Page 47

T he Sanctum library was not just a place of secrets. It was something ancient, a beast with breath and hunger.

I slipped between the towering shelves, their spines vanishing into the abyss above. They were woven with black-veined ivy, tendrils curling around shelves and hanging low over the books. The dark moved with me, a mirror, expanding and contracting with every step.

The ladders drifted like specters, gliding noiselessly along their rails. They did not carry people, but secrets. Books lifted themselves, whispering as they vanished out of sight.

I felt a jab at my side. The Fool card thrummed in warning. I wasn’t meant to linger here.

Air rushed out before my body remembered how to breathe, fingers trailing over the spines of the books. They were warm. Some leaned into my touch, pressing against my palm like something seeking comfort. Others flinched away.

And then, a book convulsed beneath my fingertips, its spine arching, pages thrashing like the frantic wings of a dying thing. I recoiled, but too late. The tome wrenched itself free from the shelf, shuddering as ink bled from its seams, thick and dark as spilled blood.

The words did not stay bound to the parchment. They rose, letters twisting, unfurling into something alive. They slithered through the air in a feverish dance.

I had no time to reason before they poured into me. The library buckled, warping at the edges, then…vanished. It was ripped away in an instant, leaving me suspended in a chasm of sightless void.

Light bled into it and suddenly, I was somewhere else entirely.

I knew this place, sulfur stinging my nose. The shadows recognized me, too. I was in Evermore’s alchemy laboratory, but Professor Esmerelda was nowhere to be found.

Instead I saw my mother, younger, her eyes wide with desperation, her breath ragged as though she had been running but there was nowhere left to go.

“The portalling tonic will not hold for long,” my mother whispered. “If they catch you here?—”

“Then let them,” a cloaked figure said smoothly. “They will not understand what they are seeing.”

For a moment I wondered who this shadowy figure was, but then the information came to me effortlessly. The High King of Elsewhere. Aurelius Darkblood.

The Dowager made it sound like he had just returned, but here he was, twenty years ago or more. More information filtered through my mind at will. The Archangels weren’t his only game. He had been preparing his return for a long time. But here, this night the book showed, he was weak .

Even the wisest witch in Elsewhere had got it wrong. He’d been rising like smoke through the cracks, the burn of his return so slow no one had questioned that the house was on fire. Dante said it himself. He’d been garnering support for years.

“You know I have a soft spot for you. Your work has been instrumental in helping my court rise again,” he was saying.

A smile traced his lips, all cruel indulgence.

“But Evangeline, my dear, you know the rules. I cannot grant you something like this without cost. Leaving Evermore once marked is quite an ask.”

My mother leaned forward. “I won’t let this place take me now. I won’t—” She faltered.

The High King tilted his head, face still hidden by the hood of his robes. “Oh,” he purred, “I see why. How curious. And what, exactly, are you willing to offer?”

She did not hesitate. “Anything.”

“I can see you truly mean that,” he mused, reaching into his cloak to pull out a necklace.

Her necklace. My necklace. “This is a Lumen,” the High King said.

“As long as you wear it, you will remain safe in the Common World, visibly mortal and untouchable. It is a tether between your mortal body and your soul.”

“A tether?” my mother asked, her fingers drifting to the delicate chain.

“It shields you from harm. If you are wounded, it will mend you. If you try to die, it will pull you back. Evermore cannot summon you, nor can the afterlives claim you—not while this binds you to mortal life.”

His gloved hand closed around the pendant. “But you must never remove it. You are already marked. The moment the tether breaks, they will find you.”

“Alright.” My mother nodded quickly, her voice barely above a whisper. “That’s a deal. And what do you want in return?”

The High King leaned closer. “Your firstborn.”

My mother flinched, lip twitching. “What?”

“They will enter Evermore and graduate. They will stand where you stood, she will pay what you would not. They will redeem the balance.” The High King’s voice deepened. “And not only that, they must?—”

The room tipped, as if the weight of the truth was too great. The vision snapped. The library heaved, warping around me as if reality itself was rejecting what I had seen. My body reeled as I staggered back, nearly crumpling under the weight of it.

No. No , that couldn’t be right. But it was. It was clear now. The Archangel had warned me. My mother was no hero. She had not escaped Evermore.

She had run. Hid. Bargained away the future. My future. She had bought her freedom… with my blood. My life. I wanted to deny it, but I knew it to be true.

The High King had been biding his time, patiently waiting for his moment to rise again all along. I was never meant to escape this place. I was always meant to return, until the debt my mother created was paid.

The pain wrenched through me like another loss. She was never the person I thought she was. I pressed a hand to my chest, but it didn’t stop the twisting ache. She hadn’t just left me. She hadn’t just abandoned me. She had traded me, sealed my fate in blood that was never hers to offer.

Dread pooled in my stomach like lead, nausea clawing its way up my throat. Why would she do this? What was she running from? I wanted to scream, to tear the necklace from my throat and fling it into the fire, but I couldn’t.

