Page 25

I couldn’t tell you how long I had walked in this agony of reflection, half hoping something, anything, would happen, and it’d all just end there.

I was acutely aware the Librarian was there in the building with us, but where?

I was no longer just physically tired; I was also emotionally exhausted.

There was only so much trauma one could accumulate before the nervous system buckled under its weight.

In comparison to everything else, being eaten alive felt simple at this point.

Mostly, it’d been Ford’s eyes. As I was moving to leave the alcove, I saw the lost look give way, just for a second, to fear.

He was in there. The lights were on but the doors were locked and the windows barred.

Whatever else Minji had done, she had not—not fully, at least—disconnected his awareness from the world, which made me wonder if he’d been conscious of those hairs burrowing into him, if he’d been screaming inside the walls of his own mind as those fine strands punctured his corneal membranes.

I found myself wondering if it had hurt worse because he hadn’t been permitted to scream.

“There you are. I’ve been looking all over for you.”

I jolted at Rowan’s voice. He slunk out from around a corner.

I stared at his face. The deep shadows of the corridor had aged him somehow.

I could see how if the years got to sap what little puppy fat he had it would crevice.

I could tell where the weak jaw would recede into an excess of jowls.

If he lived to be an old man, Rowan would thin to a long-limbed strip of ruddy-skinned jerky.

“What do you want?”

“Did you fucking see what happened to Ford? I didn’t know Minji could do that.

I didn’t know a person could do that. I’ve seen a lot of shit but that was in a class of its own.

Like, what kind of—” Rowan’s hands shook as he patted at his pockets, his sleeves rolled up his bony arms. “Shit, where are my cigarettes?”

“Maybe because she’s not a person.”

Rowan stopped his search, wide-eyed as he said, “Shut up.”

Long welts of blue shadow dappled the walls.

I could still feel the weight of Minji’s slender frame nestled against my side, hear those voices, and it’d been easy then to forget what she was with the salt scent of her skin in my nose, easy to put aside the fact she wasn’t a human as much as she was a reservoir of parasites.

I ground the nail of my index finger against the meat of my thumb, slicing at the skin until it was pared away, the pinprick agony enough to reground me in the moment.

“Between the teachers and the Librarian and Minji, I’m beginning to wonder what the hell Hellebore really is,” I said. There was so much blood in the proverbial water, it was almost a clot in my lungs. “Do you remember what the Librarian said?”

Rowan didn’t get the chance to answer. Gracelynn barreled in, relief washing across their features as they laid their velveteen eyes on us.

“Thank god,” they said, hands outstretched for ours. “I thought—I thought—”

Neither of us intercepted that attempt at intimacy: Rowan installed his hands in his pockets and I took a step back, wary. Gracelynn slowed in their approach, hands closed into fists before they let them drop. Nonetheless, the relief did not abandon their expression.

“What did you think?” I said.

Their gaze ricocheted between Rowan and I, both of us smothered in shadows too dark for the sweltering afternoon. “I thought Adam might have done something to you.”

“Can’t be worse than what she did to Johanna,” said Rowan before he let out a soft aha of pleased discovery, removing from a pocket a battered cigarette.

Gracelynn froze. I scowled at him.

“I’m sure there’s something we don’t know,” said Gracelynn, licking dry lips. “I know Alessa. She wouldn’t do anything like that for fun. We must be missing something and if—”

Suddenly, I thought of Gracelynn’s spouse.

I thought of them holding each other in the dark, and how Kevin had opened their veins to the shadows as the faculty surged toward us, how they’d kissed Gracelynn before they told them to run, told them not to look back, told me to keep them safe.

Like Kevin, they’d absolutely die for someone else, counting themselves lucky the whole miserable time because it’d be a noble sacrifice they’d made, and it was all I could do not to scream.

“I’m an asshole. It’s not that complicated.”

Gracelynn’s brow rucked.

“What are you talking about?” they began cautiously.

“Look, I don’t want to talk about what happened,” I said. “But I will say this weird little attempt at humanizing me? Totally unwarranted. I did kill her.”

