Chapter 34

ChapterThirty-Four

Thea tried to settle into the house in the best way she could. She helped Alistair with paperwork every day, organizing everything into stacks that made sense to her mind. Some days he thought she did a good job, other days he was so preoccupied with something else that he waved her out of his office before looking.

It wasn’t... terrible?

She still woke up every night with nightmares, and she hated living in the house. But for the most part, the job kept her so busy that her mind couldn’t wander. If she didn’t think about the darkness and the lingering shadows, then it was easier to go about her day.

And that seemed like what the others in the house did. Nora ignored the tendrils that looked like spider legs. They reached out from underneath the stove and touched her shoes as she walked by. Thea had only met a couple of other people who worked here, certainly less than Nora had led her to believe, and they all swore they didn’t see the shadows move at all.

She paused in the kitchen, staring intently at the darkness underneath the stove. And there they were again. Like dark spiders waiting for their prey.

“What are you looking at, dear?” Nora asked as she walked into the kitchen. Her arms were full of fresh vegetables from the market. Clods of dirt still hung on the roots.

“You don’t see them?” Thea asked. “The spiders.”

“Oh, yes. Those are leftovers from Balthazar. We see so much less of them now that Alistair’s taken over the household.” Nora dropped her armful on the table and sighed. “It’s so hard to put good energy into food when one is afraid, you know. That’s why I ignore them.”

Thea had been wondering about Nora’s gift. And though Balthazar would have considered it a small gift, Thea thought it was rather lovely to put feeling into what others were about to eat.

“And they don’t bother you?” Thea had to ask the question. They’d been bothering her.

“Not usually. The more you get to know them, the easier they are to be around. They don’t like the light. That makes it easiest in the kitchens because the stove pretty much always keeps them trapped there. Just don’t let your feet get too close.”

Nora said it all as though it were normal to live with shadow monsters who wanted to grab onto your toes. Thea thought it was all rather horrifying, but then a thought caught in her mind.

“You said they’re afraid of light?” she asked.

“All of Balthazar’s creations do poorly in well-lit areas. His brand of spider magic relied entirely on the darkness. Thus a dark house.” Nora grabbed a knife from a drawer and pulled the vegetables toward her. “Aren’t you supposed to be working with Alistair today?”

“He had to go to the school, so he said I could help out in the kitchens.” Something chewed inside her. A thought that wanted to be let out.

Apparently, the housekeeper could already see that. “What is going on in that head of yours?”

Thea wasn’t sure. But that tug in her stomach told her to spend her day in the library and, well... why not? “Do you mind if I work in the library today? I noticed there’s a particularly large amount of dust and I had hoped to clean that.”

“Really?” Nora lifted a brow. “And what do you need to clean the space?”

“Everything?”

“You do what you want, girl. Just make sure it won’t anger the master when he returns.” Nora pointed with the knife to a closet behind Thea. “Go ahead and get what you want. I need to prepare dinner, and lunch, and then breakfast for the week for all the butlers since they’re moving more of the furniture from the attic and selling it at the market.”

“I’ll stay out of your hair.” Thea flashed her a grin and then spent most of her morning hauling buckets of water, a large amount of soap, three mops, two brooms, and an armful of different bins and buckets to the library.

Once she had all her goodies piled up on one side of the room, she turned around to survey the damage. Even Browning had joined her. He sat on top of a pile of buckets, looking rather stoic as he eyed the mess.

There were seven giant bookshelves, each one matching like dominos throughout the room. To the right, a larger space had been cleared next to a fireplace full of soot and the desk that Alistair preferred for work. Books were strewn about the room, pages littering the floor, and grimoires fought each other for space on the shelves that they had already cleared most of the books off of.

“We’ve got our work cut out for us,” she muttered.

Browning croaked in response.

“Do you think you could tame a few of those grimoires on the floor? I want to look at that fireplace.”

And so they set off. Browning took off to the left, Thea to the right. She peered up into the fireplace and saw so much soot that no one would have safely been able to light a fire in there. The whole building would burn to the ground. Thankfully, she could get some of it away from the areas in the room. They’d need a chimney sweep to do the rest.

