Page 9 of Booked for Murder

I loved her, as I could usually get what I wanted with minimal hassle.

Limping through the maze of cramped offices and cubicles, I headed to the very back where Beatrice reigned and knocked on her door.

“Enter, you mutty blight.”

I laughed at Beatrice’s barb. Had anyone else flung it at me, I would’ve taken offense, as I was technically a mutt regardless of my true magical rating. I’d lobbed far worse at her over the past year when we’d settled on a cooperative yet savage rivalry rather than the cordial professionalism expected of us. “Did you miss me that much, to start before I’ve even come into your office?”

According to the stacks of books taking over Beatrice’s office, she’d been recruited to handle acquisitions overflow, one of her least favorite tasks. Dodging the clutter with a cane and a briefcase with a shoulder strap took work, but I managed to close the door and make it to the sole chair in front of her desk without mowing anything over.

“Keep telling yourself that if it helps you sleep at night. You’re limping a lot today. You all right?”

“I forgot my cane on my way to work, and then I had to lug Ajani home. Senator Godrin was murdered on our steps. I was scheduled to come in an hour after opening for a change, so I missed the show. I’m just glad the cops let me take my cat home. I was worried they’d consider her a witness or evidence.”

I wished the police luck finding someone with the right magic to talk to cats—and then get my stubborn cat to cooperate after she’d been cruelly forced to return home rather than stay at the library.

“Tawnlen had called about it, and he asked me to keep you busy for the rest of the day so he can pay you regular hours until that mess is sorted. Since the rest of the staff was at the office, he gets to roll them into our emergency measures, but since the library was closed before your shift started, he couldn’t squeeze you in. He played one of his games to make sure you were still on active pay.”

Huh. “Has hell frozen over? And the main branch approved?”

“With a senator dead on the steps, the staff will be under fire for weeks, and it wouldn’t surprise us if the senator’s family tries to pin the murder on one of the librarians or the support staff. Since you were the only one who wasn’t present, and witnesses who know you can vouch you have a low magic rating and that you arrived after his death and were spotted walking down the street at his time of death, you’re clear and there’s no need to question you. Or so I’ve been told.”

Ugh. I’d already been investigated? Well, I could deal with that turn of events. I couldn’t stomach the thought of my fellow librarians being accused of murder when I was the only one who worked in the building capable of pulling off the crime. “I appreciate that I’m not a suspect, but I’m now considering going to my apartment and hiding for the rest of my life, if people actually noticed me walking to work.”

“You limp, you limp badly, and you forgot your cane? I was wondering why you would’ve been limping, but you not having your cane explained that. Don’t forget your damned cane next time, idiot.”

“Fair. I’m an idiot. I’ve been told I’m a temporary head librarian, which is why I’m here, because the boss wants me to deal with our magazine archive and our empty rooms. We have an entire empty floor, Beatrice. An entire empty floor we’re paying for.”

“Yes, Tawnlen warned me you would come armed with logic and determination. As I don’t feel like losing an argument with some damned idiot mutt who can’t remember to take her damned cane to work, I’m going to skip the argument, so we’re going to skip straight to the budget discussion.”

“Who are you, what have you done with Beatrice, and so help me, if you’ve hurt her, I will destroy you.”

Beatrice snickered. “When you’re not pissing me off, you’re so much fun.”

“Well, if we didn’t have to play this damned game to fight for every improvement at my branch, I wouldn’t have to piss you off.”

“You’re not the first person who has told me this. Let’s get this out of the way so we can talk about the Godrin situation. How much do you want, why do you want it, and when do you want it?”

“Enough to renovate the completely empty floor we’re paying rent on, enough to convert the storage floor to more library space, enough to renovate the extra rooms on the third floor into a magazine archive for the politicians who are doing reputation checks, and enough to get a proper room for our microfilm archive. We’d also like to be able to fill those recently renovated rooms with a mix of fiction and non-fiction books. With most of our catalogue relating to the Met and other research material, I’d like to see the last empty floor converted completely to fiction books to draw in more people.”

“How many empty floors do you have over there?”

I considered. “I think two empty and one used as storage. We keep getting denied on the renovation costs because we’re a small branch. We’re paying for that space, so we should use it.”

“Can you open concept the fiction floor and use clever shelving strategies to separate the sections?”

“I see no reason why we can’t. We’ll want to include sitting spaces near the windows. Our patrons enjoy reading near the windows. The sedans we have weren’t that expensive, and they seem durable enough.” I regarded Beatrice through narrowed eyes. “How are you about to skunk me, woman?”

Beatrice snorted. “I’m not going to. I was told by my boss we should take advantage of your branch’s situation when word came down the wire about the murder. Since you’re the only staffer we have that can get away from the library right now, you get to make the renovation work. I was asked to question you about the abilities of everyone at your branch, however.”

“None of the staff I’ve met at the library, from the custodians, maintenance workers, and librarians, have the required magical aptitude rating to pull off that sort of murder. None of them are exsanguinators, either.”

Except me. That would be a problem. My wishful thinking of developing some other form of magic would need to become a reality in a hurry, especially if Bradley Hampton caught wind of me with his magic. I’d started out wanting to be a nurse, but when my magic had flared to life, I’d become as much of a blessing as a liability. By the time I’d been eligible to go to medical school, my parents had begun negotiations with the Hamptons, and I’d lived a dual life for a while.

If my damned magic had been something else, I would’ve gone in to become a nurse for trauma victims rather than try my hand at becoming a librarian.

“Exsanguination is a difficult talent to master,” Beatrice conceded. “I am under the impression you are born with the ability. We have been asked to do some research for law enforcement on the rarity of exsanguination talents, provide names of registered exsanguinators, and relinquish this list to the police and the FBI upon completion. Unfortunately, the list we have is rather short, and our best information is at your library.”

There was a reason for that, and I hadn’t been part of that reason. The blame went to Mickey, as he viewed researching magic as his purpose in life. Whenever Mickey got sent to acquisitions, he found some way to include new reference books on the various types of magic. Somehow, we’d developed an entire section dedicated to magical research, the best one in the entire city.