Something in their expression stuttered, gave up its last breath, and died.

I’d be the first to admit they’d done nothing to deserve that.

Their only fault was a suicidal amount of kindness but I can admit now what I refused to acknowledge then: I’d been afraid Gracelynn might think me worth martyring themself for.

There were people I imagined were worth dying for, folks like poor Delilah and unlucky Sullivan, people like Eoan even, who played badly but had done his best with the rotten hand he’d been given. I wasn’t one of them.

Not even close.

“Okay, okay, theydies and gentle psychos, please, come on,” said Rowan, sidling between us. “Let’s focus on what’s important.”

“And what is fucking important here, Rowan?” I said, teeth gritted. “Tell me.”

“Getting out, obviously,” said Rowan with far too much cheer, waving an unlit cigarette at me. “Hear me out. What if we all embarked on a nice trip into the stacks again?”

“What the hell for?” I demanded.

“Well, Eoan did us a favor. He overfed the Librarian before he, uh, went ahead and started becoming an all-you-can-eat buffet for Portia. This is the perfect time to go back in there and finally get the answers we want.”

“Better plan. How about,” I said, “we find Portia. Take Eoan’s remains back from her and I don’t know, smother Adam in the remains. Get her and Adam to kill each other.”

“ What?! ” demanded Gracelynn, their repulsion so great, I could hear the extraneous exclamation mark.

“Sure,” said Rowan. “But how about we table that as a backup plan and try my plan first?”

Some leviathan weight slammed itself against the wall so hard, the ancient oak moaned and cracked and broke.

Dust fountained from above with every impact.

Whumph. Whumph. Whumph. I backed away from the wall, an arm raised and laid across Rowan’s chest, nudging him back.

Six feet from us, one of the lights recessed into the ceiling seemed to stave into itself, its glow dimming, dying with a shiver.

“Looks like the Librarian woke up from its food coma,” said Rowan.

“Then keep your voice down,” I hissed.

The centuries-old masonry whimpered as it was climbed, a vast weight crawling into the ceiling above. More dust billowed down, veiling us with a fine white film. I touched my index finger to my lips, a warning. Then, nothing.

“We go now,” I whispered. “Or we go never.”

We heard something scuffle above us, like the world’s largest dog turning in circles before it bedded down for the night.

“Well?” I said, staring pointedly at Gracelynn.

They scrunched their face at me. “Fine. Let’s go.”

The stacks were quiet when we crept back into the main hall and stayed so despite our paranoia.

Hours passed in a fugue of surreptitious research.

Despite our certainty the Librarian would find us, we remained undisturbed.

Not that it mattered. None of the books, at least none of the ones in reach, yielded anything useful.

And as night at last absorbed all color from the sky, it became clear all we’d succeeded at was moving the library’s collection from their appointed shelves to a pile on the floor.

Sighing, I crumpled cross-legged onto the ground.

I studied how the shelves sloped away into the darkness.

The serried rows that had looked so beautiful when illuminated by the church light now made me think of teeth; the ceiling was a cavity, a throat leading to the black of an unseen digestive tract.

The gold leaf inlaid in the blistered frescos of carnivorous deer and oversized wasps no longer gleamed.

Instead, it was now the color and texture of boiling fat.

It was almost ironic how absolutely banal half the library’s contents were: it even contained annotated copies of every transaction the school had had with the outside world over the decades.

We’re talking hoarder levels of records.

There was still so much to read but we’d run out of time again.

“Alessa?” It was Gracelynn.

“If you’re here to cry at me,” I said, rising to see them standing on the opposite side of the shelf I’d been leaning against. “You can just—”

Gracelynn ignored my vitriol and instead held up what looked like a collection of crumpled, yellowing, coffee stain–mottled notes, all held together by a particularly hubristic paper clip. “I found something.”

“Show me.”

They circled around to where I was, riffling the pages with their thumb.

I saw photos there, half-faded Polaroids.

