“You should begin to read. You have much to catch up on.”

I sat at his desk and carefully opened the book of nightmares. I sifted through the most recent of entries, and quickly realized that some of them were written in dark gold ink, while the majority were in black.

“Do you have a reason for using different colored inks?” I asked.

“Yes. The gold entries are the active ones, dreams of people who currently reside here.” If a resident happens to move away or dies, I charm their records into black ink, so I keep track of which dreams to study. He pruned a few wilted leaves and then went to work making a remedy. He chopped and scraped an assortment of leaves and petals into a glass flask, where it bubbled over a flame, casting an astringent aroma in the office.

“I suppose it’s hard to keep track of everyone who comes and goes within your territory,” I said after I had read a few of his entries. “The city is such a fluid place.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “Some nightmares unfortunately escape my records.”

I left him to his task of straining and bottling the remedies, and I read through page after page of golden-hued nightmares. I began to jot down ideas for spells to counter them. The hours crept by. We worked in companionable silence, interrupted only by Mrs. Stirling bringing us a lunch tray of sliced rye bread, cold slabs of roast beef, cheese, and pickles.

Phelan and I sat across from each other at the desk, but I was too focused on eating and reading to attempt a conversation with him.

“Do you have dinner plans, Miss Neven?” he eventually asked.

“No.” I kept my eyes on the page.

“Would you like to have dinner with me and two of my friends tonight? We can walk the streets this afternoon, so I can show you the territory boundaries, and then we can go eat with Nura and Olivette.”

Nura and Olivette? I reached for my lukewarm tea, suddenly stricken with nerves. He had friends, which meant they would most likely ask me an endless stream of questions.

“I’m not sure. . . .”

“Do you have elsewhere to be tonight?” he asked, and I heard the curiosity in his voice. He wanted to know more of my history and was too polite to directly ask for it again.

I sat back, my fingertips stained gold and black from turning the inky pages.

“I’m not a very social person, Mr. Vesper.”

“Neither am I,” he quipped. “But I should warn you that if you put Nura and Olivette off tonight, they will insist on meeting you tomorrow night, and the night after that, and the night after that. . . .”

“All right,” I said, waving my hand. “If your friends are so persistent, I’ll join you.”

“Excellent,” he said, rising from the desk. “I have a few deliveries to make, but I’ll return soon.”