Page 7 of King Among the Dead

After breakfast, Beck excused himself to his office with a quick little bow and a sincere thanks to them for doing the dishes. Rose pushed up the sleeves of her grubby shirt and plunged her hands down into the suds, absolutely bewildered at this point.

Beside her, Kay had another cigarette bobbing on her lower lip; she tapped its ash out into a crystal tray on the window ledge between drying plates; managing it didn’t seem to slow her hands or affect her ability to chatter up a storm. At some point, she seemed to realize that Rose was staring out the rain-slicked window at the wet courtyard behind the house, and not listening all that well.

The soft press of an elbow in her side brought Rose back to the moment. “Sorry, sorry.” She nearly dropped the plate she was holding, and scrubbed at it vigorously to hide that she’d been startled.

“Poor chickie. Ain’t nothing to be sorry about. If you were with Tabby for a while, it’s no wonder you’re jumpy as a cat. If Beck hadn’t already – well, and if these old bones were up to it.” She coughed a laugh. “Let’s just say it’d be nice to see her back looking like yours did.” She dropped a hand onto Rose’s shoulder, and it wasn’t very hard not to shrink from it; it felt nice there, warm and grounding, like when Beck had gripped her by the elbows last night.

“You’re safe here,” Kay said. “That I can promise you.”

People lie, Rose thought. But no one had ever promised her she’d be safe. Not ever.

She let out a breath. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure. Here, you done with that? I’ll rinse it.”

It helped to keep working; to not have to make eye contact. Still, she swallowed a lump of nerves. “Yesterday…Beck said he and Tabby – Miss Tabitha. That they go way back. How did he know her?”

Kay chuckled. “That’s not the question I was expecting, kiddo. But it’s a better one. Let’s just say Tabby’s always had a habit of trying to make money off kids in some way or other. And she’s always been absolute shit at it.”

A memory assaulted her: Miss Tabitha’s hand clamped to her chin, squeezing tight enough Rose felt the bones grind together, her foster mother furious and spitting.“You’re damn lucky, you little shit. Three years ago, I would have given you to one of my boys for talking back like that.”Rose had saidstopwhen the belt crashed against her back; a tiny squeak of pain she hadn’t been able to hold in. It was a mistake she hadn’t repeated.

She shuddered.

“No need to worry about that now. Beck’s damn good at taking out the trash.”

~*~

Kay gave her a tour of the first floor. Several sitting rooms, all with furniture in various states of dustiness. A few held showpiece furniture that looked antique and untouched, but one boasted more modern leather sofas that bore the distinct impressions of human inhabitance on the cushions. There was a TV in that room, one Kay waved toward with an explanation about technology and picture quality that Rose didn’t follow.

Beck had a study, its door shut. Kay advised that he needed time alone to work on his “projects,” and that he was best left alone unless the door was open.

Then came the library.

Rose had never seen so many books all in one place. Heavy, leather-bound tomes with gold lettering on the spines. And small, cracked-spine paperbacks stacked haphazardly in every direction on the shelves. The fireplace mantle had been carved with snarling lions, and a hunt scene done in dark oils hung above it. Two chairs were positioned at angles by the hearth, each big enough for two, and with their own tufted ottomans. A table stood by one, littered with a few empty glasses and a small stack of books. The room smelled of dust, and ink, and ash in a wonderful way.

“If he’s not working, this is where he spends all his time,” Kay said, voice fond. “I have no idea how many books there are. Thousands, I guess. I know he won’t mind if you want to read some of them. Heh. Or all of them.”

Rose didn’t realize she’d walked deep into the room until she turned and found Kay still at the threshold. She felt like she’d intruded, but Kay was grinning at her.

“You like books?”

“I never had any of my own.” One of the other girls who worked for Mr. Fisher, Claire, had owned a battered old secondhand Kindle, and she’d read romance novels on it in the break room in back of the grocery store. She always let Rose crowd in close to her, and waited to swipe to the next page when Rose nodded that she was ready. That wouldn’t happen anymore, Rose supposed with a swift tug of sadness…but here was a whole library of books. “But I love stories,” she said, voice hushed against the weight of all the volumes around them.

“You look like you do,” Kay offered, not unkindly. “Everybody with eyes as haunted as yours likes to get lost in other people’s stories. You and he’ll get along real well, I think.” She offered a smile that was knowing, smirking, and which Rose didn’t understand at all.

She was still stuck onhaunted. She looked haunted? By what?

FOUR

Kay invited her to watch TV in what she called the “comfy parlor,” but Rose chose to stay behind in the library. She explored, tentatively at first, and then, fingertips electrified by the feel of fine leather on the spines, more boldly. She made slow laps around the room, titling her head side to side, reading titles. There were dictionaries and encyclopedias, atlases; nonfiction titles on cities, and animals, and rock formations; biographies, and books about battles from history. Books about anatomy, and psychology, and astronomy. Many, many books about the history of England; seven titles alone about the fabled King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

She paused there, hand hovering, ready to pull a book down. She supposed Beck was like a knight – like her childhood imaging of one. There’d been no white horse, only blood, and his armor had been combat boots and leather. But. He’d saved her.

She kept moving, though, and finally found the fiction. A wild and varied assortment of it. Poetry, and slim Shakespeare volumes. Classics and fat, dusty paperbacks from the middle of last century. Popular fiction,New York Timeshits, and old romances with embracing couples on their faded jackets. Fantasy, and murder mysteries, and mythology retellings. She finally selected a small paperback with a muted, pastel cover and went to snuggle down in the chair that didn’t have a table beside it – that one she’d marked as Beck’s straight away.

The rain drummed outside, on the sidewalks and window ledges, a soothing backdrop of white noise, and it was easy to slip inside the book and forget who and where she was.

It was the blurb from another author whose name she recognized that had urged her to pick this one:epic love. But she hadn’t known what to expect. The protagonist was a girl her own age, homeless, hungry, on the run, living in a kind of terror that had Rose hunching over in her chair, her stomach tight with empathetic nerves that were all-too-familiar. The girl learned to fight, and scrap, and stay alive, but just barely…and then she met the boy with wings. A beautiful boy with white hair, and white, feathered wings.I’ll keep you safe, he whispered, and when the girl shuddered, Rose shuddered, too.

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