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“That’s right.”
But Penbrook, brow arched in amusement, knew better. “Dust that you poof.”
From the other room, a crash interrupted her embarrassment. Finnick’s ears flattened against his head, and Fia froze, gripped with fear.
“Someone’s in the shop,” she hissed, imagining the thieves slinking through the darkness, faces lost in shadows. Wondering whether one of them might belong to a vengeful Sebastian Smith—greatly displeased she’d pried into his life.
Another heavy thud sounded.
“That doesn’t sound like footsteps.” Penbrook, more curious than cautious, crossed to the doorway, listening.
Fia tiptoed up beside him, and together they peered down the hall toward the shop, braced as if something might charge through the door. When all remained quiet, they edged forward in their stockinged feet, Fia nearly on Penbrook’s heels. Without a word, he nudged the door open, a protective arm held out to shield her.
It was darker here in the shop, shadows bunched up in all the corners, the only light a sickly yellow slanting in from the streetlamps. Slowly, Fia slipped past his arm—and almost immediately tripped.
Penbrook steadied her with one careful hand at her waist, but Fia was already pulling away from his touch and bending for the object she’d stumbled over.
It was a book. One she certainly hadn’t left there.
Her heart caught in her throat, and she wondered if she’d somehow finally managed to call her mother’s spellbook out from wherever it had been hiding.
Please, she thought.
But as her fingers closed around the cover that very clearly wasn’t velvet, another book slammed to the floor.
Jumping back with a startled yelp, Fia knocked into Penbrook. Felt the lean lines of his hip against hers, the unflinching way he stood beside her, as one book after another lifted up from their places on the shelf and whipped through the shop.
The bespelled books smashed against the display tables, overturning bottles and jars. They collided with the cabinets and tipped over stools, dizzy and wild. Gaining momentum, the tomes spun and spun, cycloning around Fia and Penbrook and tingeing the air with the scent of paper and ink.
They watched the books churn, and then plummet, landing with loud thumps in front of Fia, like offerings.
She didn’t know if she should laugh or cry that her magic would work, but so disastrously. She hadn’t found her mother’s spellbook, but she’d magicked every book in the shop her mother had once touched. They’d come to her when she’d called.
“Mayhem,” Penbrook said, sounding almost impressed as he took in the mess.
Fia groaned. “This is why I don’t want to try to call The Book of Ribs myself. Who knows what kind of chaos I’d create? Or let loose.” She looked up at Penbrook. “Will you help me?”
He bent for one of the fallen books, stalling his answer, and she worried he’d say no. She wasn’t asking for some small thing. He’d be tangling himself up in her troubles.
“Well, I could try,” he said finally, in a tone she couldn’t read.
Weighing his indifference with her desperate need, she gently asked, “Tomorrow, perhaps?”
Because that long night she had to straighten up the store. He stayed right by her side, though, as they put away each and every one of the scattered books and righted all the bottles and cleaned up the rose-tinted glass of those that had broken. Only after it was done and they’d eaten and she’d thanked him did Fia take Penbrook upstairs to what would temporarily be his room.
“Here it is.” She smiled.
“Hmm. The door seems to be missing a knob,” he remarked.
A flush of embarrassment rushed through her. In her wild rush to steal her mother’s doorknobs, she’d quite forgotten to replace them. “Yes, well, just loop your finger in the hole to open and close the door. But look…” She pulled him forward before he could object. “What do you think of the room?”
He peered inside, knuckles whitening on the handle of his suitcase. “It’s a little small.”
Fia tensed, hurt even though she didn’t want to be. The room was approximately the same size as her own, and yes, maybe the slanted ceiling was rather low where the roof angled, especially for someone as tall as him, and maybe there wasn’t space for anything much more than the bed and the dresser and the wardrobe. Her mother had thought it practical enough, and Fia had always preferred to think of it as cute and cozy.
Yet Penbrook found it lacking. No matter how well they’d gotten along that night, she shouldn’t have expected anything different from a snooty Madbury.
She cut her eyes at him, and he seemed to realize what he’d said. “I didn’t—”
