Whether or not the laptop is on doesn’t matter. Linux is envious of how much time the machine gets and tries to get his body between the keys as often as possible.
A sudden thought grips Elgar’s lungs in terror. His chest freezes up, breath punched out of him. What if my laptop has vanished, too? He rushes to his office, clutching his sluggishly bleeding hand, and stops in the doorway. His lungs burn as he sucks in a breath to shout.
“Linux, move!”
The cat raises his head and grumbles unhappily. Elgar crosses his office and shoves his hand under the furry creature, who hisses and snarls, but refuses to be budged. Underneath him, Elgar’s fingers skim the cool metal casing of his computer. He sags, bending down to press his forehead against Linux’s fuzzy belly, overcome with relief.
Linux bats at his hair, but with claws sheathed this time. Elgar rubs his nose against the cat’s tum, and Linux gives up his anger, sprawls back, and enjoys the bizarre petting. After a moment, Elgar’s joints feel sturdy enough for him to straighten.
He keeps backups—both paper and digital—in a fireproof safe in the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet, and he checks this, too. Everything is where it should be. The correct number of CDs and memory keys still sit atop the early-draft manuscripts filed neatly under them. He locks the safe, and then the filing cabinet, and runs his hands through his puff of white hair, relieved and annoyed at himself in equal measure.
If it really was actual, real magic that stole his old typewriter, then it hadn’t reached here. And really, he chides himself, if there was some sort of magic intent on stealing his work, or his tools, then everything would have vanished months ago, the same time as the typewriter.
The same time that everyone else’s books were disappearing.
Still . . .
He doesn’t want to worry Forsyth unnecessarily; Forsyth would drop everything and come to Seattle for him. Maybe he’d even get on a plane, though he despises the things. No, better to go to the more prosaic of the pair first. He glances at the clock on the wall. Lucy will be at work by now, so he goes back out to the living room, grabs his phone, and calls her office.
“Professor Piper, UVic,” she answers on the second ring. “Hello?”
“Hey, Lucy, it’s me,” he says.
There’s a slight pause on the other end of the line, a hesitation that he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been listening for it. It’s taken Elgar a few visits to Victoria to work out why it is that Lucy always seems uncomfortable around him, why she never totally welcomes his presence in their lives. It’s not that Lucy Piper doesn’t like her husband’s creator. It’s the fact that Elgar Reed is the living reminder that, at some base level, the man she loves and the child they have created together are not real. They live, they breathe, they can touch and be touched, they have preferences, they laugh and cry and bleed. But they are not, at their most base, of her world.
And there is always the terrifying possibility that something might happen—in the world of the books, or to Forsyth and Alis, or to Elgar himself—that will make everyone she holds most dear blink out of existence. They’ve had more than one wine-fueled evening of sniffles and honesty since the Pipers returned from Hain. And Lucy’s chiefest fear is that, when Elgar dies, as he eventually must, her husband and daughter might go with him.
The truth of it is that, even though it’s through Elgar’s imagination and pen that the inhabitants of The Tales of Kintyre Turn have gained sentience and access to this realm—what Bevel Dom has dubbed the Overrealm—no one actually really knows how or why the Deal-Maker magic works here. Especially when no other magics do. Forsyth’s potions are just herb soups, his runes nothing more than lifeless scratches in the dirt, his Words of Power nothing but blurred mumbles.
Which means that, no matter how hard Elgar tries to work at their relationship—and he does try, despite any accusations anyone might level at him about his being narcissistic, self-important, and high-handed—there is always an unavoidable undercurrent of tense animosity on Lucy’s end. A fearful wariness.
And he can’t blame her. After all, what Elgar thought up had hurt her.
“How was your flight?” Lucy says after a quick breath. “You must have just got in.”
“I did. It was fine. Same as always. Listen, uh . . . I have a strange question for you.”
“Yeah?”
“When you were, um, there . . . Forsyth said that the Deal-Maker was destroying totems, right?”
“. . .yeah,” Lucy says, and Elgar can hear the worry creeping into her voice just as clearly as the squeak of her office chair as she sits up. “Why?”
“Was . . . was there ever any attempt on a totem from The Tales of Kintyre Turn?”
Lucy is silent for another moment, and it’s just long enough that the chills return.
“Lucy?”
“I didn’t really see it, myself,” she answers slowly, her voice low and scared. “I didn’t get much chance. I was, uh, unconscious for a lot of this bit, but . . . Forsyth said he saw your typewriter.”
“The red De Luxe?”
“Yeah. Blasted apart. Like, by lightning. The Deal-Maker was a weather witch.”
Elgar’s stomach drops out. He’d only ever written one weather witch into
