Wicked Heart

Contrary to popular belief, Stella Lanoue was not a librarian.

Okay, once, very briefly, she worked at the local library as a volunteer on the weekends. And sure, that started her on the path that would become her career, but she had never been an actual librarian. For starters, there were proper degrees that people pursued when they wanted to be librarians, which Stella technically did not have. To follow, they worked in (and for) specific libraries, and while Stella would admit she was known for visiting libraries and conducting business in the vicinity of libraries, she did not actually work in libraries.

Last, if Stella was actually librarian, she probably would have had the void and veil given sense not to throw herself on the back of a stranger’s motorcycle and demand that he drive.

What Stella actually did for a living, which she looked on with increasing regret, was curate rare books into collections, mundane and magical alike.

And that was why Stella found herself clinging to the demon in front of her for dear life and hoped like hell that the vampire behind her was not about to give chase.

The bitch of the situation was Stella knew she was bound for a bad day the moment the estate auction email came through to her phone. Very few of Stella’s clients actually depended on her to go out and find rare texts on their behalf. More often, they preferred to do their own hunting, to spend extortionate amounts of money on the off chance the text in their hands was authentic, and then they paid her even more extortionate fees to tell them whether their hard work and money actually paid off.

But every once in a while, this particular client would forward her an email, with a specific item circled, and ask her if she had time to check it out.

This was hours before the motorcycle demon and her vampire tail. Back when the world made sense and the only thing Stella had to worry about was how many people would be crawling out of the wood-works to nose around a locally famous collection of esoteric literature.

“I’m only doing this because you’re my friend, Saige.” Stella jabbed the wireless earbud into her ear and transferred her phone call from handset to bluetooth as she walked into the front hall of a very large, very gaudy mansion of some recently deceased bozo with a penchant for literature on the kabbalah. She frowned down at the pretty blonde woman beaming at her from the other end.

“I know, I know, I know! But I owe you, Stell. Really, next time you’re in Texas, we’ll have a spa day. A really long one with yoga and massage and wine. The works. All on me.”

Despite living in Texas, the blonde on the phone spoke with a crystalline British accent. She sounded as much like money as she looked. But the last thing Stella wanted was for Saige Setima to pay her for her efforts with a spa day.

“You don’t owe me. I know that in your line of work, a concept like that is practically impossible to wrap your head around, but seriously, I don’t want any sort of payment or special favours. Maybe it’d be one thing if you were making me trek all the way across the country again, but Hot Springs, Arkansas, is close enough to home that it barely matters.”

The woman on the other end of the phone harrumphed. “Come on, Stella. We’ve known each other for a year and a half. Surely, that’s long enough for you to stop being suspicious that I’m going to drag you into vampire business.”

“Saige, this is that business,” Stella muttered at the phone while flashing her ID at the security guard on the doors. “Literally, this is the most business of vamp—“ she stopped short when she realized how much her voice echoed in the tall, grand hallway of the building and said instead, “accounting business that someone not in accounting can get into before they become an accountant.”

“Oh Estella, people don’t become vampires by doing business with vampires. You’re either born one or you’re not one. You know that.”

She did know that. Hell, if vampires could turn people in to vampires, her second-to-youngest sister would be one, courtesy of Saige’s older cousin.

“Not the point, Saige. I like my life simple. I like being your friend, and I do things as your friend. But I don’t need you making a big song and dance about you owing me. Think of it as... I don’t know, a gift instead of a favour, ok?”

She ignored the way Saige’s cherubic face pinched into a sulk, and before the woman could try to wheedle her way back into Stella’s good graces, Stella asked, “What the hell did this guy do for a living? And why doesn’t he have a proper will?”

“Just the usual human things.” The slightly pixilated Saige fluffed her hair and shrugged. “I think he made money by having money.”

“You’re calling that the usual human thing? You’ve never sounded so privileged,” Stella mused as she consulted a small directory that outlined what parts of the house were part of the sale. Now that she was deeper into the house, she could hear the murmurations of other people, some speaking with the authority of those representing the estate and some with the keen observance of those who’d come to buy.

Saige made another grumpy sound. “If you’re trying to make me feel bad, you’re not going to. If you’re taking the mick just to be mean, fine. You made your point, har-har and all that.”

Stella grinned. “Cranky doesn’t look cute on you.”

“To answer your question,” Saige pressed onward, making a show of ignoring Stella. “Gideon found out about the sale and sent me the details, so he probably had something to do with one of the branches of the syndicate. And his wife is dead and they didn’t have kids. Hence the estate sale.”