She tied her skirts into a knot at her waist, tucked her hair into a bright pink scarf, and set to work. It took her at least an hour to clean out the fireplace. But when she was finished and covered in soot, she could see that the fireplace had actually been made of bronze. It would glow with a fire and bounce the light around the room. Which was exactly what she wanted.

“Perfect.” She clapped her hands together one last time and then looked up the chimney. “I don’t think we’ll have to hire a chimney sweep after all, Browning! The soot was almost entirely at the bottom here.”

No ribbit replied to her.

Thea turned to find her toad in a fierce battle with a grimoire on the floor. The book kept snapping at Browning and throwing pages at the toad until he couldn’t see where it was. Although, now that she looked at it, it appeared as though the grimoire was attempting to clamp onto her familiar and swallow him.

How dare it?

Stomping over, she muttered the entire way. “Get off of my familiar, you dusty, decrepit, no good... out of print novel!“

With the last insult, she stomped down hard on the book cover and flattened it before it got another bite out of Browning. The grimoire let out a little wheeze. Dust fluttered over the floor, but then it fell silent.

Stooping, she picked it up and brandished the leather volume at the other grimoires. “You will all stay put from now on, do you hear me?”

The sudden silence that came after her words startled her. She hadn’t realized how loud the library had been until this moment. No more shuffling pages. No more angry sounds of grimoires grunting in the corner.

She glanced down at Browning and grinned triumphantly. “You see? All they needed was someone to tell them to behave.”

Then the bookshelves creaked, and all the grimoires fell off their shelves. A wave of books rushed toward them, all their pages flying through the air with razor-sharp edges and the books themselves chomping along the floor with single-minded intent.

Thea dropped the grimoire in her hand, grabbed Browning, and sprinted out of the room. She could hear the buckets she’d neatly stacked all falling behind her. Sliding across the hall, she pin-wheeled her arms for balance, then promptly grabbed onto the doors and slammed them shut.

She threw her entire weight into holding the doors closed. Bracing her feet against the wall, she shouted over the sound of the grimoires, “Browning! Maybe try to get some help?”

“What in the world did you do to my library?”

Thea tilted her head backward to look behind her. And there he was. Upside down, of course, but Alistair stared at her with that half smile that made all her insides mushy.

“Ah, I had a theory that I wanted to put into practice. As you can see, it’s not going well.”

“A theory?”

“I’d rather not share until I see if it’s going to work or not.” The door jerked in her arms.

Alistair sighed. “I suppose I should know better than to ask questions about your plans. I’m going to open the door now.”

“I wouldn’t advise it.”

“They are my books, Thea.”

It was his funeral. She shrugged, let go of the door, and launched herself to safety behind him. Grimoires spilled out of the room and then skidded to a silent halt in front of Alistair’s feet.

“Back to the shelves,” he scolded. “You all know better.”

The grimoires grumbled, but they all went back to their assigned sections on the bookshelves. Quite a few floated back to where they should be, and they picked up their missing pages along the way.

Alistair followed them into the room and then turned to look at her. “So far, all I’m seeing is that you cleaned the fireplace.”

“Well, I had to bring all that up here as well.” She gestured to the stack of cleaning objects that were now haphazardly tossed around the room. “You are interrupting me in the middle of this project.”

“Which entails?”

She blinked. “Cleaning.”

“Ah.” He bit his lips and looked around them while nodding. “I see.”

She understood how that might be a little confusing. Pointing at a bucket of water, she said, “So I’ll just... get to it then.”

“Right.” He looked at his desk, then back at her. The awkwardness deepened. “I have paperwork to do. So I’ll just...”

“I thought you were going to the school?” She watched him settle behind the desk and grab a handful of documents.

“I was.”

And that was it. That was all Alistair said before diving into his work and not paying a single attention to what she was doing. Or at least making it appear as though he wasn’t looking at her. She had a feeling he might be.

She’d do just fine with an audience. Cleaning was cleaning.

