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“Do you know what’s wrong with me? Is it serious?”
“Certainly it’s serious. But there’s nothing wrong. It’s a marvel. You are blessed. Find your number and call us back.”
“Where would I look?”
“You have hosted a visitor. Look in his effects—whatever he’s left behind.” Glaucous coughed and hung up.
Jack sat for a moment, face red, both angry and curious—then walked on quivering legs to his small bedroom and pulled back the trunk.
The folio was gone. He stared in astonishment, then ransacked the room, looking under the bed, pulling back the sheets, the mattress, returning to the trunk. Nothing.
He felt in the shadows behind the trunk. His fingers swept out a small hexagonal piece of paper. He picked it up. The hexagon had been intricately folded, like origami or one of those mathematical puzzles kids learned how to make in school. It was clever, so tight he could not pry it open far enough to peer in. No loose bits. As far as he could tell, all the corners and edges met inside. You’d have to have very clever fingers indeed to fold a piece of paper that way.
“Stop it!” Jack shouted to the room’s still air. He squeezed the folded paper between his fingers from two opposite sides, then from another angle—trying all combinations to get it to pop open, to flower. Nothing. Then, tentatively:
They want a call number. The catalog number of your special volume. Whatever you do, don’t give that to them, under any circumstance.
“Why not?”
No answer.
“To hell with you.” He felt a growing pressure in the air, fogging his thoughts. Jack looked up. Someone was climbing the stairs. Footsteps outside—heavy thumps. He hoped it was Burke—someone to talk to. So much had happened today. The pressure increased. His head began to hurt. Anything to make it stop. The rain and wind blew harder.
The thumps slowed to the pace of an older person—a cautious person—not Burke, who was quick and athletic. Jack suddenly wanted to be anywhere but where he was. Then the sensation passed, painted over by another wave of pervasive sweetness. All would be well…
Across the curtains in the living room window, something big cast a shadow. The big shadow passed and a smaller shadow replaced it: short, broad, like a gnome.
A heavy fist slammed on the door, rattling the frame and the wall and shivering the curtains.
“It’s Glaucous, dear boy,” cried a rough voice—the same voice that had answered the phone. “I’ve brought my lady to meet you. Let’s find that number, shall we?” The fist slammed again and the voice added in an amused undertone, “Easy, dear.”
CHAPTER 33
The Green Warehouse
Gi
She made out only a few phrases. “…all here. Gathered…” Then, Bidewell, “The girl doesn’t have it with her…” And another, deeper female voice, “Pawnshops, the usual…”
Gi
She appraised the rumpled bedding on her cot, the chipped antique bureau pulled into place at the cot’s foot. This part of the warehouse was large, dusty, drafty.
Once, she had enjoyed rain, even thunderstorms; not now. But the storm wasn’t hunting her—not this time. The warehouse was protecting her.
No, this storm was after someone like her, someone else who had read an ad or seen a billboard alongside a highway and was about to make the mistake of his or her life—and Gi
All of us—cut loose and bumping into the end.
That image made her suck in her breath with a sad hiccup.
For a few moments she paced before the door, biting her thumbnail. All her nails had been chewed to the quick. Her mother had once told Virginia she would have pretty hands, if only she would stop chewing on them. Quickly bored with chewing, she twisted a strand of hair until it draped in an elongated ringlet over her nose.
Enough.
She lifted her fist to the huge sliding door. Before she could strike the first blow, the door groaned, then pulled aside wide enough for Bidewell to shove through a scrawny arm. With an emphatic grunt, he heaved the door back on its track until it bumped against a rubber stop. All the while, he carried on his former conversation. “We shall use the century rooms, I think. I’ve kept them empty and ready. If you’re sure you can find them all.”
In Bidewell’s private library, in the rear half of the warehouse, three women sat in high-backed reading chairs. White lightning flashed through a tall window covered with steel bars, carving brilliance on the ceiling-high shelves.
“We’ll find them,” one woman answered.
All the women were older than Gi
She was not sure she liked anyof them.
Bidewell smiled, revealing strong teeth like mottled bone tiles. “Would you please join our group, Miss Virginia Carol?” he asked. “A little premature, perhaps. Dr. Sangloss is not yet here.”
Gi
The pawnshop—her stone.
The women regarded her with wary curiosity, awaiting her reaction. I might bite. Who are they?
Another rumble of thunder.
The woman with the green coat got to her feet and extended her hand. “My name is Ellen,” she said. Gi
The stout woman with the appraising look was Farrah. She said, “The storm is just getting started, Virginia. This time, it’s not after you—not yet.”
“I know that,” Gi
The stout woman continued. “We have an hour at most. We should have made our move sooner.”
“I’ve been slow, it’s true,” Bidewell confessed. “A little tired of late. Forgive me. We need you, Virginia, because none of us is a fate-shifter.”
“What’s a fate-shifter?” Gi