Brave the Tempest (Cassie Palme) - Karen Chance Page 0,1

book so big that she needed two hands to lift it.

“For me?” Billy smiled and ruffled her hair. Some of it even moved, so he was exerting some power. “And why would you want me to have that, sweetheart?”

“Look.” She tried putting the massive tome down on the pouf, but the little thing was going ballistic. It didn’t seem to like the book, maybe because it was a rival in the get-out-of-dodge camp and the pouf was going home with us, goddamn it. Or maybe it was something else, I thought, getting a bad feeling suddenly.

“Uh, Emily—” I began, but it was too late. She must have worked the heavy buckles on the sides open before she came over, so all she had to do was drop the thing on the floor and flip up the cover—

“Oh, shit!” I said, earning me a disapproving glance.

“Rhea says you have to say ‘poo,’” Emily told me seriously.

“Oh, poo,” I said, and pulled her behind me, because that—

Was a seriously messed-up book.

“Ghost,” Emily said happily, peering around my legs.

“Yes, there’s a ghost in there,” I agreed, looking around for something—anything—to use to shut the damned thing. I couldn’t use my hands, because the boiling mass of magic—dark, by the feel of it—swirling around in there was not a good thing to touch. Not for anyone, but especially not for me.

Touch clairvoyance is a bitch, and while I wasn’t sensitive enough for everything to trigger it like some poor people, that . . .

Would probably do it.

“Oh, poo!” I said, a little more forcefully, because the ghost had just noticed us. What looked like black smoke started to leak out of the book’s pages, and Billy predictably freaked. Vengeful ghosts were not something to play around with.

“Shut it! Shut it!”

“With what?” There was nothing within reach.

“With your shoe! Take off your shoe!”

“I’m trying!” And I was. But instead of my usual Keds, I’d decided to be fancy today and was wearing cute little open-toed sandals with a buckled strap. One that was stubbornly not. Coming. Off.

“Just rip it!” Billy yelled.

“It’s elastic!” I told him, hopping around on one foot.

“If it’s elastic, then just pull it off!”

“It’s tough elastic!”

And then somebody slammed the book closed for us.

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,”