She dragged the water bucket over to the massive window that took up the entire back wall and then pulled both mops over for good measure. The problem wasn’t cleaning the bottom windows, it was the top ones that were easily two stories up.

Right. Library. There were plenty of ladders around.

Thea grabbed the closest ladder and waved away Browning’s worried croak. She’d be fine. She had climbed ladders before, and besides, the windows wouldn’t wash themselves. Manhandling the bucket up the ladder to the top felt a little dangerous, but she made it with the mop in her hand. Prepared to clean what she could only assume were the dirtiest windows she’d ever seen.

Slopping the mop into the bucket, she slapped it hard against the window. She half hoped it would break the glass and Alistair would have to replace them. No luck there, though. The glass remained sturdy as ever. Shockingly, the water mingled with some black substance that looked like oil. It wasn’t smoke residue. Leaning closer, she realized it was the sticky remains of a dark spell gone awry.

Obviously, his father had been fond of the library while he was doing his spider shadow work.

“You’re going to wash off,” she snarled at the window. “I’ll be here all day if that’s what is required to fix you.”

And that was what she did. Another hour of dunking the mop, slapping at the windows, and angrily snarling at them while she tried her best to clean them. The top ones were the most stubborn. Water ran down them, though, and at least that took care of the bottom ones.

She’d had to change out the bucket five times in the hour, and her arms were aching by the end of it. Had she made any progress at all? They still looked blurry to her. If only she could get rid of the thin film that prevented the sun from entering the room.

Leaning precariously forward, she used a rag she’d brought up to put some elbow grease into the cleaning. And there, there it was. The glass looked like glass on this pane, and a bright beam of light speared into the library.

At the same time, she heard a hiss in her ear. Like a wild cat had lunged at her. Except it wasn’t a cat at all.

The shadows had all coiled up at the base of the ladder between herself and the glass. They launched at her face, all tendrils and spider legs that twisted together as they reached for her face.

Thea didn’t think. She reacted. She flinched away from the darkness that wanted to attach itself to her, and the entire ladder tilted backward. A small shriek echoed from her lips before she curled up her body to shield herself from the hard floor that would strike her any second.

Until warm arms caught her underneath her shoulders and legs. She landed neatly in Alistair’s arms as the spidery shadow creatures struck the light beam and sizzled out of existence. She looked up at Alistair while he stared in shock as his father’s creations melted in the sunlight.

“So that’s what you were up to,” he murmured.

She’d forgotten how to breathe as he held her. The boy she remembered had been wiry. Alistair had a certain strength to him back then, but she would never have called him strong. Now there were actual biceps holding onto her. A hard chest that she leaned against. Perhaps not the body of a working man, but still a man nonetheless.

Oh goodness, was she trembling? She needed to stop doing that, or he would wonder what was wrong with her. She was already wondering that.

Thea had every reason in the world to hate the man who had just saved her life. Possibly. She might have been fine if she had hit the floor.

But he still had all those freckles. And she’d never finished counting them.

Shaking her head to clear it of those mad thoughts, Thea cleared her throat and looked at the window with him. “Yes. Nora said something about how the spiders were afraid of light, and I thought... Why not bring more of it into the room?”

“Light. Of course they’re afraid of that,” he muttered while letting her legs slide down to the floor. “What a marvel idea, Thea. May I help?”

She blinked up at him owlishly. “Do you know how to help?”

He gave her that crooked half smile. “It’s been ten years, Thea, not forty. I know how to clean if I have to.”

“You could have fooled me. Everything needs to be cleaned in this house.” She tried not to sound too surly, but she was rather uncomfortable and startled at the way her heart beat faster because he smiled at her.

“Well, I’ve been rather busy keeping the house from being condemned.” He rolled his sleeves up his forearms, and she was entranced by the veins there that stood out.

He wasn’t a boy anymore, and that was regretfully distracting.

She bit her lip hard and nodded. “Right, then. Back to the windows?”

“Shall I get another bucket?”

Nodding, she started her way back up the ladder and tried not to look at him as he left the room. What had she gotten herself into now? Thea knew better than to fall for her employer.