Page 31

As you know, most libraries are meant for the unrestricted use of whomever is in need of their facilities: refuges for the shy and the unprivileged, the impoverished student.

Reservoirs of knowledge staffed by the excessively curious and the professionally methodical.

Libraries, as a collective, are where you go if you are looking for a place that can’t conceive turning you away, especially not if you’re eager for education.

In my experience, most libraries were basically perpetually at the verge of kidnapping passersby, handing them a catalog, and breathily going, “What can we convince you to read today ?”

The library at Hellebore, however, was different.

Appendage to the main campus, it acted only in the faculty’s interest, which seemed to revolve exclusively around fucking us students over.

It disdained visitors. It delighted in being impermeable and I suspect in the knowledge that we all knew it contained every book ever written or that would be written, work we’d never be able to make use of as the library was a vault with no door.

Access required navigating a byzantine amount of nonsensical paperwork: applications and forms that were often in contradiction with one another, often demanding a student go speak with a teacher no longer on the payroll, or report to an office on a floor that did not exist. Most of us, we didn’t bother. The effort didn’t seem worth it.

Plus, there was the question of the library’s warden.

“If the Librarian’s taken your spouse, there really isn’t anything much we can do for you, I’m afraid,” I said. “They’re gone. You—what’s your name, anyway?”

“Gracelynn. Gracelynn Wilder,” said our new acquaintance, knuckling at their mascara-smudged eyes.

“Gracelynn, you should know as well as the rest of us that if the Librarian has them, your spouse is as good as dead.”

“Please help me,” they said anyway.

Rowan lit his fourth cigarette of the evening, eeling around us to gently rap his knuckles against the plain metal of the service door, its hinges, testing the lineaments with intense curiosity. The cold hadn’t improved remotely.

“Is this a trap?” asked Rowan.

“Test me,” Gracelynn said immediately, a sleeve rolled to bare a soft forearm. “Trap? No. Look. Bleed me. Ensorcell me. Put me under. Dig in my brain. I don’t care. Do whatever. Just help me. I need to save Kevin.”

They inhaled, sharp, like the name had cut their tongue, like they’d stuff it back down their throat anyway if they could even if it gashed them in the process.

Gracelynn’s eyes were wild with a terror of calculations.

But then, with a noiseless sob and a sudden loosening of their shoulders, they said, with a shame I didn’t entirely understand, “Kevin can get you out of here.”

That had me careening to a stop.

“Does everyone know about that?” I demanded. “Did a school newsletter go out? The hell’s going on?”

“You were gone for days. Either you had died, which would have been so sad.” He made a jerk-off motion with his hand at this. “Or, you’d done something to piss off the school and generally, Hellebore doesn’t give a shit unless you’re trying a jailbreak,” said Rowan.

I didn’t like the thought that the whole of Hellebore was potentially aware I’d failed at escaping, or how it might adjust the school’s esteem of me. I wondered how many people now saw me as weak, as prey.

“Keep talking,” I said, outwardly ignoring Rowan.

“Kevin—they work with shadows.” Gracelynn swallowed. “They can use them to let you travel anywhere. It’s quite easy for them.”

It was no secret that half the campus had enrolled out of desperation, hopeful that Hellebore might illuminate some technique for domesticating the terrible things inside them; to quiet the voices, calm their hungers; to stop the brood of ancient gods they’d been involuntarily nursing in their ribs from waking up and flossing with adjacent cartilage.

But three months in, I couldn’t imagine most not regretting those innocent hopes.

The school didn’t care what we did to one another.

I was poleaxed, unable to reify the idea of someone like Gracelynn choosing to stay when escape was an option.

“Why are you two even here then?” I exhaled and there was hurt there that I wasn’t expecting, a rawness in the question.

Gracelynn’s throat, I saw, leprous with scars: claw marks and knife wounds, fingerprint-sized indentations like someone had tried, at a loss for better weapons, tried to sink their hands through Gracelynn’s skin and tear.

“If I could get out of here, I’d have run ages ago. ”

“This is the only place where the shadows can’t…” The hyphen of skin between their very straight brows rucked with concentration. “Well, let’s just say it’s safer for them at Hellebore than it is for them outside. They can sleep here. They can rest.”

“What do you mean they can sleep here?” said Rowan, his investigation of the door concluded. He trotted back up to us, looking quizzical.

