Rook by Daniel O'Malley Read Free Book Online

this time.
    “Were you a morning person, Thomas?” she wondered aloud as she struggled up out of bed. She’d spent most of the previous day sleeping and reading through the dossiers that Thomas had left her. She’d fallen asleep around midnight, her face covered by a report on the Checquy’s diplomatic relationship with the Great Barrier Reef. Now it was five o’clock on Monday morning, and she’d woken with a start, petrified that she was late.
    For a moment she’d toyed with calling in sick, but a number of factors had dissuaded her. To begin with, the letter writer had seemed reluctant to suggest that missing work was even an option. In addition, the prospect of staying alone in the contrived apartment another day was, well, kinda creepy. Nope, it was definitely time to go in to work and figure out what the hell was going on. She stumbled to the shower and ran through a variety of possible wardrobe combinations in her mind before settling for a suit. It was Myfanwy Thomas who had picked out the clothes, so at least she didn’t need to worry about turning up and not looking like Myfanwy Thomas.
    She’d noticed the previous morning that the cupboard was surprisingly bare of breakfast foods.
Slipping a little, aren’t we, Thomas? What kind of “extremely capable administrator” doesn’t take care to leavebreakfast for the woman inhabiting her future amnesiac body? Not even a Pop-Tart? A frozen croissant? Honestly.
Still, there were coffee beans and a grinder, and she was able to sit down with a cup of coffee and that big-ass purple binder.
    Thomas seems like a decent sort, but she’s a glorified paper pusher,
she thought ruefully.
Even if she
does
work for a paranormal version of the MI5, she’s probably dealing with the boring bits. “Heavens! Some kind of werewolf is eating the Queen! Fetch some forms and ask her to fill them out in triplicate, and then perhaps we can attend to her needs at some point during the next quarter.”
Snorting to herself, Myfanwy opened the binder and read the instructions Thomas had left for getting ready for the office.
    Half an hour later, she was wearing one of the ugly suits from the wardrobe, holding a briefcase, and anxiously explaining to the man on the phone that she’d like a cab as soon as was humanly possible and admitting that yes, she was in a hurry, and so, yes, she should have planned ahead. The next fifteen minutes were spent in the lobby of the apartment building looking out for the cab. When it finally appeared, she gave the address to the extremely scruffy driver and was then forced to concede that she didn’t know where it was.
    As the driver perused his map, she thumbed through the purple binder. She’d only managed to read the summary, which had been mind-bogglingly intricate. She’d found some sticky notes in the flat’s office and was marking various important-seeming passages. As a result, every page was marked, some of them three times. Apparently Thomas had not felt an index would be necessary, although there was a vague table of contents.
    “So, you have no idea where this house is?” the driver asked. He was elderly and wearing one of those dubious flat caps.
    “No,” she admitted as she turned a page and found an entirely new alarming topic.
    “Whose house is it, then?”
    “Oh, it’s mine,” she said distractedly and was sufficiently absorbed in her reading not to notice the look he gave her. In fact, she kept her head down for the entire trip and so had no idea where the house was located even when they arrived. She thanked the driver as she staredin utter bemusement at the building in front of her.
Goddamn! I must be loaded!
    “You live in a big house,” the taxi driver remarked.
    “Yes, it seems I do,” she replied.
    “Tasteful too,” he added. “I’d say it’s mid-nineteenth century.”
    “Oh?”
    “Yes. The features around the windows and the gables are a dead giveaway,” he said.
    “Those and the engraved
1841
above