But my favorite parlor trick was using each book as a conduit for my magic. Perhaps it was the mystical power instilled in every tome by its owner or the scribe copying its pages that helped to amplify my magics. A fire spell was only a fire spell when blasted from the palm of my hands, but channeled through the pages of five, six, twenty books? The rush of power is exquisite, orgasmic, like unleashing the breath of dragons themselves.
And in truth, that was how I felt each time I returned to the Repository to bring every book to its new, permanent home. I was like a dragon adding another pile of treasure to its hoard, a hero, or perhaps a villain in a video game gaining another level. These weren’t the standard selection of books you’d find in some common wizard’s study, either, not a paltry assortment of scrolls buried deep in a swamp witch’s trove. Each volume had been carefully researched, located, then collected from destinations around the world, or in certain occasions, acquired in exchange for a very pretty penny from some very specialized booksellers. Yes, I had a reprint of the Dictionnaire Infernal – who didn’t – a copy of the Vermiis Mysteriis, even a book of shadows written in the teenage years of some witch named Agatha Black.
But there were also quite a few written in languages I would never hope to understand, true rarities culled from merchants driven half to madness by the few pages they’d peeked at themselves. One of my rarest books, its title only pronounced correctly if phrased in the form of an agonized scream, had a tendency to explode when read indiscriminately. I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t actually perused every book in my collection. Otherwise I’d be completely mad, or splattered across the walls in bloody smithereens. Those I left in a steadily-growing segment of the Repository that I liked to think of as my to-be-read pile. Shameful.
I ran my fingers across the spine of the Testament of Spheres, relishing the bumps and creases in its weathered leather. Interdimensional travel had always been a challenge for me, but that was why the Testament of Spheres was such a welcome addition to the Repository. Eventually I’d be able to break beyond the limitations of helleportation, and the Hexus itself. Transportation magic made me uncomfortable. Something to do with teleporting wrong and leaving parts of myself behind, or even embedding myself in a brick wall by accident. Don’t laugh, it’s happened to even the very best mages.
The door behind me creaked. I spun on my feet, my fingers already loading offensive spells on instinct, my tongue ready to launch either a trigger word or a brutal castigation on the servant who dared to enter when I was having a private moment in my happy place. There was no one at eye level, though, because the infiltrator was a much, much shorter individual. Think half a foot tall, unless it somehow got up on its hind legs and started walking like a person. I got down on my haunches, grinning.
“Mr. Wrinkles,” I cooed. “You little rascal.”
“Mrrow,” said the gray Sphynx cat, rubbing himself against a table leg before padding languidly towards me. If I had to pick between my favorite people to see at home, it was a pretty tough split between Pierce and Mr. Wrinkles.
Actually, you know what? Mr. Wrinkles was a safe bet for the top spot. At least he didn’t talk back with a smart mouth, or ambush me in the dark with a pair of knives.
“How’s your day been?” I said, scratching him behind the ear.
Mr. Wrinkles didn’t answer, of course, because he was just a cat. He shut his eyes as he rubbed his entire head into the palm of my hand, purring like the world’s littlest jet engine. His skin and extremely short fur put me in mind of slightly bristly velvet. I liked it. Even the weird, wrinkly folds of his body and the fact that he looked more like an old plucked chicken than a cat had grown on me.
Wrinkles lived on a perch in my bedchambers, but he liked to prowl around the apartments like he was the master of his own household. He liked to sit with me when I spent time in the Repository, dozing off on one of the cushioned chairs, or padding over the tables and weaving between scrolls and stacks of books.
He leapt onto one just then, tilting his head this way and that, how any cat might when it was trying to listen for something soft or distant. On more than one occasion I’d caught Mr. Wrinkles looking over the pages of a book. He was doing it again, paws planted on the table as he stared blankly at the notes I had jotted down in an open journal. It was cute, like he was reading. If the little guy had any aptitude for magic, I probably might have considered formalizing a ritual to make him my familiar.
Some time back, I rescued Mr. Wrinkles from a psychotic wizard, but I think it’s fair to say that Mr. Wrinkles saved me just as much as I saved him. That excursion had mostly been about me stealing – I mean, collecting a new book for the Repository.
That was when I found Mr. Wrinkles being held in a filthy cage in a mad wizard’s kitchen. Just horrible. I might be technically a villain – and on most days I like to think I truly am, albeit one with a terrific head of hair – but I’m not a monster. Plus, isn’t having a cat around the lair to villainously stroke one of the requirements of becoming an evil genius, anyway?
To keep a long story short, I released Mr. Wrinkles from his cage, when the wizard tied me and Pierce up. And Mr. Wrinkles – well, there’s no better way to put it. Mr. Wrinkles shot beams of