“Great. Well, it’s been on for two days by this point, Saige, so there’s no guarantee that your book is going to be here. Let alone that it’ll be what you’re looking for.”

“I know, I know! But do look hard, won’t you? And let me know, even if it turns out to be nothing.”

“You’re taking a lot on faith that I’ll be able to identify this thing if it’s real—and that’s a big if, by the way.”

“So you keep saying,” Saige responded. “But, Stella, I have faith in you. You’re a spellcrafter from one of the most powerful families I’ve ever met. That’s got to count for something.”

“Only the constant headache I seem to suffer.”

“How dramatic.”

“Saige, you’ve met my family. If Thalia’s not having a crisis, Daniella is. If Elle is behaving, Sylvie or Ivy is flying off the handle, and if it’s not them, then Penny’s getting into trouble. Christie and I are the only normal people in our family, and sometimes even Christie goes a little weird around the edges.”

“And you’re just the epitome of Norma Normal.”

Stella had not survived a childhood with six sisters without knowing the start of a bickering match when she heard one, so instead of answering her friend, she said, “I’m going to let you go now so I can concentrate on finding the library. This place is a maze.”

Saige barely had time to say, “Avoiding the topic now, are we?” before Stella ended the call and tucked her phone into her pocket.

She wanted to consider Saige a friend, she really did, but the woman and her mad hunt for fairytales was absolutely exhausting.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it was literal fairytales, Stella mused as she followed the sounds of voices down the hall and peeked into open rooms looking for a library. But Saige Setima wasn’t after Hans Christian Anderson or specific editions of Brother’s Grimm collections with rare illustrations.

No, like most vampires, Saige couldn’t be content with the attainably rare. She had to reach for the most far-fetched fantasy she could drum up.

Stella rolled her eyes at the thought and turned away from the small, beautifully decorated sitting room where a couple in their sixties were discussing whether the upholstery on the armchair could be replaced.

“Gah!” she barely stopped with enough room between her and the person behind her to keep her nose from colliding with his collarbone. “Hello? Good grief! Ever hear of personal space?”

The man, with his faded black t-shirt and an assortment of heavy chains decorating the clavicles that nearly assaulted her, didn’t even bother to step back.

“Sounds like one of those new-age concepts. But a ‘sorry for bumping into you after randomly changing directions’ wouldn’t go amiss.”

The low timbre of the man’s voice was just about the only thing attractive about the man who Stella had to step backwards to properly scowl at.

Oh, he was nice looking (really nice looking), if you were the sort of person who liked scraggly beards and unkempt dark hair and dress sense that looked like it belonged to a person who wore all black because he couldn’t figure out how to separate his darks from his lights. But Stella wasn’t. Stella preferred men who were well-groomed, and dressed nicely, and knew how to take a frickin’ hint when it came to not blocking doorways.

“Uh,” Stella laughed dryly and lifted a finger, “No, no, see, if you hadn’t been practically trying to step into my shoes just now, I wouldn’t have bumped into you.”

It wasn’t often that Stella felt small. Being a suitably above-average five-foot seven-inches, she was pretty capable of holding her own in most situations. But the man blocking the doorway looked and felt big, and when he looked down at her, Stella realized she did, in fact, feel very small.

All that did was make her feel like she should stand her ground. Maybe punch the guy in the diaphragm for good measure, but with the old couple now standing to nosy attention behind her, Stella wasn’t convinced that was a good idea. So she ground her teeth and said, “So?”

A dark eyebrow quirked in disbelief, and the man shook his head before looking over his shoulder and down the hall where he’d presumably come. “Yeah, okay. Sure, kid. Sorry.”

The words were rushed, preoccupied, and if they didn’t have an audience, Stella would have told him his tone didn’t exactly cut it. But he was holding his hands up and stepping back, and Stella was smart enough to realize dying on that particular hill would make her look like a total twat.

Instead, she said, “Great. Well, sorry I ran into you.”

Feeling all kinds of out-of-sorts about the ordeal, Stella turned sideways and scooted around the man. He offered her some weird salute that felt incredibly sarcastic as they traded spaces. And that would have been the end of it, except the man kept glancing over his shoulder with some odd expression of disdain on his face. He crossed the room, opened one of the large, tall windows, and climbed out of it.

The old couple made the appropriate sounds of bafflement and toddled to the window to watch the man go.

What a weirdo. Stella shook her head at nothing and headed back down the hall, skipping several closed doors in favour of the big double doors at the end of the hall and hoped they were something more library-esque.

