“I’m so confused.” Green streaks of light arced across my vision. “What powers? What curse?”
“I’m getting there!” Grimalkin flicked away my questions with her thin wrist. There was no rushing a cat. “As I was saying, you came into the world, and too late Homer saw that if he did not run, he would be locked away forever for his copying, never to return to complete his poem. The world would have lost Helen of Troy and he would be behind bars, never again able to find the river Meles. And so he left you for the first time.”
I knocked back the rest of the Scotch and thrust the glass into Heathcliff’s hand. While he refilled it, I drew the letter from my pocket, holding it in trembling fingers. “That’s not what my father said. He said he left us because he was in danger.”
“That letter was not written when you were born, Mina, it was written a year ago, when your father – now an old, blind man – left Nevermore Bookshop in the hands of Heathcliff Earnshaw and went to do battle with his enemy.” She snapped her fingers at Heathcliff, who was busy refilling my glass in between taking swigs from the bottle. “I’ll need one of those, too.”
“Steady on,” Heathcliff frowned. “Apparently, you’ve been a cat for several centuries. How do you know you can stomach this shite?”
“I’ve been subsisting on live mice and crickets, and that muck you have the gall to call cat food. My constitution is above reproach.” Grimalkin wiggled her glass under his nose. Sighing, Heathcliff topped her up, then leaned back in his chair and skulled the rest of the bottle in one long gulp.
I brought my drink to my lips as Grimalkin continued. “Now that my thirst has been sated, I can continue. News of Homer’s epic poems reached the gods, and as Poseidon read what had been written about him, he became incensed. In theOdyssey, Poseidon is the enemy – he delays Odysseus’ return home from Troy because Odysseus blinds the cyclops Polyphemus, who was Poseidon’s son. Incensed that Homer would have his son blinded in the poem and that he’d present the god in such an unflattering light, Poseidon poisoned the waters of Meles. He killed my beloved husband, and now, anyone borne of the waters is also cursed. Here in the future, Homer’s eyesight immediately began to fail. This curse, it would seem, he has passed on to you.”
Oh, for Isis’ sake.She’s saying that my retinitis pigmentosa is the curse of a petty Greek god.I was too numb to demonstrate the full brunt of the anger I felt at that moment, at having this essential part of my personage, this part of me that I’d worked so hard to come to terms with, reduced to a line in an epic poem – a footnote in a fairy tale. I growled in my throat. Quoth’s fingers squeezed mine. Grimalkin continued, oblivious.
“He continued his journeys through time, growing older as he established a business in this residence during every decade of history. He yearned for Helen, and for the daughter he couldn’t know. He could not return to your time as a youth, for he would be arrested and Helen would never forgive him for abandoning her. So he moved through time and waited out his years in the past, winding back and forth until his years drew long and his hair turned grey. He came back to you only as an old man, so that neither the authorities nor your mother would recognize him. He returned to his spring, and he watched over you from behind this very counter. As more and more book characters showed up at the shop, he explained things to them and sent them on their way as best he could. And he welcomed you with open arms, never telling you who he was but always making sure that you were steeped in the power of story. He hoped one day you might be able to take over his duties, but before he had the chance, his enemy arrived. The rest of the story you know. He left to track his enemy, to keep this creature of evil away from you. In his place, he left Heathcliff Earnshaw with instructions to watch over you when you returned to Nevermore.”
“And how doyoufit into this insane story?” Heathcliff demanded.
“My purgatory is Poseidon’s idea of a joke.” Grimalkin rolled the ‘r’ in purgatory, which would have been hilarious if I wasn’t completely freaked out. “When he learned of the spell I wove on the waters of Meles to protect my son, he cursed me to live out my days as the one creature terrified of water, to ensure that I would never again find a lover like Meles and regain my powers. The only person who would be able to free me was one who read the words of my son aloud in my presence, in his original language.
She gestured to her sensuous body. “As a nymph, I am already blessed with eternal beauty and long life. Poseidon granted me nine lives – the amount allotted to felines. I have guarded these lives carefully, expending only seven over the centuries I’ve lived in this form. All those years of waiting, all those dead mice, just waiting for my chance to hold my son in my arms again.” Grimalkin paused. “But he has gone, and all I have in his place is an ungrateful granddaughter, a lumbering brigand, a weasely intellectual, a raven I’m not allowed to eat, piles of dusty books, and a looming danger that could end us all.”
“All right,” I yelled. “I get it. Now we’ve heard the whole sordid tale, can youfinallytell me what is this danger my father is protecting me from?”
“The enemy that you should think yourself lucky never to cross,” my grandmother folded her arms across her chest. “Count Dracula.”
Chapter Nineteen
Iburst out laughing. “Okay, now I know this is a fucking joke. Dracula is just a character in a book, inspired by Vlad the Impaler but not even historically accurate. He’s not real—”
My laughter died in my throat. Because briefly, for a moment, I’d forgotten where I was standing. Nevermore Bookshop had brought my three boyfriends to life – Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s James Moriarty, and Edgar Allan Poe’s raven. All flesh and blood and bone, and all borne not from a womb but from the waters of Meles and the mind of a brilliant writer.
If they could be real, then any character could also be real. And if Heathcliff and Morrie and Quoth and Lydia Bennett had walked out of the pages of his book and into the real world through Nevermore Bookshop, then…
…then so too could beasts of myth and horror, like Dracula.
Stoker’s words came back to me a flash, as if I’d read them only yesterday. “‘…he means to succeed, and a man who has centuries before him can afford to wait and to go slow… water sleeps, and the enemy is sleepless’.” If Dracula came to our world from Bram Stoker’s book, then he came with centuries of knowledge and power. No wonder my father – Homer – was worried about my safety. But then, if he was so worried, why did he up and leave? Why did he gift the shop to Heathcliff?
“Where is Dracula now?” Heathcliff growled, obviously wondering the same thing.
“Who knows?” Grimalkin rolled onto her side, stroking the edge of her breast. “Hanging upside down in a cellar somewhere? If my son has his way, he’ll be burning in Hades with a stake through his heart.”
“What of my father?” I demanded. “Have you heard from him?”
She gave a cat-like shrug. “He has no idea who I am. To him, I was just a stray cat who refused to leave the shop. As soon as he knew that beast was free in the world, he walked out of Nevermore and has never returned. He didn’t even have the decency to put out a saucer of cream.”
The shop bell tinkled. Heathcliff leaped to his feet. “We’re closed!” he boomed. “Can’t you read the bloody—”
“Is that any way to treat the person who comes bearing strange delicacies from far-off lands?” Morrie stepped into the room, carrying his laptop bag in one arm and balancing a large bakery box under the other. “I queued for hours to get these cronuts. They’re supposed to be the best in England and… oh, we have a visitor.”
“Mr. Moriarty.” Grimalkin turned her head. Morrie’s eyes widened as he took in her… display. A wicked grin spread across his face.
“And to whom do I owe the honor?”
“That’s Grimalkin,” I said. “And she’s mygrandmother, so maybe stop looking at her like you’re the cat the got the cream.”
“There’s cream?” Grimalkin’s long neck extended. “Where?”
