The Book of Blue Daggers, Chapter 1
Sophie burned with a Chernobyl heart of lies and violence chasing the Book of Blue Daggers.
She could count down the number of months she had left to live on two hands, and still had enough fingers free to wipe rom the needles of sweat from her eyes to strap the gem-mirror ski goggles double-tight. Stifling in the front seat, she made it worse by zipping the black rubber filtration mask flat against her skin, adjusting it as she read the instruction on the shot-can of the Mean Green pepper spray.
She marked twenty minutes to go.
The shot can was the size of a water bottle, with a plastic grip and squirtgun trigger. It was cool to the touch and almost weightless. She zipped the goggles on both sides and mimed aiming with one hand. The bottle promised a vivid green pigment and 3 million scoville units to disarm and mark your attacker.
Fifteen minutes. Kyle had been in the bookstore for fifteen minutes. She could see the sign through the windshield condensation: “Vellum and Villains: Rare Books and Trade”.
Sophie opened all the windows to get a cool breeze. She was sticky, even in the shade. Hot enough that her hair was pressed wet from forehead to neck. She had never worn it this short, clipped and chopped shorter than an inch. She had never had it this color, shocked to a pale sherbet with a powder bleach. She had never looked like this before.
Sophie wanted a pepper spray in fire-engine red with a snarling grizzly on the label. A burn meant for bears or mountain lions. A salesman in camouflage suspenders told her that bear spray was much weaker than regular pepper spray. On account of the sensitivity of the bear's sniffer, he said, tapping his nose. Less goes a long way with animals. The man in camouflage suspenders said he gave each of his three daughters this exact green canister that Sophie held the day they went to college.
The store sold fishing gear, two dozen types of tents, generators, pink-and-mossy oak shotguns, child seats for ATVs. Sophie said she just needed to feel safe when she was camping. She paid in cash. She didn’t know what 3 million units compared to. She slid a red tab to the slot above the trigger marked “Activate!”
Sophie chewed her fingernails, lips, pulled at scabs. She was down to the flesh at her fingertips and didn’t care about the bleeding. Doctors laid it on the line. Sophie’s life was left to months you could count with your fingers. But inside Vellum and Villains was a book that held the secret to life eternal, if only she could get it between her red-stained hands.
Sophie was out of breath from a whole life of pushing to right here. The lodestone wish. The text and words that had saved her life before would save her life again. A witchcraft manual to a life of petrichor glades and golden sunsets. Her desire: The Book of Blue Daggers.
Sophie watched Douglas key himself into Vellum and Villains. Douglas and Annie, Mom and Pop criminals, watched Cartel and Syndicate Empires rise and fall as they fenced stolen goods, the primary consumers of a criminal food chain reaching back decades.
Sly predators, they squeezed Sophie so she didn’t become prey. Sophie dropped them antique helmets, swords, maps of coastlines discovered a thousand years ago, clockworks and cogs born in vanished lands. Douglas and Annie wove a spell of legality and enchanted the poached objects that Sophie found for them, bouncing back thirty percent to her for her part in the stolen cycle of life. It was a terrible rate.
Time hit double zeros and Sophie went dewy. Soaked in sweat. Swimming in this huge heavy sweatshirt. She pounded her head and wiped the steam off the goggles again. She pushed her arms and fingers out in a sunburst flex and still couldn’t straighten out the shakes.
Kyle texted her pictures of two books on cherry viewing trays. Sophie could see Annie's turquoise ringed hands arranging a third one. The small bookseller shop behind him was empty. No other appointments. Sophie told Kyle it would be easy to notice. The Book of Blue Daggers had blue chapter headings, deeply inked plates. A color you could judge by the cover.
She and Kyle shared a mattress for the wrong reasons over a year now. They had both floated out of the same big statewide foster family wreckage. They connected, stragglers on a deserted island, in a support network meetup.
They used felt markers on state maps of downstate Illinois to circle their foster homes and elementary schools. They’d both remembered a big blue Chrysler van driven by a state worker who snuck Camel cigarettes at the end of her shift. They both remembered how she gave them cat-and-dog stickers, how she told the kids to call her Aunt Catty.
