Page 18 of With the Key in the Office

We saw her out. Robbie rinsed the mugs. I sat on the edge of the bed then Robbie settled beside me.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Getting there,” I said. “Watching your own jaw move on a stranger gets into your head.”

He bumped his shoulder against mine.

I smiled into the steam. “Watson,” I said, and that was enough for the night.

When he left, I locked the door because caution had turned into a habit. The cats settled. I yawned. Night night. Hopefully, without hours spent dreaming of a ghostly me.

10

CENDI

The next nightcame in wet and cool. It’d rained all day, making the castle the academy was in appear creepier than usual, all the shadowing deepening by the clouds overhead. My friends and I stayed in the Great Hall after dinner to brainstorm what to do next without much luck, flinching every time thunder boomed overhead.

It was late when we stepped into the hall to head to our respective dorms. Most of the other students and facility had long since gone to bed. Every creak of the hallway made us increase our pace, just a little bit, even while none of us acknowledged that we were doing it.

As we passed the library, I noticed a pale flicker of light behind the library’s door, which was left open just a crack. Jessie slowed without looking at me, having seen it too. Jaylyn caught my sleeve. Robbie angled us toward the door with that steady calm that turned quick decisions into normal ones. And we all seemed to hold our breath, wondering what magical thing might be glowing in the library.

“Tonight,” Jessie said, quiet and sure. “If Maple’s doing more than straightening shelves and humming at encyclopedias, we find out.”

We slipped inside. Paper and lemon and the faint metallic tang of fresh wards rose to meet us. The lights over the main tables had gone low, which made the glow ahead of us look braver than it probably intended. It pulsed near the front desk and turned every brass edge into a small moon.

We moved past the reading lamps and the card catalog and stopped.

Maribelle Maple stood in the circle of light with her shoulders rounded and her chin tucked, both hands wrapped around the silver charm at her throat. Thin brightness leaked between her fingers. Her mouth kept up a steady stream of half-sentences. Around her, chalk rings traced clean lines on the floor. Faint sigils shivered along the lower shelves. Three tomes stacked near the blotter pulsed in a slow heartbeat, not menacing, but not harmless either. The nearest spiral of books leaned toward the desk as if drawn by tide.

Jessie stopped two paces short and kept her hands where Maple could see them. “Maribelle,” she said, careful and steady. “It’s us.”

Maple startled anyway. The top book on a teetering column slid, and she caught it with a neat scoop that showed practice. Her glasses had crept down her nose. She pushed them up with the back of her wrist rather than let go of the charm. The glow brightened on her inhale and dimmed on the exhale.

“I’m finishing a pass,” she said, breath quick and words quicker. “Timing windows dislike interruption and I should have posteda sign that said please don’t walk into my circle, but that would have been a sign that invited walking into my circle, and also I didn’t want to lie and say I was reshelving when I was very much not reshelving.”

“That makes sense,” Robbie says carefully, even though none of us know for sure what she’s doing.

Her gaze slid between us. “And yet, you don’t believe me.”

“We’re not here to accuse you,” Jessie said. “We saw the light and were worried, that’s all.”

Maple’s shoulders eased by a hair, which on such a tense and jittery woman counted as a nap and a vacation. “Worry is kind,” she said, then glanced at the chalk. “Please don’t step across that ring. The geometry matters more than it looks. If you break the spacing, the charm complains, and the complaining is louder than any of us will like.”

Jaylyn edged to the line and studied the markings without breathing on them. “Protective lattice,” she murmured. “You’re knitting containment across several shelves and setting the dull books to hum with the difficult ones so the room can digest the noise.”

“Exactly, yes,” Maple said, a flush of awkward pride lifting her voice a notch. “It’s not pretty, but it works, and the hum you hear isn’t the danger, it’s the net, and I know this looks suspicious, but the glow is a tell, not a weapon. My grandmother lined this pendant with a ward that flares when bindings strain. I use it as a metronome because the catalog clocks go fast when they worry.”

Robbie glanced at the pulsing stack. “What’s straining?”

“The Weeping Grimoire,” Maple said, then lowered her tone out of habit rather than drama. “It doesn’t weep water and it doesn’t weep blood. It leaks memory, and if the threads get into a reader’s head the book bribes them with yesterday until today thins. It woke when the key left its hook. The empty space tugged the shelves that talk to it. I’ve been retuning since, because if I ignore the hum it turns into a howl.”

I took in the chalk rings, the careful angles of the leaning stacks, the faint shimmer that rode the edges of the sigils. None of it looked like theft. It looked like a person trying to keep a room from coming apart. Still, suspicion had spent a week curling its fingers around my ribs and habit doesn’t loosen because a librarian smiles.

“So that’s why the other librarian wasn’t really doing a lot of this strange stuff, because the key being stolen by the ghost triggered changes in the library?” I asked.

She nods eagerly.

I wanted to believe her, I really did, but I was still so new to this world of magic. She could tell me she’s making puppies for cuddles, and really be creating a dangerous spell to kill us all, and I wouldn’t know the difference. I needed more information if I was going to take Maple off my list of suspects.