We’d destroyed forty-six boxes of earth.
We were so close. And yet, we still had four more to go before we could move against Dracula, and time was running out. We’d been at this for months now and I was so tired of looking over my shoulder all the time. Not when he’d become bold, killing people and draining their blood without a care for the police investigating the crimes. The more he drank, the stronger he’d become.
We knew what Dracula and Grey wanted – the bookshop and access to the waters of Meles. Grey knew about the tunnel stretching between our shop and the basement of Mrs. Ellis’ old flat. We barricaded it closed (Handy Andy was supposed to brick it up, but of course he hadn’t shown up to do it yet) and bedecked the bookshop with garlic and holy water and crucifixes galore. Dracula needed to enter the shop to access the time-traveling room, but he couldn’t cross our threshold without us inviting him in. Unless…the bookshop didn’t belong to us any longer.
So Grey tried to buy us out. When we refused to sell, Grey resorted to driving us barny with incessant construction noise at all hours and blocking access to the shop from Butcher Street with his scaffold to cut off our foot traffic. But if he thought that would break us, he didn’t know Mina Wilde.
The Dave Danvers First Annual Science Fiction Convention at Nevermore raked in a ton of money, and the shop’s social media presence had become so famous that customers were seeking us out. We wrote to the council and they made him remove the scaffold blocking our front door.
I couldn’t help but wonder if littering Argleton with the bodies of dead women was the next stage of the plan. Would Dracula soon have the power to take whatever he wanted from us?
I sent off a quick text to Sherlock, letting him know our current total. We’d started off as bitter rivals, but he wasn’t so bad…now that he lived in London and had a new boyfriend. He replied a moment later pointing out that, according to Morrie’s app, we’d checked every one of Lachlan’s properties. We didn’t have a single clue where Grey and Dracula hid the remaining earth.
Great.
I slumped down in front of the plinth and pulled over the clues my father sent – the letters, the scrawled words in the empty pages of the occult books, and the book about the Frog-Mouse War that conveniently appeared while we were dealing with the Terror of Argleton. I flattened out his latest letter and read it over again.
BRING THE WINE
What are you trying to tell me, Dad? Why can’t you—
“Mina! Your mother’s here!”
Shit.
It was always a bad idea to leave my mother and Heathcliff alone together.
I slammed the books shut and raced out of the room, pushing the storage room door shut behind me. Downstairs, Mum bent over the desk, brandishing a heavy leather-bound volume with a crystal glued on its spine in Heathcliff’s face.
“…I don’t see why I can’t have a teeny, tiny corner of the shop dedicated to my bibliomancy booth. I’m going to be the hit of the festival, and customers will flock here for my accurate predictions, and it’s veryon-brand—”
Heathcliff narrowed his dark eyes at her. “You want to charge people to randomly open books?”
“I’ll have you know that the art of bibliomancy has been practiced for centuries by the Greeks, the Romans, and in the Muslim world. It’s more than just opening a book at random and using the text to divine the future. I have to channel the inner thoughts of the authors and capture the universe’s natural story. It’s very complex, and requires a deep, spiritual connection. You couldn’t possibly understand…”
“Mum, hi.” I shoved myself between them, grabbing the book from her hands before she could whack Heathcliff over the head with it. “What’s this about bibliomancy?”
“Mina.” She ignored my questions and wrapped me in a huge embrace. “I’m very annoyed at you. Have you been ignoring me?”
“Not at all. I—”
“Because I’m worried about you. Whenever I call you’re too busy. You seem to be working all hours and you haven’t been over for dinner in weeks. It’s not healthy to ignore your mother like this.”
“I’m not ignoring you, Mum. It’s just been busy here at the shop and getting ready for the Halloween festival and Quoth’s art exhibition.”
“That’s no excuse not to talk to your mother. I wanted to give you this.” She scrabbled around in her purse and pulled out a tub of greenish goop. “It’s a healing balm made from ground-up Venus flytraps, and it’s supposed to haveamazingproperties. The lovely young man who sold it to me said it cured his wife’s cancer.”
“Mum, I don’t have cancer.”
“I know, dear, but thisrepairs cells. That’s the whole point. It can repair your eyes.” She shot me a triumphant look as she thrust the goop toward me, as if she’d just performed an epic mic drop and left every ophthalmologist in the world in awe of her genius.
Ever since my eyesight started to deteriorate, Mum’s been determined to find the miracle cure that will restore my retinas. So far, she’d given me a rosehip and carrot eyeball wash, and an entire garden of multi-colored crystals to put under my pillow.
I held the container up to the light, but that made the green look even more disgusting. “If it’s so miraculous, why isn’t the lovely young man’s wife all over the news talking about this stuff?”
“Oh, apparently she died of spontaneous liver failure,” Mum waved her hand dismissively. “But she went to her grave cancer-free.”
“Thanks, Mum. That’s very thoughtful of you.” I dropped the container into my purse, where it would never see the light of day again. “So, bibliomancy? While it’s a lovely idea for the festival, we don’t really have a lot of space in the shop, so I don’t think—”