Kyle joked that they were related. Both of them, children of the State of Illinois. They showed each other their Illinois CFS 444-2 sheets, their magazine-thick child medicine logs: Ritalin, Albuterol, Daytrana, Tofranil, Cymbalta, Prozac, Zoloft. Kyle told her about his puberty years on a dairy farm in Danville. About his six foster siblings and the seven monthly checks shuttled to the bank. The whole big family operation greased smooth by zombie-shock doses of Depakote in tall glasses of whole milk for the kids.
Kyle knew he had other siblings, real siblings, blood siblings out there. A mother somewhere that he could meet if he wasn’t so afraid of it. He was so full of questions. Of who and where and why.
There were so many kids that were unlucky with questions. Unlucky with the wondering who and where and they. There was just one way that Sophie was born lucky, and that way was that all of her questions were answered so quickly, and with no room left for doubt at all.
Sophie was well-acquainted with the postpartum madness that emerged, a sinister twin to her birth. 'Such a wicked child,' her mother lamented. Swearing she saw Latin hexes etched in the infant's eczema, she'd shoo away admiring glances at those baby blues, whispering how they glanced a feline yellow all through the night.
Once, Sophie’s mother swore to it, Sophie nestled with a dead rabbit in the crib. Her mother swore this was the only night of her life Sophie slept soundly. Not even a year old now, just imagine her grown, her mother shouted. It won't be rabbits then, just imagine it all grown up, she screamed. Imagine that thing all grown up, she would point and scream and gesture at Sophie softly grunting into her baby dreams.
It was warfarin that did away with her parents. It was her mother's ignorance about the blood-thinner to know the suicide plan wouldn’t pass through breast milk that saved her. She had just one picture of her mother. She was wearing denim overalls, holding a paintbrush. She was rainbow-spattered, smiling, the brush split-ends with white.
Orphan news spread lickety-split in downstate Illinois. Aunt Catty’s extra-nice stickers brought on bullying double-time. The kids found out. Sophie Suicide, they called her. Sophie Sucide, they giggled, Sophie the Crime Scene Baby.
Life was running, chasing, a twilight sprint and Sophie was never certain beyond where her hands touched the darkening wind. Grown life. There was something trapped inside this body with her. She inherited something from parents that she never knew. Something that clenched at her throat and filled her lungs with sand. A body that wasn't a shipwreck like hers made 2 million red blood cells every second. Sophie made 2 million blood cells every second, just stillborn and blue.
She would slice every tether and scrub every note of her life away once she could feel the book in her hands. There was no reason to worry about anything beforehand. This was her starting line. There was no prologue.
Sophie pulled the big sleeves past her elbows and smoothed off her damp pale hair. She walked to the door at the rear of the bookstore. She was ready to put the knife to the whole tether from the shore that gripped her from the waves. She'd slip the blade and she would need no one else but herself forever.
Kyle used the screwdriver and vented the door open a quarter-inch. Just like Sophie showed him. She leaned into the cool air. Douglas’ voice was getting louder, telling Kyle two, three, four times.
“Don’t take any more pictures, son.” Douglas said.
Annie’s voice reasoned Kyle back to the books. Sophie pulled the gloves on. She moved inside the shop, slipped the screwdriver away with her foot and blinked against the cast-iron blackness inside her goggles.
They were getting heated. Kyle was putting it on and Douglas was telling him to put the phone away.
“Sir, I just want to make sure I’m buying the real thing. I have to check the colors and shades.” Kyle said.
“We told you our policy when we made the appointment. If I have to tell you again...I don’t care how serious you are, you’re out on the damn sidewalk, you understand?” Douglas said.
The Book had saved her life once. The Book would save her life again. She remembered the blues, the deep blues, the darkest blues, the heavenly blues. Mountain Bliss, Wishing Well, Blue Vault, the majestic cool and trustworthy shine of ocean and sky across the chapter headings.
Kyle asked Annie about the plates, the pictures, the colors. How could the greens stay so green over the years? Wasn’t it true that purple dyes once came from a sea snail? He questioned tints and hues.
Douglas gas-bagged on about how they got the book, the owners of boats, the colleges their friends children went to, Annie reminding Douglas, the University, Douglas’ son, oh, of course, yes, anyway, Kyle also had an interest in first editions, so very few young people do, of course.
Sophie got a grip of the spray.