“I figured that if we were going to find a way out, we should maybe start by seeing who’d built what in the library.

Figure out the bones of the place and all, you know?

Fortunately, the school’s kept excellent records.

There’s stuff here dating back more than two hundred years.

I was looking through them when I found this. ”

Gracelynn handed over the hodgepodge of papers: students records, medical files, letters someone had written that the school I assumed had confiscated—but I only had eyes for the photographs, for the girl scowling up at me through the past. “Wait—”

“Uh-huh,” said Gracelynn in a hushed tone.

I flipped through the pages again, checking each in turn. Much of the ink had faded over the years, gray now with time’s passing, but the letters all had the same handwriting, a florid cursive all but extinct in this day and age, yet uncannily familiar.

“That’s her handwriting but that—that isn’t her face.

That’s not—how? I don’t understand. It can’t be.

” My voice stumbled as I stared down at one photograph in particular, of a woman, older now although not by much, in front of a mirror, painting her own self portrait.

I knew the room she was in, had stood in it the night before.

I knew the bend of her mouth and the tilt of her jaw, the shadows settled into the sockets of her eyes, knew the long gracile line of her throat: flesh changed but bones were eternal.

I couldn’t understand how it’d taken so long for me to realize this. “I can’t believe that’s her.”

“It is.”

My blood chilled to sludge. “Why did she change her face?”

“Maybe, she didn’t do it herself. Maybe, the school made her transform.

” said Gracelynn. “Or the Raw Mother. I heard stories about others—they were changed too. Horribly. The Ministry had to take them away. I honestly don’t know, Alessa.

What I do know is that people would probably have questions about Bella Khoury not aging. ”

“I don’t understand why she’s here or how—” Except this was Hellebore and the idea that the girl I’d sort of harbored complicated feelings for had been alive for centuries didn’t actually seem improbable.

“She always spoke about Bella”—my voice trembled around the name—“like she was someone else. Why hide it?”

My voice died midway through my musings.

“Haven’t you ever noticed that Portia’s a bit…

forgetful? I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with her where she’d say one thing and then just not remember she said it.

At first, I thought it was stress.” As Gracelynn spoke, their gesticulations grew more animated though their voice did not, their Southern lilt made sweeter by their hushed tones.

“But maybe, maybe it’s because they broke her. ”

“I remember her asking me to go to a party. There was a card and it’d had a dozen signatures, but I was sure she’d faked all of them,” I said, thinking of that first day when Portia had stood soft-eyed and smiling beside the self-portrait of Bella, and I wondered how you might torture someone to make them forget the work of their own hands. “I wonder…”

I riffled through the letters; they were all addressed to the same person: a lover that would not come to Portia, could not have come to save her even if she had every desire to, not with the missives here.

I was struck ill by the thought that somewhere a girl had grown old waiting for Portia to come home.

Swallowing, I said, “But what about the Raw Mother? What did she have to do with this? Why is she in the school? Nothing in this fucking place makes sense.”

Gracelynn set the folders down onto the floor.

“Kevin and I, we researched for months before we decided we wanted to enroll here.” They couldn’t meet my gaze, could only stare down at their shoes as they spoke.

“They’re—I mean, they were so meticulous about it.

By the time we enrolled, we knew just about everything there was to know about Hellebore.

Except why all the graduates stay with the Ministry.

I remember writing that down. I wanted to ask someone about that.

Because that seemed off, you know?” They swallowed.

“But when I walked through the gates, something happened. Suddenly, I remembered seeing the graduates that the headmaster mentioned. In interviews. In person. Graduates whose names weren’t in my notes. They do something to us here, Alessa. I don’t know what or why. But they do.”

Again, that chill, that feeling of my grave trampled.

“What are you saying, Gracelynn?”

An ichorous substance pearled down from the ceiling, an oversized amber droplet of something incandescently shimmery: like lava, or heated gold. It hung in the air for the moment and then landed on the tiles between with an audible splat.

The residue began to sizzle.

“Shit,” I said. “The Librarian’s awake.”