to happen, don’t you?”

I pulled out my notepad. “Sparks and I are fine. Thanks for asking. I admit I suspected you at first, because you are such a slime weasel”—I drew a single line through “slime weasel” and continued—“businessman, but, yes, I know you didn’t expect things to go this far.”

“And the book?”

I shrugged.

“What happened?”

“Gone.”

“Truly?”

“I’m not you, Nixi.”

“But how?”

“It flew away.”

“Very fun—” He glanced at me. “Really?”

I nodded. “Tell Teliamonde she’s going back to Faerie with her fifteen thousand.”

His lips pursed, but then he smiled. “Ah. Thank you for saving me from a grave and expensive embarrassment.”

“It was the least I could do.”

“Truth. How did you undo the discord spell?”

I considered answers, then thought,
Nixi is what he is. It makes as much sense to get mad at him as it does to get mad at a skunk.
I wrote, “Try something like that again, with anyone in Bordertown, and you’ll find out.”

He swallowed. Then, studying Sparks’s sign, he said, “Why a library?”

“Who doesn’t like a library?”

“Will you make as much from donations?”

I shrugged. “Not the point, Nixi.”

He laughed. “Well, good luck, eh?”

I glanced at the upper window. The sunlight glistened on purple hair. I pictured Sparks sitting in the black wicker chair with her leg on the red stool with the pillow she had covered with a toucan print. I shrugged again. How could I convince him that I had all the luck I needed?