“How did you manage to get all these books into the crypt?” Geralt asked.
Regis smiled his tight-lipped smile. “When there’s a will, there’s a way.”
“Sure.” Geralt ran his fingers along the spines of the books on the shelf nearest the table. “You read all of them, though? How many copies of Royal Lineages of the North does anyone need, anyway?” He pulled a book off the shelf. “My Evening with a Vampire—it’s about you! And vampires! Who wrote this?!” He thumbed through the pages.
“Someone I once helped and talked to about my identity in the strictest confidence,” Regis said with a sigh. “Regrettably, he divulged rather more details about vampires than I would have preferred to gain wide circulation among the general populace.”
Geralt let out a chuckle. “Ah, what a loose-lipped bastard. The people you lied to about garlic and silver being effective against vampires should be grateful to him, then.”
Regis leaned back in his armchair and toyed with a paperweight. “They would be grateful, of course, if they had had the opportunity to read the book. However, since I obtained all the copies of the first print run…”
Geralt looked up from the book and scanned the shelves. “Regis, you are such a… bastard,” he said, momentarily distracted from being able to use the full range of the more colorful side of his vocabulary as he finally noticed that all the upper shelves were filled with suspiciously identical-looking books.
“But not a loose-lipped one,” Regis said, holding up a finger. “Nor a cheap one, I might add. Those books cost a pretty penny.”
“But if you bought up the first print run, they would have printed more,” Geralt pointed out.
“A personal visit to the publisher took care of that,” Regis said demurely. “He was ready and willing to fulfill my request to stop the presses.” A little grin tugged at the corners of his lips. “You know, they say that knowledge is power, so I thought it strange that he drew no courage at all from the firm knowledge that I was invulnerable to garlic—and fire, and aspen stakes, and running water, and so on and so forth.”
“Yeah,” Geralt said with a matching grin, “strange.”