Gracelynn smiled, if you could call it that.

It had the stretched idiotic quality of a skeleton’s grin, an accident of biology, and so displaced from actual humor, even Rowan shuddered a little to witness it.

The smile didn’t last, thank god, brought down by a grief that seemed so old and familiar now, it might as well be a friend.

Though their skin was unfretted with crow’s-feet or laugh lines, buoyant enough to be called babyish, there was nonetheless a terrible sense of age, of Gracelynn having grown old before their time in the way people did when they’d kept vigil by a deathbed for too long.

“When we’re elsewhere, when we’re outside these walls, the shadows keep trying to get Kevin to go home,” Gracelynn said with far too little inflection, a telling neutrality in their resonant singer’s voice.

Never had I been more convinced of someone’s ability to belt out an aria with negative effort; never had I shuddered at the way someone said the word home. “And they badly do not want to.”

Having offered that cryptic explanation, they turned to me again, a terrible dignity in their face.

“We’re wasting time. Please help me get them back.”

“I’m sorry, but we—”

“Actually.” Rowan took an extensive drag from his cigarette, his spare hand cupped over the cherry to shelter it from the wind. Someone who wasn’t looking for signs might have thought his expression bored. “I think we could help.”

He waggled a gloved hand in the moonlight.

“Magic, turbo-speed syphilitic touch,” said Rowan. “Also, three people are better than two when you’re trying to distract something’s attention. If you agree to help us, we’ll help you.”

“I didn’t—” I swallowed my next words. I resented being volunteered but I resented being caged in Hellebore more. Here were two people promising me a way out and as much as the situation sounded like it was too good to be true, I couldn’t look a pair of gift horses in the mouth.

“Yes, I’ll help,” said Gracelynn.

Gracelynn was now staring at Rowan not with pity but a pained recognition, the look of someone who’d had the misfortune of bleeding themselves on the same road.

Faced with compassion, Rowan did what I was learning was custom for him: he snarked harder.

I looked back to our new acquaintance. “Anyway, I think he’s offering to kill the Librarian for you.”

“Or just cause it a urinary tract infection. I could do that. I have no idea if our dear old curator of the world’s knowledge is even capable of dying, but if it is, I promise you it’s dilly-ding-dong dead as a doorknob,” said Rowan.

“I don’t need it dead,” ventured Gracelynn.

“Listen, I respect your commitment to pacifism or whatever you’d like to call it,” said Rowan. “But there is no reasoning with the Librarian. Trust me, I’ve done my research. It’s the Librarian’s way or the highway. Unless, of course, you kill it—”

“But can’t we…” Gracelynn searched for the words. “… disable it? I don’t know. This doesn’t seem right.”

“We’re wasting time,” I said. My brain examined dilly-ding-dong dead and decided there would be no commenting on the phrase for fear there’d be a repeat, so I turned the whole of my attention to Gracelynn. “Either decide you want to get your spouse out or let us go do what we need to do.”

“It’ll be fine, I promise,” Rowan said. “Chances are the Librarian, being the learned being that it is, is going to know exactly what I am and go, What? A deathworker? In my stacks? Heavens no! I will do everything I can to get him out! ” He grinned, strutting over to drape his coat over Gracelynn’s shoulders, a kindness delivered with such remoteness, it was almost like his arms and hands were piloted by someone else, someone with no relations to the hubristic jerk in command of his mouth.

“Come on. I haven’t drunk any scotch in weeks. When we get your partner out of here, I want a bottle of scotch. Hell, make it a whole goddamned crate.”

I wish I could say that we did the intelligent thing of scaling the library and maneuvering to a higher level, finding access through the window of some obscure archive, which we opened by cannily picking the locks.

Similarly, I wish I could say we dismantled the service door and walked in through there like competent thieves.

While I’ve never felt any compulsion toward honesty, there’s something tragic about a lie so blatant, you’re too ashamed to give it air.

Which is, really, a roundabout way of explaining we went through the front door.

“You’re really making us walk straight inside.

Like, straight in,” I said, taking the stairs two at a time, trying to keep pace.

Rowan had about eight inches of height on me, most of which seemed to have gone entirely to his legs.

Gracelynn jogged stoically behind, bogged down by their endless skirts.