The Book of Dragons. Группа авторов

out on the glittering glass surface, was the primer.

      Please, please, be readable, she thought, and eased a finger beneath the battered cover. Gingerly, she lifted it a few inches, waiting for the telltale movement. When no words scurried across the page and out of sight, she breathed a sigh of relief. The magical silverfish she’d found graffitied in the last pawnshop’s primer had herded the words into the spine each time it was opened. Probably the parting gift of a senior lexomancer to all those undergraduates who had to stoop to buying their books on Pawn Row. Imagining all sorts of miserable postgraduate fates on the fictional lexomancer, Melee hadn’t been able to resist adding a few lines of her own in the margins of that one before shoving it back on the shelf.

      The text on the pages of this primer, however, stayed firmly in place, obscured here and there by patterns of oily thumbprints in various degrees of translucence. They testified to at least one previous owner with a love of pizza, and no hope of resale profit. She thumbed through the first chapter, wrinkling her nose at the faint smell of mildew and ensorcelled embalming fluid that wafted out. The pizza-loving owner must’ve been a necromancy major exploring their backup career options. Wonderful. She’d heard of senior students binding unpleasant little creatures within the textbooks they didn’t like as practice for their finals, and the last thing she wanted was a pseudo-djinn bursting from the pages and interrupting her studies.

      The trouble was, she needed this textbook. Term started on Monday, and she was running out of pawnshops where she was still welcome.

      “Interested, darling?”

      Melee slammed the book shut and let out a stream of expletives her father would be shocked to hear she knew. The man standing behind the counter merely smiled and raised one perfectly manicured eyebrow.

      “Good to see you again too, Melee,” he said when she stopped for breath.

      “Carl,” she growled, “you can’t sneak up on people like that.”

      “Says who?”

      “Says me!”

      He sighed. “Next time I’ll wear a cowbell. Now: Are you interested?”

      She looked down at the fraying cover, the pizza stains, the torn pages. “Yes,” she said carefully, “but I think I should get a discount.”

      “What?” At least, that’s what she assumed he meant. It came out more like, “Hwhaaaaaaa?”

      “Look at it,” she said. “The professor’ll quarantine it as a biohazard.”

      Carl sucked in his cheeks until she could see the outlines of his elongated eyeteeth, making him look more like a corpse. An impressive feat, given that Carl de Rosia had been legally dead for at least a hundred years.

      “Melee. Darling,” the vampire tried. “Be reasonable. You’re going for magitech, aren’t you?” He waved a hand before she could answer. “What am I saying? Of course you are. I’ve known Instructor Groźny for … well, for a long time. She’s been teaching those technical courses since before I got my fangs. As long as you have it, she couldn’t care less about the state of your textbook. Besides, a little battering gives it character, don’t you think?”

      “A little battering?”

      He looked again at the weary cover. “I believe the proprietary term is ‘well loved.’”

      Melee bit her tongue. He was probably right: about the book, about Groźny, about everything. No matter where one fell on the vital spectrum, no one earned a position at the University of Uncommon Arts and Sciences without enough life experience to fill a textbook of their own. Or a position at the institute technical branch, she reminded herself. Those who made it that far had learned to pick their battles.

      “I’ll give you one hundred and twenty,” she said.

      “One hundred and twenty? One hundred and twenty?” The words escaped with more than a hint of a whine, and Melee saw his lips twitch back from his fangs. She guessed he’d added a few more words out of the range of human hearing. “Do you want me to starve, heartless girl?”

      “You’re being dramatic again, Carl. You’re not going to starve.”

      “I might!” he cried. “I haven’t had customers in days.”

      “Liar.”

      “All right, hours. But I have a high metabolism and … and you don’t understand …”

      Melee wondered if the University Theater knew what talent they had missed when Carl de Rosia decided to pursue the unlife of a pawnbroker. Really, all that was missing were tears and a lacy handkerchief.

      “Oh, come on,” she said. “You could get four hundred and fifty for that orrery set behind you, no problem.” Carl gave the delicate brass instrument a doubtful glance. She pressed on. “I know for a fact there’s a first year arithmancy student down the road who needs one before term starts.”

      Carl’s theatrical despair evaporated. “Oh? And is this first year … hmm … healthy?”

      She gave him a look. “Nope. Not playing that game—I’m not your dealer. If you want to know, you’re gonna have to ask her yourself. In the meantime, what would you say to a hundred and fifty?”

      “I’d say you’re laughing at me.”

      “Never. Two hundred?”

      Carl tugged the primer toward him. It was all she could do not to follow it with a look as hungry as his. “Three hundred and fifty, and that’s generous. Call it a friends-and-family discount.” His expression softened. “For your dad.”

      Melee swallowed hard. “How about two hundred and fifty?” she asked.

      “How about you get out of my shop?”

      He said it with a smile, but it was the smile of a cat who knew the score. Melee ran a silent tally of everything she’d spent in the last forty-eight hours, checking off the items on the crumpled list in her pocket. She’d had it memorized for weeks, ever since that final miraculous scholarship had gone through. Metallurgy for the Magitechnician, Twelfth Edition. One hundred and fifty. Nine Parts Iron: A Brief History of Thaumaturgical Transportation. One hundred and twenty-five. The Combustible Compendium. Fifty, but that was only because the pawnbroker had just sold a gilt alchemical set to a senior with three fawning hangers-on who agreed to split the exorbitant fifteen-hundred price tag between them, and he was more than satiated. Melee had been an afterthought.

      Three hundred and twenty-five spent in the past two days, and all but one textbook purchased. She touched the cover again and watched the cheap cardboard dimple beneath her fingertips. It was ridiculous, really, considering the shape it was in. Carl was asking too much—he knew he was asking too much—but he’d stated his price and showed his fangs, and she knew better than to push now. Three hundred and fifty for family and friends? Yeah, that was certainly for her father.

      “You won’t find it, you know,” Carl said, before she could step away from the counter. “This book. Anywhere else in the city. I know that for a fact.”

      “How did you …?”

      “Don’t worry, I can’t read your thoughts, though in this case I don’t need to. You were thinking of trying another shop.”

      “You’d be surprised what’s out there,” she said, but her words sounded hollow, even to her.

      Carl spread his long, spidery fingers over the glass countertop. They shone like old ivory in the dim light of the shop. His nails, Melee noticed, were very sharp. “I get the lists of all required texts from the professors at the university. And the institute,” he added, glancing again at the primer. “All of us on Pawn Row do, and, child, we fight fang and nail to make certain we have those books available for the dear, desperate students