Something Borrowed, Something Cold

The back room of Vale's Curiosities was less a room than a controlled avalanche. Boxes were  stacked to the ceiling in towers that defied several laws of physics, each one labeled in grandfather's careful handwriting with a date and a source, a system that made perfect sense to exactly one person on earth, and he'd been dead eleven years now, so the family had simply learned to decode it by trial and affection.

The Holloway boxes sat by the window, four of them, water-stained cardboard that smelled like someone else's grandmother. I  pulled the first one toward me and started working through the layers of newspaper padding. In it were a set of chipped teacups, a mantel clock missing its hands, a small ceramic fox that made her smile despite herself.

"Anything good?" Mom called from the front, where the bell had chimed twice more in the last ten minutes, the particular rhythm of a slow Tuesday.

"That depends on your definition of good. There’s a clock in here that only tells you it’s always ten to two." I shouted loud enough for her to hear.

"That’s every clock in this shop, sweetheart." She said back, laughing.

I  smiled to myself and kept digging. I  was halfway through the second box when my fingers found something that didn't feel like the rest.

It was cold. That was the first strange thing about it.  The  room wasn't cold, the little space heater in the corner saw to that, but the book, when I  pulled it free of its newspaper nest, was cold enough that I almost dropped it out of surprise.

It was bound in leather so dark it looked wet. There was no title on its spine, no author, nothing to indicate what it was or where it had come from. When I  turned it over in my hands, I was expecting dust to have clung to the cover the way it clung to everything else that had spent God knew how long in a dead woman's attic, but it  didn't. The leather was clean, almost new.

It was as if someone had wiped it down and set it in that box only moments before I  opened it, which was impossible, because the box had been sealed with packing tape that hadn't been touched in years, brittle and yellowed at the edges.

I  told herself it didn't matter. Old houses had strange pockets sometimes. The  box might have been left open or  a draft could have kept the dust away. I  told myself a lot of things over the next several seconds but none of it made sense to me.

I examined the book again and felt drawn to the symbol embossed into the cover. The sigil was strange but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from it.

It was a bird curled around itself with its wings acting as a shield around it and  where the eye of the bird should have been was a small flame instead. It was rendered in careful, raised detail like something that was meant to be touched, something meant to be found by fingers exactly like mine.

Unable to stop myself, I ran my finger tip over the sigil and the moment my skin met the flame, the world went sideways.

It wasn't pain, I wouldn’t call it that. It was heat, a sudden, total heat. It was like I had physically stepped into a bonfire, and beneath it, underneath my skin, something old and enormous turned over in its sleep and opened one eye.

For half a second, I  saw fire behind my eyelids even though her eyes were open. I  saw a forest burning black against a sky I  didn't recognize and then it was gone. All of it gone so fast I  couldn't be sure it had happened at all.

I fell on my knees on the back room floor with the book clutched to my chest and my heart going so hard I  could hear it in my ears.

"Aurora?" I heard mom’s voice from the doorway, sharp with concern and I looked up. "Sweetheart, what happened?"

"Nothing." The word came out steadier than I  felt. "I just…….got dizzy. Low blood sugar, probably." I tried to wave it off so I won’t alarm her but I knew there was nothing blood sugar related with what I experienced earlier.

Mom’s eyes went to the book in my hands and something crossed her face. It was there one second and gone so fast I would have thought I conjured it. It was a flicker of an expression I  didn't have a name for, worry maybe or something closer to fear.

"Where did that come from?" she asked, her voice a little bit shaky.

"Holloway boxes." I  turned it over, showing the plain, dustless leather like it was nothing at all, like my hands weren’t still faintly trembling. "Weird, right? It’s the only thing in there that isn’t ancient."

Mom  didn't answer right away. She crossed the room slower than usual, the way she moved when her knees were bad, and picked the book up gently, almost reverently, turning it over the way you'd turn over something that might bite.

"Maybe it’s a keepsake. Something they kept sealed away," she said finally, but her voice had gone thin, and she set the book down on the desk like it had grown suddenly heavier in her hands. "Don’t touch that sigil again, alright? Some of these old estate stuff are not to be messed with, you never know what oils or chemicals got into old leather like that. Could be bad for your skin."

It was such an easy, mundane explanation that I  almost believed it. Almost.

"Sure," I  said but I did not mean it, because even now, minutes later, my palm still felt faintly warm where she’d touched the flame, like I had held it too close to a candle and the heat simply hadn’t left yet.

I  put the book in her bag before closing, telling myself it was because I  wanted to research it later, price it properly, see if it was worth anything. I tried to suppress the other reason - the small, insistent pull low in my chest that wanted the book near me, the way you would want a hand to hold in the dark.

By the time I had finished the rest of the box, teacups priced, the handless clock set aside for the shelf of things nobody would ever buy but everybody liked to look at, the afternoon had gone long and gold through the front window, and mom was ready to close up early, knees finally winning their daily argument.

"You lock the back, I'll do the front," mom said, already easing into her coat. "And eat something when you get home. You still look pale."

"I’m fine, Mom." I rolled my eyes at her playfully.

"You said that already." But she let it go, the way she let most things go, with a small fond shake of her head, and the bell chimed her out into the evening.

I  took one more lap through the shop before locking it down for the night, straightening a shelf that didn't need straightening, more to keep my hands busy than anything else. The bag with the book in it sat by the register, and I  found my eyes drifting to it every few seconds, the way you couldn't stop checking on a pot about to boil over.

It was while I  was turning the sign in the window from OPEN to CLOSE that I  saw him. It was someone else, not Cillian, a shape across the street I  didn't recognize, standing very still outside the shuttered movie theater in a way that didn't belong to anyone waiting for a bus or a friend. He wasn't looking at his phone. He wasn't looking at anything in particular, as far as I  could tell, except, perhaps, faintly, at me.

I  blinked, and the awkward angle of the streetlight resolved into nothing more sinister than a delivery driver checking an address, and he was walking away before I had even finished being unsettled by him, and I  told myself, the way I had been telling myself things all day, that it was nothing.

I  locked the door twice, something I never did, and did not look at the book again until I  was three houses away  from home.