Grimoires and Where to Find Them Raconteur, Honor (read along books TXT) 📖

pulled each aside, painting the hex on them, too. Then Gibson started to help, no doubt realizing we really had to get in there to get things sorted.

Eventually, we had no more reasons to delay. The idea of retrieving the grimoires from the Reaper’s Set was only semi-motivational. Retrieving them meant having to deal with them at their most chaotic. Still, best to get this over with. I grasped my bag in a white-knuckled grip, promised myself a three-day weekend after this, and waded through the ward as if I had glass in my shoes.

Seaton led the charge, throwing over his shoulder, “The landlady gave me a key to the place, so the apartment is already open for us.”

A wrinkle I hadn’t thought of, but he’d been on scene longer than any of us. “Good to know.”

Marshall called from the rear, “I’ve only got twenty bags on me. How many books are in there, RM Seaton?”

“Too many to count at a glance,” Seaton reported. He did so with open dread even as we topped the first riser and continued up past the second level. He did cast a glance over the open wood balustrade and gave us all more of a clue. “The apartment is a standard one-bedroom, and it’s filled with bookshelves to the point that I can’t see a single wall or surface.”

We were going to be here for ages. Assuming the building held up that long.

“Why would anyone store that many grimoires in one place? Even us magicians don’t have more than a dozen or so grimoires!”

“My only thought is that this is either a very stupid collector, or more likely a thief using this place as a storeroom. I can’t think of any other possibility. And since most of the grimoires have no protective boxes, I’m leaning toward thief over collector. A collector would be adamant about keeping the box with the grimoire. Removing it lowers the value of the grimoire, after all.”

A sound point, and sound reasoning. I had no objection. It just pained my soul that we had to clean up after this idiot.

And I definitely did not bring enough bags, although I’d brought all the station had in stock.

Gibson muttered, “I’m preempting that problem now.”

I cast a glance over my shoulder, saw him pause long enough to pull out his pad and scribble a quick note. Ah. Calling for more bags to be brought in. Smart of him to do it now. Binding cloths might do the trick, too, if some of the grimoires were a low enough level. Although we’d have to get up there to make that evaluation.

We stepped quickly up to the third floor. The apartment in question was immediately to the left, the door wide open. The…liquid…door. I swear to you, it was trying to drip off its own frame even as I looked, and the wood fibers were in a liquid puddle on the hallway floor.

Was the floor inside even safe to step on?

Seaton seemed to have the same question, as he stepped gingerly inside. “I did throw down some reinforcement spells to keep this apartment attached to the building. But…well, they’re already getting sucked into this magical soup. Step lightly, everyone.”

I really, truly did not like the look of this.

The first glance inside the room reinforced what Seaton had described. It was a standard one-bedroom with an open floor that connected living area to kitchen, with room for a small table in between. The table was mounded over with books, as were the kitchen counters, so clearly this place was not lived in. It was meant to store the books, nothing more.

The walls had bookshelves of all types, nothing uniform about any of them, and they were crammed with books. Not even arranged vertically as usual, but horizontally, to buy the owner more space. It was entirely ridiculous.

And the protective boxes around the grimoires were scarce, indeed.

I couldn’t tell at a glance how many grimoires there were, but I did see that some vintage books were mixed in. Not all of them were grimoires, then. Which was good, but only marginally helpful. I wished I could tell which would be our Reaper’s grimoires, but unfortunately their exteriors weren’t remarkable—just plain leather covers. We’d have to shuffle through this mess to find them. And it was a chaotic mess, no question.

No wonder the building was suffering from the onslaught. There was absolutely nothing here to contain the magic. Not every grimoire comes standard with protection—that was a modern addition. These grimoires looked old, some of them at least a century, so odds were half of them didn’t have a sealing hex on the signature page. And not all of them looked to be in the best condition, either. The covers gave that impression. So, we had poor quality grimoires stacked together by a thief known for leaving protective boxes behind. Ye little gods, I felt a migraine incoming at the sight of this madness.

Baker—a kingsman I did not know well—gave a groan long and loud as he stepped into the room. “Where do we even start?”

“Books nearest the door,” Colette advised with a sharp, pragmatic nod, as if she was agreeing with her own assessment. “The more we clear out, the better the situation gets. If we start with the books nearest us, we have less of a chance of the floor collapsing halfway through the job. Skip the vintage books for now, focus on the grimoires first.”

It was an entirely practical suggestion, and I approved. “Seaton, I also think that’s the best way to go about this.”

Seaton inclined his head towards Colette, expression approving.

“As do I. Alright, unprotected grimoires first. The boxed ones we’ll leave be unless they show signs of being compromised. Baker, Lansing, you’re better runners than the rest of us. You two stay at the door and run the grimoires down and set them in the bottom parlor for now.”

Also a good suggestion. We couldn’t take them out of the ward yet—there was no