Kyle talked faster now about the details on the plates, the woodcuts. All the wrong colors, meaning Orange and Red and Yellow. Annie said yes weren’t they lovely, Georges Viljoen himself oversaw the layout of all text and plates and cuts.
They didn’t say a word about blue. Nothing blue. Nothing but nauseating purple and slippery shades of gray. Sophie went dizzy when they talked about the alabaster whites.
Sophie’s goggles fogged from the temperature change. Her whole body snapped cold.
They weren’t talking about colors. They weren’t talking about the chapter headings. They weren’t talking about anything blue at all. Kyle and Annie were discussing woodcuts and silhouettes. Annie mentioned Belgium, Bohemia, how the words made their way across an ocean.
They didn’t say a word about blue at all. Sophie's head tilted and she could smell the ancient pages and swipes of glue against the backing boards and the last metal ink winged wafts of the tannery inks on the leather shells.
Sophie streaked the goggles clear with a finger pressed inside and stood up. Douglas was standing next to her, looking at the back door. He didn’t notice until he got a twisted-up look on his face at the young woman wearing sapphire goggles directly beside him.
Sophie committed to it instantly. Her body released itself from all moments of painful indecision. She clicked a stream of thick green lightning into Douglas’ face. He clapped both hands against his eyes like a frightened child. Shouts, then. Thumps. Sophie ran on disks of air, her black boots enchanted slippers that could lead her no wrong.
She strode into the main room and could see everything in an aquamarine slow-motion from behind the goggles. She sprayed Annie and Kyle in one clean emerald arc, tiny specks of the violent liquid legging to the goggles. Annie howled and scraped at the air and begged for her life, moaning and falling and her skirt bunching all the way up to her belly as she shoved away from the boiling pain.
Time slowed. The three of them slithered and scraped and stamped their feet against the agony. They stained their fingertips green as cut-grass from scraping the liquid burning at their eyes and nostrils. Kyle coughed and crawled and didn’t say a word. He held a hand out for Sophie. Waved to her. Here, I’m right here. Here baby here. Sophie was too close to getting out, getting away now.
Sophie looked for the book. The one. The Book of Blue Daggers. She’d have it and they’d never make fun again. She’d prove it was real. They wouldn’t doubt her.
The books on the cherry trays were antiques. Old things. Nothing remotely close. Sophie tilted them off the floor and shrieked.
Annie leaked snot and tears and babbled and told her she shouldn’t have done this. The book was gone. She pleaded something Douglas, and please, his medicine.
Sophie smeared her face into Annies as she moaned and asked if she knew what she was looking for now and Annie said Yes! Of Course! The Book of Blue Daggers!
“I know you had it! Where is it?” Sophie growled
“Bill Dillinger!” she wailed. “He said he wanted it to heal his wounds...it tricked him...killed him...” Annie said.
“Where is it?” Sophie shouted, but she knew the answer.
“It just tricked him! The book got away!” Annie said.
“Where? Bill Dillinger is dead! Tell me where!” Sophie asked.
“That’s...Bill Dillinger..I dont...I can’t…” Annie mumbled off.
Sophie could see the truth. She was moving so perfect now. Annie wasn’t lying. Sophie opened her mouth wide and aimed the spray end towards the back of her throat. Sophie Suicide. What a Crime Scene Baby she was. They were right then. Her mother was right. They were right all along.
“He has it! Dillinger has it, please!” Annie grasped at Sophie.
Kyle said to go. They needed to go, Jesus he couldn’t stand this anymore. Douglas heaved and talked to someone on the phone.
“Send help, I can’t breathe, I can’t-” Douglas moaned.
Douglas’s face swelled to a pink concussion striped with green. His tongue stuck out and he snorted and shook as Sophie kicked the phone from his hands. She swiped the cash in the register and left Kyle to groan.
The scene receded away from her and the light flared as she left and ran. She was empty handed in every single thing. No, oh no. Please, no. A siren pulsed and Sophie threw up and sobbed in short bursts as she walked down the street. Her dog died, she’d say. Maybe her mother, if someone asked.
She buried the goggles and canister under filth in a garbage bin. She leaned against a brick wall, smothering from the heat, and begging herself to wake up, to be back in the car, to reverse the time loop, to something, anything. The reversal never came and the sirens never turned. Sophie dropped the sweatshirt at her feet and left the day giving up almost everything but desire.