“Let me make you proud again.” I pulled my sleeve back down.
He sighed heavily, and I knew I’d already won even if he didn’t quite realize it yet. “They have tommy guns in there.” He nodded at the book. “I lost my Mary. I can’t lose you too.”
Mary, his wife and my grandmother, had been a retired high school English teacher. Grandma had been very ill and suffering for several years, and her death, though heartbreaking, was a peaceful release for her. Unspoken was the fact that Pops had already lost hisdaughter—my mother—and therefore losing me too would be one tragedy too many for his heart.
I could’ve reminded him he was the only family I had left as well. I would have bet my entire book collection that I would miss him more than he would miss me, should something happen to him on a mission.
But I didn’t.
“If I can handle Cthulhu, I can handle Chicago.”
“I know, I know, but—”
“What’s this about, Pops? I’m twenty-five years old, remember? Twenty-five,” I repeated. “Not five. Not fifteen. I’ve been doing this job for a decade.”
Most Book Witches begin apprenticing at age sixteen, but I had shown magical promise from childhood. Plus, I’d been so determined to follow in my mother’s footsteps that I’d begun my formal training a year early. For ten years now, I’d worked as a fully licensed practitioner of storycraft. In other words, I knew what I was doing.
“Hard to believe,” Pops said wistfully.
Time toyed with us like a funhouse mirror. When I looked at Pops, I saw the robust sixty-year-old man who’d walked me to school the first day of kindergarten, not an eighty-year-old with a broken heart and a bad hip. When he looked at me, he saw a girl with pigtails and a My Little Pony lunchbox. Time passes like the pages of a favorite story, drawing ever nearer the end whether we like it or not.
“You know you still love him,” Pops finally said. “Nobody really outgrows their first fictional love.”
“I can still do my job.”
“What if he disappoints you? You should never meet your heroes, they say, and they say it for a reason.”
“Either the Duke is as wonderful as he is in the books or he’s not. If he is, I’ll be a very happy witch. If he’s not? I’ll find a new book boyfriend. Poirot’s single, right?”
I put my hands on Pops’s shoulders—he was still strong for a man of eighty—and grinned. “Follow me,” he said.
We returned to the library, and Pops made the call, putting it on speakerphone. “I’m sending Rainy,” he told Dr. Fanshawe. “She knows this series inside and out. Any objections?”
There was a long heavy pause before Dr. Fanshawe replied.
“Rainy?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Your late mother was the best Book Witch I’ve ever had the honor of serving with,” Dr. Fanshawe said. “I hold out hope that in time I’ll start to see the resemblance.”
“So do I,” I said, my voice smaller than usual. No matter how many cases I cracked, I would never measure up to my mother in Dr. Fanshawe’s eyes. I was good, very good, but even very good was nothing compared to perfection.
“Recite the Eight Black and Whites, please,” Dr. Fanshawe ordered. It was the Book Witch equivalent of saying the Pledge of Allegiance, something only apprentices were asked to do.
“Are you—” I was about to say “serious” when Pops shot me a warning look. “—listening?”
“Go on,” she said, her tone stern.
“Of course,” I said, running through them quickly in my head to make sure I had the order right. Our rules are called the Black and Whites for two reasons. One, books are printed in black and white, so the name fits our aesthetic. But the main reason, so I’d been told many thousands of times, is that when you are a Book Witch, there are absolutely no shades of gray. The Black and Whites are to be obeyed to the letter.
“Black and White Number One,” I began, “is to protect all stories without judgment, be they true classic or cult classic, bore or bestseller, fan favorite or forgotten flop.
“Number Two: When a fictional character escapes the story world, they must be returned as soon as feasibly possible, and their memory of our world erased.
“Number Three: The author’s intention for the story must be preserved at all costs, no matter how much a fictional character may object.”
Pops succinctly paraphrased Black and Whites Two and Three asNever let the inmates run the asylum.
