Broken Contracts, page 5
“Looking for anything in particular?” she asked, giving him a warm smile.
He returned it. “Just browsing.”
“All right.” She seemed to notice the book in his arms. “We’re not doing buybacks right now, hon. First week of the month only.”
“My mistake,” he said graciously, not dropping the smile. She nodded once, then disappeared into the stacks. He went to the left, following the direction of the not-energy.
The building was a firetrap and a fucking maze. Every inch of shelf space was packed with books, books stacked on books with no rhyme or reason he could find. He went up and down the same shelf twice, trying to find where the compass point went after disappearing through the solid paper barrier. He finally noticed a small door, half blocked by cardboard boxes of books.
A paper label on the door read Employees Only, so at least he was unlikely to be disturbed as he searched. Quietly, he pushed the door open, and gingerly stepped over the box barrier.
Immediately, he knew he was in the right place. The energy of the entire room was off. He felt like he was walking across gossamer, ready to tear at any moment, plunging him, this shop, the whole fucking city into the unknown. He didn’t need to consult with Christopher’s book anymore. He could see what he had come for—a water damaged cardboard box, sitting unassumingly on a low shelf.
He hauled it out and rummaged through the contents, setting leather-bound tomes of magic carelessly on the floor as he delved deeper. And then, halfway to the bottom, there it was.
The book was heavy, and old, and had a sticky writhing aura so thick that Slate could barely see through it. He stood up, cracking the spine as he opened the book.
The centerfold was an illustration of a doorway, through which there was nothing to be seen but emptiness. Real emptiness, so much darker than black ink on paper—
“What are you doing in here?”
“What do you want for this book?” Slate asked, without looking away from it. The blackness beckoned from the centerfold of the door-book—the pylinomicon. In the doorway, the pink-haired woman put her hands on her hips.
“These aren’t for sale. They’re my husband’s, he got them from his grandfather and—”
“What. Do you want. For this book?” Slate said, louder, turning toward her.
She looked shocked, then crossed her arms. “It’s not for sale. They’re heirlooms, and my husband—”
“I’ll give you twenty thousand dollars,” Slate said, his voice flat. Too flat, he realized belatedly. He saw her eyes widen, then narrow.
“I think you should leave.”
“Fifty thousand,” Slate said. Reasonably, he felt. “There really is an easy way and a hard way to do this.”
“Are you crazy?” she snapped. “Get out of here, or I’m calling the police.”
She turned to walk away. Slate snatched up Christopher’s book and followed her. He adjusted his focus, watching her connections as she moved.
There were lots—family, customers, neighbors, all of them friendly but not particularly strong. An amiable sort, then.
He reached the counter seconds after she did, snatching the phone out of her hand before she had a chance to dial.
“Name a price,” he started to tell her, but was cut off when she reached below the register and came up with a baseball bat.
His blood thrilled. He’d misjudged her character. It was rare, but it happened. Very slowly, he laid the books on the counter.
“You have two seconds,” she said, her voice harder than her aesthetic would indicate possible. “One.”
Her connections fanned around her like a halo, the one dark strand taunting him. He was so close, so close, hung up because he couldn’t buy a book from a bookstore.
“Two,” the woman said, and swung the bat at him. It was a slow swing, and he caught it easily, holding it with both hands. Having lost the opportunity to avoid a violent altercation, Slate translated his energies into winning it. Time seemed to expand, his heart beating faster, and he was able to see, even savor, the confusion and fear on her wrinkled face as he shoved her down. She hit the ground hard and he was already there, coming down on top of her, straddling her, the bat like an iron bar across her windpipe. She shoved at him, clawing at his arms, but it was no use, she was pinned like a butterfly wing. All he had to do was press . . . a little . . . harder.
“I’m taking the book,” he told her, watching her face turn red. Her hands beat helplessly against his forearms. “You will receive your money within the week. All right?”
He gave her just enough slack to breathe. She nodded vigorously, and he shifted the bat to her collarbones. She let out a cough, her body shuddering beneath his. It occurred to him that he could kill her—the shop was empty, he’d told no one he was coming. He shifted, his half-interested cock pressing agreeably against her soft belly. She whimpered.
“If I need to come back here, I’m going to fuck you up,” he said evenly, looking down into her red-rimmed eyes. He searched her connections for something he could use. “I’m going to fuck up your store, I’m going to fuck up your husband, I’m going to fuck up the teenager your husband’s fucking. Understood?”
Her face blanched, the ghost-white letting him know he’d hit a nerve. Perfect.
He stood, leaving her whimpering on the floor as he made his way back to his car, books under his arm.
Micah’s whimpering misery grew less entertaining on the ride to Troy, which was fine, because Slate’s new acquisition had him transfixed.
He had to actively focus on the new book to keep the energy from obscuring his ability to read it. It was challenging, bordering on actually difficult, and Slate loved it.
Christopher’s book was a story with smatterings of practical magic included almost as footnotes, but this.
This.
