“I want to know everything about you,” he said. From any other man that would’ve sounded like a line, a pickup. But I could tell Duke meant it. I knew I should be getting Duke back on the plot, but I couldn’t tear myself away from this conversation. Not yet. This was a teenage dream come true.
“Some Book Witches are born into it, like me,” I said. “Witchcraft often runs in families. Otherwise, we put enchanted recruitment posters up in libraries and bookstores and coffee shops. To normal people, the posters look like someone’s selling gently used tractor tires. To anyone with latent magical ability, it says we’re hiring people to protect and defend stories.”
“Fascinating. So no soul selling? That’s all anti-witch propaganda, I assume?”
“We don’t sell our souls to anyone, although we do, usually, owe our entire paychecks to the local bookstore. To get in and out of stories, weuse little spells. No cauldron, but I do have a coffee mug in the shape of a cauldron. And my wand, so to speak, is in the alley outside the Bathtub.”
“How did you know that Burner person had infiltrated my world? Magic, I assume?”
“We have a whole coven that monitors books for damage. Someone discovered a blank page in your book. X had you tied up in a basement so you couldn’t finish the plot, and the story started to die.”
“Die?” He sounded aghast.
“You pull a plant from the ground, it’ll eventually wilt and die. It’s kind of like that. But I rescued you so he decided to—”
“Eighty-six me on page eighty-six?”
I nodded. “But now that X knows I’m watching your books, he likely won’t try it again for a long time. And once you get back to your mission with Edith King, and I leave, the story will go back to the way it was, the way your author intended it.”
“And if I don’t finish the mission?”
“You saw the blank pages,” I said. “That blankness will spread through the rest ofEmpty Graves,then all copies ofEmpty Graves,and then finally…people who read the book will forget it ever existed.”
“Dastardly. Well, we shan’t let that happen,” he said, lifting his glass to salute me.
“You’re handling this well,” I said. “Finding out you’re a fictional character would do a number on most people.”
“It’s good news in a way, really,” Duke said.
“How so?” I asked.
“My brothers,” he said. “You can never die if you’ve never lived, yes?”
I knew his backstory as well as he did, but listened as he recounted his brothers’ fates. His oldest brother, David, died in the Great War. Charles, the second-oldest, caught typhus in the trenches two years later. Edmund died by suicide.
“Eddie had been suffering from shell shock,” Duke said, his voice soft. “Poor lad. But you say this is a novel, yes? Then it didn’t happen, did it? My brothers didn’t go to war. They didn’t witness horrors. They didn’t die for naught and in vain. It was all just lines in a book. I find that strangely comforting.”
While Duke was reciting the litany of his tragedies, Koshka had trotted over to him and pounced into his lap.
“This,” he said, stroking Koshka under the chin, “is also strangely comforting. I wish my writer had given me a cat. No, no, I’m not bothered at all to learn I’m pure fiction. It explains so much.”
“Does it?”
“I don’t seem to age. Time passes very slowly. If I get shot—which I do more than I should, I think—I tend to heal completely by my next case. Always seemed slightly suspicious to me. I solve every case I take on. And I’m tragically unattached. You’d think a duke would at least have a steady girl.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Fictional detectives are almost always single.”
“Surely not.”
“Miss Marple? Single. Poirot? Single. Sherlock? Sam Spade? Easy Rawlins—he’s after your time—he was married but got divorced.”
“Glad to know it’s not anything I’m doing wrong,” he said.
“You do everything right,” I told him. Then blushed. “I mean…your character does all the right things. Like focusing on solving cases instead of dating. That’s what I mean.”
“Edith King again?” he asked.
“You do really need to finish your story.”