Like the front hall, the library seemed to forgo the idea of floors in favour of sheer height. The house was one of those atrocious Gatsbian affairs on the outside, but when Stella stepped into the library, she could almost forgive the building’s previous owner for their lack of cohesive architecture style.

She didn’t dare think how stupid the building looked as she took in the cathedral ceilings with its elegant arches and the frosted windows that diffused the light and turned the whole room into a soft haze.

Books, books, and more books stacked on double-depth shelves rose all the way up to the rafters, and Stella counted no less than three rolling ladders. Biblichor, dust, and old leather hung heavy in the air, and for a moment, Stella didn’t even mind that this room was where most of the people had converged.

And of course they did, because it wasn’t the dead guy’s furniture and tastes in upholstery that made him a local legend. It was his books on the occult.

In the center of the room, a table with piles of books stood as the highlight of the display. One glance at the white edged paperbacks and the jewel-toned leather of the books on the table told Stella they were the last thing Saige would be looking for. Even though more than a dozen people were crowded around the table and siphoning through the piles, Stella could tell those books had been put there because they were newer, more common materials that held pittance of value. The sorts of things no one had to worry about people touching with their oily hands and sticky fingers, because even if they looked nice, they weren’t inherently special.

Not like the older, dustier books in their ugly manila paper dust-jackets and their unassuming brown leather covers. Easy as those might have been for the average observer to overlook, Stella knew when it came to esoteric literature, the more boring it looked and the more cramped the pages, the more valuable the text.

So she didn’t bother stopping by the table on her way to speak to the woman in the navy dress suit who’d tucked herself in the far corner of the room. The woman wore a high-gloss name tag and the iPad she carried had the estate sales company’s logo slapped on the back of the tablet, and behind thick glasses, the woman’s eyes had glazed in sheer boredom.

“Hi there. Sorry to disturb you. I wondered if you had access to the library’s catalogue?” Stella opened the email Saige sent her and brought up the photograph of the highlighted text. “I’m looking for a specific book that’s rumoured to be part of this collection.”

The woman did a double-take, then frowned. “Is that supposed to be the title or the publisher?”

“Honestly, I’m not sure. I’m here on behalf of a client who collects exceptionally old volumes, so for all I know, it’s just a description of the cover of the book.”

Still frowning, the woman jabbed at her iPad a few times, scrolled through a list, then jabbed some more. After about the third session of scrolling and jabbing, she said, “If it’s still here, it’s probably in the locked case at the back,” she nodded in the direction of the far corner of the room where Stella could just see a line of tall, glass case shelves.

“Great, thank you.” With another nod, and a promise to herself that she could have an enormous glass of wine as soon as all of this was over, Stella excused herself to check out the bookshelves in question.

“They’re locked,” the woman said before Stella could take more than a single step away. “And only the head agent has the key, so if you find what you’re looking for, you’ll have to tell me and I can call for her to come down and unlock the case.”

“All that just for some books?”

The woman glanced at her iPad. “They’re expensive books,” she said, and although her tone was level, a tiny lift of one well-groomed eyebrow told Stella they weren’t just expensive.

If I have to clean out my bank account for this book, Saige, I’m going to really make this a business transaction.

“I’ll let you know if I find it.”

She ducked toward the back of the room and disappeared behind a row of shelves.

Thankfully, these were not double-stacked. Nor were they as full as some of the unguarded shelves Stella passed. But they were locked, just like the woman said, which meant Stella was going to have to narrow down which of the bookshelves her prospective purchase was in before asking the woman to make the call. And all she had to go off of was what the spine might look like based on the item report that might have been a title, or a publisher, or a description of the book.

Stella grumbled as she looked down at her phone and glared at the picture. The item read simply:

Fleece, Golden.

She almost hoped it was a description. It would be easy to spot a book made of golden felt.

Something told Stella she wouldn’t be that lucky. Hell, she wasn’t even lucky enough to find it in the third shelf she looked at. Or the fourth. She was half tempted to skip to the end of the row, but she thought if she did that, it would almost certainly have been on the fifth shelf in the line all along...

When it was neither on the fifth or the sixth, or even the last bookshelf in the line, Stella almost gave herself permission to give up.

After all, maybe the book itself was real, but there was no way (no way!) that Fleece, Golden was part of the Alchemical Androgyne.

Stella stepped back and crossed her arms over her chest, glaring at the seven glass-covered bookshelves. There was no way a man who wasn’t even a spellcrafter, one of the many hidden people of the world who could use craft to tame magic into some useable form, could get a hold of part of a text designed to outline the theory and rules of an entire world’s worth of craft and power.