Slate stared at the drawing of the doorway, at the empty blackness that seemed to roil beneath it. What did that mean? The door couldn’t go nowhere, there had to be something there, but what?
The pylinomicon’s aura faded back into view as his mind wandered. The connections—there had to be hundreds of them—shone from the book in a thick, unnatural darkness, and then . . . vanished. Picking up Christopher’s book, one strand re-solidified, connecting the two tomes. But the moment Slate set it down, the connection vanished.
Reaching across the back seat, Slate pressed his palm to Micah’s trembling belly. The slave was hot, his body glistening with sweat, and on any other day Slate would have found that unavoidably distracting. But today, he was only interested in the connection between Micah’s darkness and the pylinomicon.
There wasn’t one. Whatever connected Micah to all this, it wasn’t either book.
Interesting.
Slate was still missing a piece. Maybe pieces.
He refocused on the book, trying to decipher it as best as he could. It was written in a combination of Old English, Latin, and Greek. Like any self-respecting magical scholar, Slate could read these, passably—but it made for slow going, to say the least. He’d barely finished with the first few pages by the time they got to Troy.
He wasn’t sure why Christopher’s book had given him such a strong feel for this place. For most of the way here, he’d worried he was imagining it—that he was assigning familiarity to a location that could have been anywhere. That suspicion went away the moment the Mercedes pulled onto the property, and tendrils burst from the pylinomicon.
Slate glanced at Micah, who appeared to be semi-conscious again beneath his hood. His not-connection hadn’t changed.
Another piece, still not Micah’s.
Interesting.
Slate climbed out of the car, taking in his surroundings. The forest surrounding the inn was in its full spring attire, leaves bright and birds singing. The place really was beautiful, which was good, because Slate suspected he was about to be spending a lot more time here.
The bellboy greeted him politely, even reverently, and Slate returned the greeting. He’d called ahead, of course, so he would be the only guest in the building tonight. Slate gave the boy a hundred, to help compensate, and told him to take the luggage up to the master suite. The driver would take care of Micah.
For his part, Slate was following the connections—not just one, but dozens of them now—leading into the building. He expected them to stop in the atrium, but rather than tying to something there, the connections went . . . down.
Slate frowned and turned to the indent at the desk.
“How do I get downstairs?”
“Your room is on the second floor, sir,” she answered brightly.
He waited, silently, for her to realize her error. She did, and the flash of fear across her features reminded him of the woman at the bookshop.
Gods, but he’d had a good day.
“There’s a service stairway down that hall,” she said, pointing. “Or you can access the ballroom via the elevator.”
“Thank you, miss,” he said, and headed for the stairs.
The lower level wasn’t anything to write home about. A couple of store rooms, kitchens, and of course, the ballroom. It was nondescript, mass produced metal chairs stacked in a corner, thick curtains covering the wallpaper. The far wall was mostly glass, doors leading to a patio and a scenic mountain overlook. The perfect place for a local bank’s annual company teambuilding conference. It would have been completely unremarkable, except for the thick strands of not-connection which flowed uniformly to the center of the room, and then stopped dead.
Slate circled the cessation point several times, watching the strands. They didn’t rotate evenly in a circle around a central location. Instead, they sometimes seemed to veer around something, before turning back and approaching the vanishing point from an angle that never changed.
Almost, Slate thought, like there’s a doorway.
A doorway that could only be entered from one side.
He set the books down on the ground and shrugged out of his suit coat. Rolling his shirt up to the elbow, he stepped closer. The strands of connection flowed easily through his body on their way to the door. Slowly, he reached his hand out. His fingertips paused at the energy’s apex, and then, with a deep breath, he reached further.
Nothing happened. Absolutely nothing.
He took a few steps forward, his whole body moving past the place where the energy stopped. Nothing. He was not transported to a magical far side, nor was he obliterated by the physics of an otherworldly wormhole.
He realized his heart was going incredibly fast, and he laughed, pressing his hand to his chest. He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting to find here. Absolutely nothing would have been the logical answer. What were the chances of anything being here at all?
He frowned, considering.
What were the chances? He was one of a thousand who could get access to Christopher’s book—and probably the only one who could use it to find the pylinomicon.
So what were the chances that, from all the land on the entire planet, he also just happened to own the land where the door was?
Maybe there had been some clue, more subtle than with Micah? Some semiconscious attraction that had told him he needed to own this?
No. He’d bought the place sight unseen on a recommendation from his accountant, who was, easily, the least magical being on the face of the Earth.
The chances of coincidence were vanishingly small, and there was even more to it than that.
The inn was built on a slope, as a split level. Before its construction, the place he was standing now had been underground. It had been excavated to this level years before Slate had ever heard of it, but who else could have known to do that? To his knowledge, he was the only person alive who had figured out how to see influential magic the way he could. Nobody who could see what he saw was designing midrange bed and breakfasts. They certainly weren’t excavating invisible doorways and then leaving.
Slate put his hands in his pockets and circled the vanishing point again. The conclusion he was arriving at wasn’t possible. That wasn’t how his magic worked. He could see connections because he knew the magic. He could utilize resources because he was intelligent. But as he’d been explaining to clients for most of his adult life, he could not see the future.
