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Cassie was screaming, the woman’s skeletal hand coming near, her mouth wide as she sought to tear Cassie apart with her blackened teeth.

There was nothing but despair.

And then there was fire, sudden and furious and angry and beautiful, because it wassomething,something instead of nothing.

Fire

Izzy was on the floor next to Lund, holding his arm as the man groaned and writhed. The bullet had hit him in the abdomen, in the guts, and Izzy was terrified that some organ had been punctured, that he was bleeding internally.

“Lund!” she said. “Talk to me.”

The man was a rock of tense muscle, his eyes clenched.

“I’m... okay,” he muttered, through gritted teeth.

Izzy knew he needed help, she needed to move him. She glanced up to see what was going on with the woman, and she saw instead Cassie and Drummond and Azaki all on the floor, all of them moaning. The woman was still standing a few feet away, turning on the spot, her face tilted to the ceiling. She looked almost joyous at the agonies that surrounded her.

“What?” Izzy gasped. She had no idea what was happening, what the woman was doing, but she saw the woman’s skirt was glowing.

She looked at Lund again, his jaw muscles clenched so hard she thought he would shatter his own teeth. Cassie screamed farther down the room, and she could hear Drummond grunting. Azaki was simply saying, “No, no, no,” repeatedly. As Izzy watched he rolled onto all fours and banged his head on the carpeted floor, like he was trying to knock himself out.

The woman turned around and her eyes widened at the sight of Izzy. She advanced, and Izzy was frozen, unable to move, watching as the monster drew near. And then the woman brushed a hand gently across Izzy’s cheek, and Izzy flinched back reactively. But she felt nothing, even as the woman turned, pirouetting as if dancing to music only she could hear.

Izzy realized she was safe. The book that Cassie had given her was protecting her. She could feel it, warm and heavy in her pocket, a shield against whatever was affecting her friends.

Izzy looked at the glowing skirt again, as the woman danced. She looked closer at the feathers and realized they weren’t feathers. That was why the skirt was glowing—it was one of the books. Her whole skirt was made from the pages of a book somehow stitched together.

The woman continued to dance in the flickering candlelight, her eyes cast upward.

She’s not given you a second thought, Izzy said to herself. You are nothing to her.

Izzy hated the woman. She was nothing but a selfish bully. No better or worse than the kids in the schoolyard that used to pick on her when she was younger.

She looked at Lund, at Cassie and Drummond and Azaki. She was the only one unaffected. She was the only one who could do anything.

She looked at the skirt again, seeing coarse, dry paper instead of feathers, the flicker of candles beyond the woman. And then she remembered something Drummond had said to her the morning in Lyon, months before. And she remembered sitting on the beach with Lund in Oregon.

She jumped up and reached into her pocket for the cigarette lighter Lund had used to start the fires on the beach. She sparked the lighter and dashed forward a few steps and put it to the hem of the skirt as the woman was facing away, staring at Drummond and Cassie farther down the room.

The flames were immediate, catching on the thick, dry pages of the Book of Despair, and in a few seconds the whole garment was aflame, the woman now wearing a skirt of fire.

As Izzy backed away, returning to Lund as the woman jerked in surprise and screamed, she saw Cassie shaking herself sensible, and Drummond sitting up again. Azaki stopped throwing his head at the floor and even Lund opened his eyes to see what was happening.

The woman screamed in fury, beating the skirt with her hands.

“Drummond!” Cassie called, and Izzy saw Cassie running to the mirror at the back of the room, the mirror with the secret passageway behind it. The mirror that was also a door.

Across the room Drummond had a book in one hand and it was glowing. He flexed his other arm, and the woman was lifted off the ground, a fireball and fury in the air. Cassie opened the mirror and pulled it back, revealing a dark hole in the wall, a rectangle of nothingness, and Drummond threw his arm toward it. The woman shot across the room, three feet off the floor, a streak of fire moving with the howl of an animal caught in a trap.

The woman disappeared through the rectangle of darkness, rotating to face them, her head back and staring at them as if she were falling off a building and they were on the roof watching her plummet to her doom. She threw a hand toward them as she went, as if reaching out for a handhold, and then she seemed to disintegrate into the darkness, her howl fracturing into a thousand howls, and then nothingness.

Cassie slammed the mirror shut, and the fire and the noise were gone.

Next to Izzy, Lund groaned and closed his eyes once more.

Izzy pulled the Book of Safety from her pocket and pressed it into his hands.

“Come on,” she said, tears in her eyes. “Work.”