Why show me that now? Was it meant to warn me? Or just destroy whatever faith I had left?

My hands trembled. I pressed them to the marble floor just to feel something solid. I wasn’t ready for another vision. I wasn’t ready for any of this .

But the library wasn’t finished with me.

I needed air. I needed?—

Another book tore itself from the shelf before I could gather my thoughts. This was another sick and twisted game. I cursed Dante as the spine cracked open.

Before I could move away, the words were inside me again, filling my lungs and sinking heavily as they dragged me beneath the churning waters of another vision.

And then, I saw myself. I was lying in my bed at home. White linen bedsheets tangled around my limbs as the silver glow of the moon rippled through the open window. I was in my bedroom.

A shadow moved in the corner of the room. Verrine. She stepped into the light, a dagger in hand, her silk sleeve dark with blood. Slowly and methodically, she wiped the blade, her gaze fixed on the floor.

I followed her line of sight. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drops of crimson fell from my wrist, pooling against the white marble like shattered gemstones.

Verrine stilled. Her pupils contracted, pinpricks. “It can’t be,” she whispered. “Not her.”

A ripple moved through the shadows and then, from the dark, The High King of Elsewhere. “As planned. It’s not impossible. Just… unseen.”

He did not touch me, but his hand hovered just above my wrist, sealing the wound with the barest flick of his fingers. “As I hoped, she is an impossibility,” he murmured, voice heavy. “The only one of her kind. She was never meant to be born, but she doesn’t know that yet.”

Verrine turned sharply, calculating. “What does this mean, Aurelius?”

He exhaled slowly. “We are winning, but we must have patience. The time is not right. This girl is not yet made into all that she will become. Not until she decides. The ether system cannot force her. She must choose the Fall .”

“So she is unmarked. Her blood carries no trace of what she might become?”

“Not yet.” The moonlight shone through the window but did nothing to illuminate the High King’s face beneath his hood. “But it will. When she chooses the Fall, it will remake her. When the time comes, she will tip the scales.” A slow, terrible smile crept across his face. “One way… or the other.”

“A child of both light and shadow, yet belonging to neither,” Verrine nodded. “She can never know what she is.”

And I hadn’t, until now. I finally had an answer, one that made more than a little sense. My parents had never sent me to Evermore. This had never been their dying wish. I was here to pay off a debt my mother couldn’t, a penance for her selfishness.

It was clear the debt had forged me into something else, too.

Something the High King of Elsewhere wanted to use.

They needed me to Fall to tip the scales of light and dark in their favor.

If I understood all of this confusion correctly, that was the one thing they could not force or take.

In order to make the Fall, you had to fight for it. Choose it.

The flames in the hearth flickered, twisting violently. The air vibrated, thick with something I could feel now, deep in my bones. They were afraid. The High King’s lowered, his words curling with inevitability. “She will be our making, or our undoing.”

The world shattered. The vision imploded, ripping away from me like a tidal wave, and I stumbled back, gasping. The chamber tilted, and the bookshelves blurred into streaks of gold and black.

I clutched my chest. They had called me an impossibility , like I was a wound in the very spine of fate itself. I sunk onto the marble floor, my back scraping against the shelves. My chest heaved once, twice, and then came the tears.

As if to comfort me, or maybe silence me, something dropped onto my lap. Hard. I jumped, wiping at my eyes. It was a black, leatherbound book with a silver lock. I knew this book. The Sanctum shouldn’t have it. Which meant one thing: Dante wanted me to.

I pulled the silver key from my skirt pocket. Dante’s journal. I had already read its pages in the quiet of Dante’s dormitory, rifling through his things with shaking hands, trying to make sense of the truth tangled between the lies.

Did he want me to read this? Or the library? I tried to find the page I had left off on, but they seemed compelled to move on their own.

“Father sought the Dowager of Knots. He traded my fate by severing my soul in three. The Dowager knew that the Prince of Darkness would possess a power unknown, and soul-severance was the only way to contain it. A piece went to the light. A piece to the dark. And the last…” The ink was smudged and nearly blotted out, but I saw the word beneath it.

I spoke it aloud. “A piece was lost to something… between.”

I skipped a few lines, my heart nearly beating out of my chest. I felt pity stirring, then. His own father had done this to him. His own father had, if I was reading this right, severed Dante’s soul.

“Help me. I see her every time I close my eyes. There is no silence in the darkness, only her.”

No. No more of this. My vision blurred. This was the unravelling of his lies, the one place where he would speak truth. There was no clear reason why his journal would be shelved in a library. He wanted me to find it this time. He was ready to tell me everything he could not say.

I hurled the journal with as much force as I could muster, and the library recoiled.

The shadows screamed, writhing like wounded creatures, walls groaning as if they, too, were pained by the secrets they kept locked away.

I paced the length of the library. The shadows bent with my every step, retreating from the storm unraveling inside me.

The doors slammed open behind me. I turned slowly. Dante was there, studying me like he’d been watching all along.