Celeste Ledgerwood's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

The ledger breathed under Celeste's hand, but she had nowhere to write. No desk. No columns. No sums pinned to paper. She stared at the pages of names and did the math in her head. She lost her place at four hundred. "Great," she muttered. "Rain Man, and I forgot how to count." One mistake here and a soul went missing forever. She needed a real workspace, and she needed it now. Warren wiped blood from his ear and watched her pace. The rabbit's teeth were still bared, but not at her now. "There's a place," he said. "Up the road. It's got everything. It never closes." His ears twitched toward the door. "But I don't go in." "Why not?" "You'll see." The strip mall rose against the sky like a stack of bad ideas. Floors piled on floors, each stranger than the last, all of them going up and none going down. Celeste climbed. The first floor sold shoes. The second sold teeth. On the fourth she found desks, chairs, and a wall of blank ledgers. She grabbed a pen and a fresh book and turned to leave. The stairs behind her were gone. "Of course," she said. "You can check out, but you can never leave." A star-shaped decoration hung over the counter. It had a mean little grin and dripped brown gunk from its points. As she watched, it splattered a fresh gob onto the floor. Then it spoke. "Buy something or climb," it sneered. "Those are the rules." Celeste held up the pen and the blank ledger. "I'm buying these." The star spat again. "Then pay. One name." Her stomach dropped. It wanted a soul. The exact thing she came to save. She thought of the well, the daggers crowded in it, blades tipped with poison and laughter and worse. She thought of the winged rat drinking stolen names below the water. Every name mattered. She would not trade one away. "No deal," she said. "But I've got something better." She pulled the glowing carrot from her coat. Its swirls warmed her palm. She aimed it at the grinning star. "You want to let me pass. You want it more than anything." The carrot's power poured out. The star's grin sagged. Its mean eyes went soft and glassy. "Pass," it breathed. "Please pass." The wall behind the counter split open. Stairs led down for the first time. Celeste walked out with a proper ledger under her arm and a pen behind her ear. Warren waited at the bottom, eyes wide. "You came back down," he said. "Nobody comes back down." "I brought receipts," she said. She opened the blank book on a crate and clicked the pen. Now she could copy every name, check every sum, fix every error. She wrote the first line clean. Then the ledger on the lectern shuddered, and a name faded off the page as she watched.