But when all alternatives have been exhausted, the only explanation remaining, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
And the only explanation remaining was: the energy led here because he was going to build a gateway here.
Slate stood in the middle of the empty ballroom, hands on his hips, and grinned.
“I’m eating in,” Slate said, when the girl from the front desk came to ask. There was a small restaurant on the mezzanine overlooking the atrium, but with only one guest, it wouldn’t be running unless he told it to. “Bring up whatever’s fresh.”
She nodded and left without asking any further questions. Good.
Slate went back to his work. There was a small table in his room, and at the moment, it was mostly taken up by his books and his laptop. Every other inch of space was covered by note paper. His laptop was open to a translation site, but each unknown word had to be entered manually. Optical character recognition software wasn’t quite to the point of recognizing calligraphy made with a quill.
That was all right. Doing the translation himself gave him a better understanding of the text, and he had nothing but time.
On the bed, Micah let out a quiet moan. Slate didn’t look over. The slave had been mostly incoherent ever since the driver had carried him inside. Slate’s toys—the hood, the cuffs, the studded cage—had all been put neatly away in his duffel, and Micah had been stripped down to his pants and left on the bed. The blue pill had worn off ages ago, but Slate was going to need to work on the dosing in the white one, because it had been six hours and Micah was only just now beginning to blink his way back to reality.
Slate went back to the book, adding another untranslatable word to the list. They were popping up with alarming frequency. He would need to find someone who actually spoke this language, to find out if they were misspelled or simply too archaic for a modern dictionary.
“Nnn?” Micah said, and Slate put his hands behind his head, stretching out his neck.
He could take a break.
“Finally awake?” he asked, turning away from the desk. Micah was sitting up, blinking around the room in confusion. He ran his hands through his hair, then stared at them.
“Micah,” Slate said, louder, and Micah snapped to slightly-unsteady attention.
Slate gestured to the floor directly in front of his chair and, to his surprise, Micah seemed to understand immediately. Slate gave it 50/50 he’d collapse the moment he tried to stand on his own, but he didn’t. Micah crossed the room in four unsteady steps, then sank to his knees in a motion that could almost be described as graceful.
“Have you learned your lesson?” Slate asked him. Micah nodded, not taking his eyes off the floor. Slate frowned. “Use your voice.”
“Yes, sir,” Micah said weakly.
Slate reached out and took a handful of the man’s long hair, pulling until the slave was forced to look up at him. His eyes were a startling greenish brown, and almost as wide as the bookseller’s.
“What have you learned today?”
“It’s the . . . the punishment . . .” Micah said, his words slurring together. “You’re ready . . . ready for . . .” He blinked, then closed his eyes, forehead furrowing as he concentrated. “What I did . . . leads to . . . to punishment.”
“And so you’ll be very careful not to need punishment in the future, yes?”
“No . . .” Micah frowned, shook his head. “Yes. Sorry. Yes. Sir.”
Slate gave him a small smile. Micah didn’t know how right he was.
“And you feel better now?” Slate prompted. Micah nodded. Slate let go of his hair, smoothing it back away from his face. “Good. Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to go get yourself a glass of water, and then you’re going to come back here and wait until I’m ready to have my cock sucked. Then you’re going to go next door and thank the driver for his hard work today. There’s a room key for you by the door, and I don’t want to see you again until you’re bringing me breakfast, understood?”
The chances that Micah would correctly remember four directions in a row was pretty low, but like he’d said. His actions lead to punishment.
“Yes, sir,” Micah said, rising unsteadily to his feet. “Thank you for . . . for the discipline, sir. I’ll try to do better.”
Slate didn’t doubt it in the least.
Lights. Bright lights.
The hallway was overwhelming, and Micah resisted the urge to cover his eyes as he walked toward the driver’s door.
He wondered what time it was. It felt like the middle of the night, but for all he knew, it was three in the afternoon.
Micah was, to put it bluntly, not a fan of drugs. He knew that people were more amusing, and more easily amused, while under their influence, but he wasn’t here to be amused. He had a job to do.
His job was to lie. Lie sweetly, and lie well. And he couldn’t do that when he didn’t even know what was happening.
He reached the door and gave it two short knocks, wincing at the sound.
It wasn’t just the drugs. He was failing this placement. This was probably the worst punishment so far, but it seemed like he was screwing up every time his owner summoned him.
Micah squeezed his eyes shut, willing tears not to come. Not now.
Heavy footsteps on the other side of the door, and then the driver was leaning against the open doorframe, frowning at him.
“What’s he want?”
“S’posed to thank you for your work today,” Micah said. The driver’s room was dark, illuminated by one tasteful bedside lamp, and Micah desperately wanted to be inside.
The driver’s eyebrows rose. “Seriously? Like . . .?” He gestured vaguely between the two of them, and Micah tried to scrape his wits together. Every performance deserved his best. Or at least, the best he could do.