First of all, as Stella had told Saige a thousand times, the Alchemical Androgyne didn’t even exist. Second of all, someone, vampire, werewolf, demon, or other, would have killed this man deader than dead the moment they found out he had it. So the idea some random dude who died in his bed at the ripe age of ninety-seven spent his entire life sat on one of the most mythical texts among mythical texts was preposterous.

Absurd.

Bananas.

She was staring right at it.

“Oh my god.” A hand flew to her mouth, too late to stifle the words, but a glance along the rows of books assured her that probably no one had heard. Brow furrowed, Stella took a few steps closer and leaned in toward the glass door. Beyond her own reflection and the gentle steam of her breath on the glass, she felt more than saw the thin, unobtrusive book wedged between two thicker volumes.

The spine was blank. Not even the impression of the title decorated the dark brown leather. But there was no mistaking that the book contained magic.

Deep. Dark. Needle like magic trying to pull at the space behind her—

“Interesting collection, isn’t it?”

Stella yelped, leaping away from the shelf and throwing her hands between her and the speaker.

The man was the antithesis of the guy she’d run into in the doorway. Still tall, but lean instead of broad, and dusky skinned with glowing golden waves that made her think of wheat drying out in fields. Clean shaven, dressed in a dove grey suit with an emerald shirt, he would have almost been attractive if every instinct Stella had wasn’t setting fire to the back of her brain.

Run.

That alone was enough to convince Stella she was looking at a vampire. Nevermind how polite and fangless his smile seemed.

Stella shook her head, hoping to dislodge some sense into the rest of her brain. “Sorry, you startled me. What?”

The man lifted a hand and took an almost apologetic step back. “I was just commenting about the books. They’re interesting. Very rare. Very different from the books on the table out there.”

Casually, and yet with sickening menace, the man who hadn’t even bothered to introduce himself settled in the spot Stella had been standing not a moment ago. “Which one caught your eye?”

Lie.

With seven generations of magic in her veins, Stella didn’t question the compulsion.

She picked the closest book to the one she’d actually been looking at. “The Odyssey. I think it might be the Alexander Pope translation. Makes it pretty special.”

She did not think it was the Alexander Pope translation of The Odyssey and wouldn’t have been remotely interested in the book if it was, but it felt like the sort of thing a hopeful novice collector would say. And something told Stella that she needed to lean into that.

The same something that screamed at her to grab the Fleece, Golden and haul ass when this guy wasn’t looking.

Giving her best hopeless and wistful shrug, Stella said, “The case is locked, though, so I guess I’ll never know.”

Eyes as grey and bleak as storm clouds regarded her for a long moment, and feeling more and more self-conscious, Stella clasped her hands behind her back and asked, “Which book are you after?”

He stood upright again, his eyes still on the cabinet. “None in particular. I just enjoy looking at what’s here.”

“Uh-huh,” Stella tried to smile, but she was starting to feel oddly crowded by the man. So she said, “Say, do you think that if two of us asked for the case to be opened, they’d do it? I asked earlier, but the lady out there seemed kind of reluctant.” She turned to look back at the book, forcing herself to look at the two volumes of The Odyssey and not the little brown book nearby. “It’s just, I think this would be a really great gift for a friend, but I don’t think the lady out there is taking me as a serious buyer.”

The man gave her a once-over, and Stella’s skin crawled.

Standing still while he considered her request was easily the hardest thing she’d ever had to do, but somehow she managed.

“Sure.” A shrug and a smile that was almost pleasant. “There are a few books on these shelves that I wouldn’t mind taking a closer look at, myself. Let me see if I can persuade her.”

The man barely rounded the corner before Stella was fishing a pair of hairpins out of her hair.

Quick, quick quickquickquick!

Adrenaline made her hands shake as she bent one pin and then the other, shoving them into the lock.

She would have much preferred to buy the book outright, no matter how much the damned thing cost, but if the book felt like warm candle flame, the man in the dove grey suit felt like lightning and the depths of some deep chasm that Stella didn’t want to be anywhere near, and like hell was she going to believe he wasn’t looking specifically for the same book as her.

Sometimes, you know what you know.

“Not now, mom.” She pushed the memory of the woman’s voice out of her head and focused on pushing at the lock’s pins.

Just get the book. Get it and run like hell.

And vehemently as she hissed the instructions at herself, she hissed back that she was trying. But it had been years since Stella had to pick a lock with bobby pins, and her hands were shaking something fierce now. Especially as, under all the casual chatter of the people at the big table, she heard the woman with the iPad say, “Huh, you’re the second person to ask about that book in the last ten minutes. Must be worth the price.”