Home > Nightchaser (Endeavor #1)(17)

Nightchaser (Endeavor #1)(17)
Author: Amanda Bouchet

“No.” He barked the word as if he were angry or something. Again.

Surprise and gratitude and confusion all jumped inside me like solar flares, heating me up. Shyness had been burned out of me in the first few weeks of incarceration with the help of Hourglass Mile’s communal showers and vermin-killing soap, but Shade Ganavan was one-man proof that I could still get embarrassed.

I took a step back. Then another. I climbed on board the ship, having let down the stairs for once. It had been more practical for carrying coffee.

“All right. Thanks,” I said from the doorway.

I turned and moved deeper into the Endeavor, hoping the shadow of the hat’s brim had hidden the bright flush across my face.

* * *

I gathered a small selection of books while Shade got to work filing down the rough edges of the hull where he’d eventually attach the reinforced plates. I said goodbye to the people inside the ship and then to the person outside. Just before I stepped into the elevator tube to head toward Flipping Pages, Shade called out, “Keep your head down, Tess.”

I nodded, figuring he was serious about that, since he hadn’t called me buttercup or some other crap.

There wasn’t an inch of me that didn’t think Shade Ganavan knew his way around his city and most of what was going on in it. And he’d seen how I’d reacted to that Dark Watch goon in his shop, since playing it cool hadn’t really cropped up. I doubted I’d hidden a single moment of my panic, fear, and flight from Shade, and if he was telling me to keep my head down, he probably meant that Windrow was a district that soldiers patrolled—maybe more than others. It made me extra glad to have his hat. With it, I could look around but still have a shadow on my face.

With five of the rare books in my bag, vitamin D in my body for the first time in years, and sunlight on my bare arms at least, I wound my way out of the docks—noticing plenty of spare platforms on towers other than the Squirrel Tree as I went.

Damn swindlers. Shade had been right.

Ground level was busy—busier than on the previous day. But it was also earlier. The pedestrian lanes were clean and wide, especially the farther I got from the docking towers, and there were even some small trees and shrubs planted here and there to break up the endless monotony of man-made constructions.

The city teemed with people, machines, vehicles of all kinds, some robots, and, weirdly, a whole lot of cats. I’d seen cats before, but only in live-stream videos. The felines were usually stalking birds, running from dogs, or doing what looked like death-defying acrobatics. These cats weren’t doing much of anything, though. They were just walking around or sitting there in the sunshine, watching this world go by.

Making it to Windrow wasn’t the same thing as finding the bookseller I needed, so I typed Baxton and Lorn into one of the interactive Albion City assistance stands on a busy street corner. A grid pattern instantly popped up on the screen in front of me, mapping out the best route to get there. I turned and walked on, learning the neighborhood as I went.

Flipping Pages already looked special from the outside with the Vivica Vot quotes decorating the storefront, but once I opened the door, it was pure magic. A window into something else. My heart hung suspended for a moment, waiting for the rest of me to catch up.

The first thing I noticed was the bell over the door, just like at Shade’s place. Then it was the high shelves lining every single wall, filled to capacity with a jumble of mismatched books. And then it was the comfy chairs and well-used couches toward the back, with wooden tables between them, all of them strewn with magazines and books. Paper. I’d never seen so much of it in my life. And the heavy books and glossy pages weren’t even in neat piles or stacks. They were haphazard. I loved it. I loved the whole place on sight.

How did Shade Ganavan know about this store? It was obvious he liked it—and books. Was he as drawn to the happy disarray in here as I was? He seemed like the kind of guy who liked to muss things up, and if the heat in my belly when I thought about him was any indication, I wanted him to get a little messy with me, too.

Disheveled. Tangled. Warm. Just like his shop and this place. I’d bet Shade didn’t give clinical touches or neat, dry kisses. No, he would lick, devour, and suck.

My pulse surged like that moment when an engine ignites. Thoughts of Shade were distracting me, though, and I blew out a quick breath, trying to get my mind back on track. I was here to sell rare books, not wonder about what that man did in bed.

“Hello?” I called out. There didn’t appear to be anyone here.

After a moment, I heard scuffling on stairs, and a woman I assumed was Susan appeared behind the register, having evidently come up from a lower level hidden behind the counter. She was probably in her mid-to-late fifties, a little on the short side, and totally unruly, just like her shop. There wasn’t a piece of clothing on her that matched the rest. And nothing in the galaxy could ever have matched the flame-red hair that stuck out in corkscrews all around her head.

“Sorry.” Smiling, she made a useless attempt to smooth down her hair. “Just feeding the cats.”

“No problem,” I said. “I like cats.” In theory, anyway. I’d yet to touch one, in fact.

I slid my fingers under the strap of my bag, shifting its bulk a little. Now for the fun process of trying to foist off stolen goods.

I didn’t feel guilty about having taken the books—they’d been completely underappreciated in that billionaire’s sterile basement—but I did feel guilty that the library wouldn’t get them. If they ended up here, though…

I looked around again. Wow. This place was nice.

“I know, I know—the shop’s a little untidy.” Susan’s gaze darted around, turning tenser. “I-I’ll straighten up soon.”

“No! Don’t!”

Her eyes widened at my sudden outburst.

I settled my voice back into a normal volume. “I mean, it’s great. It’s great just the way it is.”

She smiled again, her grin so big I could see the insides of her cheeks. “Are you a kindred spirit, then?”

“Uh… Maybe?” I wasn’t quite sure what she meant.

Her eyes narrowed, dipping up and down to look me over. I couldn’t figure out her look. It wasn’t hostile in any way, but she was still sizing me up—and very obviously, at that.

“White, gray, or black?” she asked.

It would have been a lot easier to answer her question if I’d had any idea what she was talking about, but I decided to just go with it. “None of those colors are much fun by themselves,” I said. “Mix them up?”

She nodded. “Stripes, then. Stripes it is.”

Huh. Well, weird and wonderful as that was, because anything inexplicable that didn’t kill you was actually pretty damn cool in my opinion—the Black Widow, for instance—I had business to conduct. I pulled out one of the books.

“Would you be interested in anything like this?” I asked, turning it over in my hands so that she could admire the old-style hardcover binding. The artwork on the cover jumped right off the page, looking like something straight out of a fairy tale. I hated to give it up, especially before I’d read it, and the kids on Starway 8 would have salivated over something like this, all of them impatiently waiting their turn. Mareeka or her partner, Surral, might have borrowed it from the library for them. I knew of at least one eleven-year-old boy whose eyes would have lit up like starbursts. Coltin loved a good adventure story, and I brought him one whenever I could.

“Hmmm.” Susan took the book from my loose grip and looked it over. “No seal?”

“I don’t think it ever went through the rounds.” And by that, we both knew I meant not only the stampings of approval, but the burnings as well.

“That’s unusual.” She looked at me, her fingers still lightly tracing the bold, gold lettering of the embossed title. I noticed her fingernails. They weren’t dirty, but they were definitely a little unkempt, just like the rest of her. “It must have been in a very secure location to go unnoticed,” she said.

I shrugged. Luckily, I was good at getting into secure locations and decoding locks, especially the fancy ones. Also, the galactic government didn’t seem to be actively hunting and destroying these kinds of relics anymore. They must have figured they’d gotten the bulk of them in the beginning and could let slide the spread-out, occasional, hard-to-find rest. Otherwise, places like this shop and a small wing of the Intergalactic Library would have been goners.

   
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