Page 31 of Booked for Theft

While it wasn’t what he specifically wanted, cuddling appeased the beast’s need for affection and did a good job of taming him.

“We should acquire some chocolates and other treats for this adventure.”

“I’m sure we can find such things while we’re exploring. Where are we headed first?”

“There is an antique bookstore on the other side of the Mall across from the Smithsonian. I’ll have the driver take us to the Smithsonian, we’ll tour that first, and then we’ll head to the bookstore. If we have time, we’ll check out the Air and Space Museum before we head over to the hospital. After your appointment, which I’ve been told should take no more than ten minutes, there are numerous bookstores nearby. We’ll explore them before heading back here. We’ll also replace my phone while we’re out, as I’m tired of having to carry a charger in my pocket or being plugged in.”

“Which vehicle did you bring with you?”

“I brought your baby because you weren’t there to tell me no.”

I snickered. “Well played, Bradley. Where is my baby parked now?”

“She’s still parked at the hospital. I got a pass from the hospital, and she’s in the employee lot. She should be fine. She’ll stay there until we leave.”

That would work. “They approved just leaving her in their lot?”

“And without billing us for it, too. They figured that was the least they could do for your help with the transplants, and I didn’t want to deal with driving her to the White House.”

I couldn’t blame him for that—and we had some hope the government wouldn’t mess with the vehicle. However, the instant we got home, I’d hand over the keys to Bradley’s father and have his company sweep the whole thing for unwanted additions.

When I’d purchased the vehicle, they’d taken a detailed photograph of every inch of her so they could reference it for any alterations.

“All right. I’m ready to go on an adventure, Bradley.”

He chuckled, checked his pockets, and headed for the door. “Hopefully, my plan for today meets your expectations.”

“The only way you can screw this up is if we don’t go to the bookstore.”

Bradley bought me several journals at the Smithsonian along with a set of ten fancy pens featuring elements of history, ranging from dinosaur bones to the invention of the plane. My favorite of the lot featured books, and it went into my purse along with a journal featuring a blue background and a golden sunburst with the museum’s name embossed near the middle of the cover. The trip in the museum itself evoked wonder, and they had pieces discovered long before the rise and acceptance of magic.

Due to construction at the National Archives, the Declaration of Independence was on temporary display within the Smithsonian, and of all the exhibits in the museum, I spent the longest staring at it, wondering how we’d fallen so far.

Then it dawned on me that I had no conception of the passage of time.

We recorded the years on a different calendar, one that better represented a magical society. We’d borrowed from the old Gregorian calendar, labeling the year as MR, which stood for Magic’s Rise. Someone had tracked back to the discovery of magic, set that to be Year 0, and we’d moved forward from there.

As far as I could recall, nobody had told me what year, in the Gregorian calendar, matched our current year.

Unlike the Gregorian calendar, we’d chosen to use a riff off the Hijri solar calendar, keeping the general naming conventions but adjusting each year based on the Earth’s actual orbit around the sun. In acknowledgement of its origin, we still used a set location in Iran to determine the start of each year.

Culturally, we still celebrated the first day of January as the New Year, but in reality, the calendar shifted based on Earth’s orbit.

For the most part, everyone ignored the technicalities of the MR calendar and pretended we still lived our lives according to a variant of the Gregorian calendar.

I christened my new notebook with a research question, which would inevitably send me on a scavenger hunt for information I feared the government had made efforts to hide. One of those efforts involved a failure to date anything beyond 2030 AD.

Scholars claimed that made an excellent year for the transition away from the Gregorian calendar due to ‘sufficient overlap’ in dating.

I was yet to associate any one event with both calendars, however.

How many years of history had been erased in an effort to blind people to the past?

After we left the Smithsonian and blitzed through the Air and Space Museum, Bradley kept his word, walked us across the Mall, and set me loose in an antique bookstore, the kind of place that might have the answer to some of my questions. If we were being watched or had been subjected to unexpected bugs, the poor bastards stuck with keeping an eye on us would enjoy innuendo, my interest in the Roman empire, and some indications I had a healthy interest in finding some raunchy romance novels so we could attempt to act out some of the spicier scenes.

While the place didn’t have any ancient books from the Roman Empire, there was a set of history texts from 1806 AD, bound in leather and preserved with magic, that would do my collection justice. The price tag, at ten thousand dollars a book, reduced me to tears.

“You realize I can afford the books, right?” Bradley asked, engaging me in a staring contest with a raised brow. “If you want the set, you can have the set.” He counted books and examined the spines, covers, and title pages of each one, wearing a pair of white gloves the shopkeeper had offered to him. “Three volumes are about the Roman Empire, and you clearly need those.” He set those into a nearby tray, which was lined in soft fabric to protect the precious volumes. “Two volumes are on the colonization of the United States, one volume is on the naval history of the United States, one volume is on general military history, and the rest are general history titles.”