The bookstore is a brick building, pressed between a coffeeshop on one side and a restaurant on the other. Alexander finds it a few days after he moves into the apartment building three streets down, and he immediately falls in love - with its warm lighting and quiet and thousands of books, the place is more like a home than anywhere else he's ever been.

It's also larger on the inside than it is on the outside.

Alexander isn't certain of that. It could be an optical illusion, combined with efficient use of space. It could potentially be an ordinary bookstore, with an ordinary man behind the counter and an ordinary cat winding between the shelves.

But Alexander doesn't think so. The enchantments on the building are well-wrought and well-concealed, but if you know how to look - and Alexander does - they're there.

Alexander finds himself visiting more and more.

There's a pattern to the place.

In the mornings and afternoons, when Alexander usually visits, he and the clerk and the cat are alone in the building. Business picks up around mid-evening, and peak hours seem to be in the middle of the night.

When Alexander asks the man behind the counter about it (and no matter when Alexander comes in it's always the same man, dark-skinned with a buzz cut and a nice smile), all the response he gets is a blank look.

Other than Alexander and the man behind the counter, most people come and go. There are a few regular customers, though - the obnoxiously confident man who buys books in French, the man who's even shorter than Alexander and spends a lot of time in the medical section, the boy with the freckles who never stops smiling, the girl who comes in every Sunday wearing the same red dress.

They smile and nod when they see one another; Alexander has book recommendations for them more often than he doesn't. He doesn't know their names, but wherever it's applicable he knows the names of their cats.

There's a community here, Alexander realizes after a month or so. And he's part of it.

It isn't a feeling he knows very well, but it's a feeling he likes.

Alexander has never seen the bookstore closed.

He honestly wasn't aware that it did close. It does raise the question of when exactly the clerk slept, but he could have been a golem (Alexander never saw an אמת on his tongue, but the man barely ever opened his mouth so he could have just not noticed).

But apparently it does, because there's a sign on the door that explains, in impeccable handwriting, that it won't be opening again in the foreseeable future due to "legal reasons" - aka, the police got called on the (magical) premises. The man behind the counter is probably in jail, if he's alive at all.

They're mages. Alexander is lucky he wasn't in the building at the time. He shouldn't keep coming back - for a Latino immigrant, that's a surefire way to get shot. He should leave it alone, stop coming to this street, stop pushing his luck.

He finds another bookstore, exactly the same size on the inside as it is on the outside. It isn't magical, there's no recurring community, but it has books.

He takes the time to set more santuary spells into the bricks of his apartment, hides chalk and rosemary and the books he borrowed from his rabbi back on Nevis underneath one of the floorboards. "Fools who run their mouths off," the man had said once, "tend to wind up dead around here." For once in his life Alexander takes the advice, makes friends with normals and doesn't mention that there's a reason he gets so jumpy when magic is brought up.

Slowly but surely, the bookstore becomes a fuzzy memory rather than a real place.

Alexander misses it, but he doesn't mourn. Not really.

They're mages. It happens.