Page 32

Rowan, oppressively lanky, did not slow for us. “Nothing says confidence like taking the front door.”

“Nothing says suicide like taking the front door,” I repeated, bounding up the wide, flat steps, and thrusting myself in front of Rowan, arms out.

He crab-walked three steps to one side and then three to another, rubbernecking unnecessarily around the top of my head. I mirrored him like an inconvenienced pedestrian before realizing the clownishness of it all, and stopped, a fist resting on my hip.

“Do you have a death wish or something?” I demanded.

“What? No. But, like, do any of us really have a choice when it comes to death? Do we not all eventually get folded into the arms of oblivion? It’s really just a question of when, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but did you want to die today ?”

“Of course not. Come on,” said Rowan, and it annoyed me to discover I couldn’t convince my body to turn back. “If there were any other routes into the library, I’d be using those. Unfortunately, there aren’t. I’ve looked, trust me. There’s only one entrance.”

“That doesn’t seem smart, to have one way in and out.” I palmed his breastbone and pushed lightly, leaving Rowan to pinwheel several steps back down. He was astonishingly light: bird bones under a wrapper of skin.

“Well, it’s so heavily warded, we’d explode into chunks right here if we thought about trying a different way in. Hellebore spared no expense at making this a fortress.”

Or a prison, I thought.

To my horror, he bounced back up to me and chucked my chin, his mouth coming so close to my earlobe, my skin warmed with his breath.

“I promise if the worst happens, I’ll say you two were my hostages, and you had nothing to do with this all, and you can run away and tell everyone I was incredibly sexy and you were turned on watching me be a hero. ”

Rowan pulled back. He smiled like whatever he saw in my face—his was sheened with the orange light gushing from the open and unwelcoming doors—was a benison, and resumed his march into the library’s vestibule.

Gracelynn came gasping up to my side. They wore Rowan’s coat like a mantle, draped over their shoulders, giving them the look of an overgrown robin, or a vulture gory with its last meal.

“What happens if he is wrong about this?”

“You run. Fast as you can,” I said.

Gracelynn stopped dead. “And?”

“I run with you.” I watched as Rowan’s long, frayed shadow chased him through the doors of the library, and then looked back to Gracelynn’s blanched face. “What?”

“You’d just let him die?”

“You really don’t know me, do you?”

Whether it was my tone, the horrendous reality of the situation, Gracelynn’s own wretched fears for their partner, I’d never know.

Their throat bobbed a few times. They said nothing after that, only nodded once, a small terse motion, before they gathered their skirts and bounded up the stairs.

I followed after, and we entered in time to hear a sonorous voice, a voice that went through the bones to the very marrow, a voice you’d think would sound unkind or vexed, but instead was girlishly elated, booming:

“You were not expected. ”

The vestibule of the library was as imposing as the rest of the structure: camphor floorboards, polished until they seemed a light source unto themselves and redolent of incense; a vaulted ceiling, with wooden ribs from which girandoles dangled, filled with wax candles the color of fresh bone; tapestries on each wall.

Opposite the entrance: a brass counter of monstrous size, gilded, volutes on every corner, its main body dominated by elaborate marquetry depicting the death and consumption of a knight by several stags.

Behind it stood a wall of keys and iron-ringed drawers and on each side of the counter, two doorways permitting entry to the rest of the library.

And there was the Librarian undulating down from the ceiling.

Picture a woman. Actually, picture one of those supermodels from the nineties, who embodied the fashion world’s belief that the body was just a hanger to drape fabric from.

Picture the way their skin canyons where bone meets their socket, their exaggerated clavicles, the long ropes of their spines. Their faces, ghostly with malnutrition.

But lovely, nonetheless, in that way a near-death experience can be, everything human starved away.

From neck up, the Librarian resembled such a person: deep-set eyes haloed by a treasure of black lashes, cheekbones high and queenly, a mathematically perfect jaw, a mouth like someone’s last wish.

Neck down, however—well, the problem began with the neck.

The Librarian’s neck was as etiolated as a dying succulent, made of too many bones and too many things that could almost be called bones.

Emaciated shoulders yielded to the body of a monstrous centipede and honestly, that alone would have been upsetting, but its segments weren’t just lacquered white chitin but tessellations of its face, its eyes closed and mouths serene, meticulously fitted together so there weren’t any gaps, and its arms. God help us, its arms. Already utterly repellent, the fact it had literally hundreds of arms—colorless and elegant, long-fingered with scintillant golden nails, beautiful if not for the context of its existence—seemed like rank overkill.

Fearless, Rowan stood looking up at the Librarian as it turned its head a good three hundred and sixty degrees in its examination of him.

“No, but you have the love of Gracelynn’s life in there, and I want them out.”

“Mine,” sang the librarian. “Calls-to-shadows, the dark-born, dark-loved, they’re mine, from now until the day their heart stops its song. Mine, mine, mine. Thrice I was promised, twice denied. This one was the third and so they are mine.”

Gracelynn whimpered.

“Keep behind me.” I pressed my fingertips to their right shoulder and pushed, gently as I could. “When I say go, you run for one door. I’ll take the other.”

They nodded, trembling as they did just that.

“Yeah,” said Rowan to the Librarian. “No.”

“Who are you to say no to our covenant? Whelp, youngling, embryo.” It poured itself into coils behind the counter, towering over Rowan.

Rowan shed his gloves with less fanfare than he’d done before, a lifetime ago, it felt, in the gardens behind the school. Setting them delicately onto the counter, he held his palms out to the Librarian, as though pleading for a boon.

“Someone who can and will kill you with a touch—”

“Deathworker,” said the librarian, awed, an almost sexual excitement kindling in its voice. “A deathworker stands in my library. After all these years of waiting, and waiting, and waiting, death comes in the shape of a boy. ”

The hair prickled along the back of my neck. Something was wrong. Neither Rowan nor Gracelynn seemed to have noticed as of yet, one busy committing rudeness, the other cowering behind me. Eagerness filled the Librarian’s saintly face, which seemed much less ascetic now, more lascivious.

Hungry.

“—so we can do this the easy way or the hard way. I just want this Kevin person out, that’s—”

I could run. We could run. I could do as I had told Gracelynn.

I could thrust them forward, trust the Librarian to be too ecstatic with having an appetizer and a main course to give a fuck about needing a palate cleanser as I bolted out the door.

I owed neither of them my death. I tensed as the Librarian spiraled up, up, creating a knot of itself, still grinning down on Rowan like a white and alien sun.

“What’s it going to be?” said Rowan like he was the one holding the aces.

“I have wanted to die for over a millennium now. They bound us here. She and I and them and all those who are now dead, dead, dead and gone, those of us whose names they fed into the machines, who they ground up and fed to themselves. They took my library and my books and they said—” It shuddered.

“They said to choose. To serve or to see my books burn. So I served and I have served for a very, very long time.”

“She?” said Rowan. “They? Who are you talking about?”

“But now that you are here, now that you have come, my beautiful death, my darling boy, my blessed final demise.” It giggled as every one of its eyes opened and every one of its mouths began to shriek ecstatically.

I was lunging forward before my brain was informed of the decision my feet had made, running so fast, I could feel my heart rabbiting in my mouth.

I leapt for Rowan, throwing both arms around his ribs, torquing him back.

He tumbled, yelping; I didn’t have time to think if his hands had grazed me, if I was beginning to fester.

There was only the weight of him in my grasp, the Librarian’s chalk-pale regard, its arms feathering upward in praise, its smile as it arrowed downward, reaching for Rowan, for us.

“And when I have eaten you, I will finally die. ”