To master the art of keeping dangerous books, one must learn the golden rule: some knowledge should never be shared.
Bookshop owner by day, restorer of rare and dangerous books by night, Kita James is thrilled to acquire a new poisonous book from the Victorian era. From the swirling patterns on the cover to its unusual leather binding, IN SEARCH OF LIFE is truly a unique find. However, testing of the vibrant tome reveals its darker nature: the leather is that of a human along with an extinct animal from the ice age. To further complicate matters, a new radioactive element is discovered lurking within its pages.
The deeper she delves into the toxic text, the less she likes about what she learns. From the dawn of humanity, people had searched for the secrets of eternal life and resurrection. And if Lugalbanda-Alad, the author of the mysterious volume, was to be believed, he had found it.
Joining forces with Dav, a rather vocal book in her collection, Kita works to unveil the apothecary’s secret. With the right magic and a strong enough will, the forbidden lore might be able to set Dav free along with the other sentient books confined within her shelves.
But all knowledge comes at a price: if IN SEARCH OF LIFE were to fall into the wrong hands, it could usher in the destruction of all Kita holds dear and the enslavement of all mankind.
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EXCERPT:
Copper, when mixed with arsenite or its equally toxic cousin acetoarsenite, created a vibrant green. Some dubbed it Paris green. Some preferred the name emerald green. No matter what one called the pigment, it remained a silent killer of those foolish enough to handle it for long.
It had come as no surprise to me, when I first began learning the art of keeping dangerous books, that nobody knew for certain how many had died to the beautifully lethal covers and the pages they contained. One confirmed mortality from the pigment had involved a floral arranger specialized in artificial blooms by the name of Matilda Scheure, and she had breathed in the substance on a daily basis while going about her work.
The Victorians had adored brilliant shades, and they had unwittingly sickened themselves with color. Mercury, in the form of the vibrant vermilion pigment, could bring about madness among other things. Lead, offering shades from pristine white to fiery reds and oranges, sickened in a myriad of ways. Then there was cadmium red, which had limited toxicity unless handled often.
I marveled over how the Victorians had managed to discover so many shades of toxic pigmentation.
Within the walls of my personal library, tucked behind a secret door in the back of my bookshop, I owned books of every hue from every era I could get my greedy hands on. I’d outgrown my single shelf of emerald hue years ago, and the toxic volumes now consumed an entire wall. Each color of the rainbow offered some new and interesting way for someone to perish should they fail to handle my collection with care.
To the few who knew of my art, I offered a glimpse into a dark past decorated with a glorious veneer, one willing and able to kill at a single mistake.
I charged a reasonable amount for access to specific volumes of my archive, making use of a different room on the other side of the bookstore for those sessions. I required waivers, and I even had an agreement with an insurance company so I held no liabilities should they be sickened from the inappropriate handling of any one of my pieces.
The waivers eliminated my personal risk, as I refused to hold responsibility for the stupidity of others.
But the colors I held in safekeeping were not, by far, the most dangerous of the volumes.
Knowledge had become power, and I safeguarded all from the deepest of darkness and the brightest of light, for both, when used inappropriate and to their extreme, caused equal harm.
A little after midnight, after closing my cash, locking the doors, cleaning up the self-serve coffee machine, and otherwise preparing for yet another grind in the morning, I retreated to my sanctuary. Most of my work—and all of the magic—took place in the ten by ten closet with a ventilation fan installed, which piped through a series of specialty filters to keep any fumes or residue from making it outside. Those filters would cost me my sanity one day.
They needed to be cleaned or replaced every three weeks, and failure to do so ran the risk of making me the next victim of my collection.
The latest tome to be tamed waited within a glass box on my desk, and it was a marvel of toxicity, magic, and lore, most of which society would deem forbidden if they knew it existed. Thus far, nobody had unlocked the secrets of raising the dead, but the author of the volume had gotten uncomfortably close.
With the right materials, skills, and incantations, the dead could walk again, puppets for the book’s owner to control.
On the outside, it seemed harmless enough for those who lacked knowledge of dangerous books. Swirls of bright reds, oranges, and white decorated the spine with stamps of vibrant emerald green declaring the book to be titled In Search of Life. Everything within had been penned with a careful hand, and a date on the first page declared it to have been from the year 1725, over a hundred years before the popularization of the toxic tomes made famous in the Victorian era.
In 1725, magic had not yet been acknowledged, although society had always told tales of witches and arcane arts in hushed whispers.
In Search of Life, should I be able to authenticate it, would once again change the timeline on humanity’s introduction into practical magics and the role of superstitions in protecting from malevolent incantations. But as was the nature of my work, if all went well, only I would know.
Author Bio:
RJ Blain suffers from a Moleskine journal obsession, a pen fixation, and a terrible tendency to pun without warning.
In her spare time, she daydreams about being a spy. Her contingency plan involves tying her best of enemies to spinning wheels and quoting James Bond villains until satisfied.
AI is never used in the creation of RJ's novels.
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