The Library of Shadows, page 22
“Pennies and sulfur, Tammy. I’m in the restroom, and it’s like someone tried to summon a demon here.”
“Gonna have to close it down until we can get it cleaned up. And you’ve gotta report this to Ives. Transferring you now.” But her words peeled apart, sound waves unraveling as static rustled the line.
Sandpaper against wood grain. Polyester track pants swishing with every step. The crackle of a bonfire, flames licking the summer air and embers drifting into the thicket, or a pyre preparing to burn her at the stake. That was the sound of the static that replaced Tammy’s pinched soprano. The last sound Este heard before the Fades sang.
“The dying light with shadowed hands will spin you in eternal dance. What blooms tonight—”
Este halted on the cobbled sidewalks, the boughs of evergreen trees reaching toward her like greedy hands. A veil of darkness washed over campus, blotting out the afternoon light. Black creeped at the corners of her vision. Night had come early.
“—a secret sworn, and you are ours until the morn. The dying light—”
The song of the Fades wove through Este’s rib cage, squeezing until she’d run out of room to breathe. Somehow, she managed to have the wherewithal to end the phone call. Their voices extinguished, but their haunting melody dragged Este closer to the Lilith. On the one night she knew she shouldn’t, she had to go back.
The library was a formidable beast of Bodleian proportions built from carved arches, pedimented windows, and balustraded parapets. Low-hanging, full-bellied clouds parted for the spire. A storm was brewing, and Este was about to walk right into it.
A Safety and Security officer with a walkie-talkie pinned to his chest held the door open for everyone leaving, and Tammy’s deadpan seeped through the tiny speaker: “Go ahead and evacuate.”
A rush of students flowed out the front doors and down the shallow steps, but Este swam upstream. She pushed through the current into the atrium. Shadows wept beneath the sconces, flooded the floorboards, and wedged into every nook and cranny of the first floor. The central staircase rose before her. She needed to get to the senior lounge, even if her side bled with every groaning step.
She made it to the fifth floor before she saw Ives, weaving through the collection. Este lunged behind the stacks, keeping the head librarian within view between the tops of books. Despite her silk blouse and tailored pants, the knowledge that she was looking at a century-old Lilith Radcliffe shot chills across her frame.
She squinted to keep her sights set on Ives. The head librarian pivoted, and for a moment, Este was certain she targeted her between the shelves. Desperation flashed across her features—the hunger of a starved hunter. Este refused to even breathe with Ives’s jungle-predator gaze searching through the stacks. Maybe she deserved to die for walking straight into the devil’s lair on the darkest night of October.
Overhead, a streak of piercing white flared, and thunder crashed—a jarring boom, close enough that books rattled against their shelves. Every light in the library zapped out at once. The wall sconces sizzled, electricity fried. As the storm opened up, sheets of rain hammering against the glass ceiling, Este was enveloped in an instantaneous darkness.
Three visions in hot pink seeped out of the shadows beside the head librarian. She lifted a hand, little more than an outline as Este’s eyes adjusted, but the Fades were unruly. They tugged a sheet of black across the fifth floor, a hum on their chapped lips as they stalked along the balcony’s ledge. Looking for dinner, no doubt.
“I said stay,” Ives grumbled to her ghouls. “Why won’t you listen to me?”
Este tiptoed down the aisle without taking her sight off the back of the Fades’ tracksuits. To get to the senior lounge, she could skirt the perimeter, taking the scenic route through jade relics and antique atlases. It would take longer than cutting through the bookcases, but she might make it in one piece without being skewered by a rhinestone manicure. She had until moonrise to make it out alive, but only if she didn’t get caught.
Beneath her, a floorboard creaked.
So much for that.
The Fades’ frontwoman with her straw-blond ponytail whipped around at the sound, and a frigid wind blew with it, rustling book pages. Este dipped toward the floor, burrowing into a ball. Please don’t see me, please don’t see me. Her spine trembled as the Fades leered toward her hiding place.
Another jagged stroke of lightning painted the sky, blinding and then black again.
“This way,” Ives boomed. “I said this way.”
Este didn’t dare breathe until the warmth returned to her fingers, the only sure sign that the Fades had moved on.
She’d cried more in the last two days than she had in years, and salt water edged her lash line. Este rested her head against the top of her knees, lungs aching. She didn’t see the frayed hem of bell bottoms until they lined up with her toes. Aoife’s voice was a flat can of soda when she whispered, “On a scale of one to ten, how dead are you?”
Twenty-Six
“Uh, eight?”
It must have been the wrong answer because Aoife huffed. “You don’t look like an eight. Are you positive?”
“I-I don’t know,” Este muttered, gliding a hand beneath her running nose and drying her cheeks with the pads of her fingertips. She peered over the book tops, but Ives had vanished beyond the trove of Old English stories. “I need to see the rubric, I think.”
Aoife was flanked by Daveed. Este couldn’t help but try to peek over their shoulders for a familiar lock of black hair, for a mischievous glint in sapphire eyes.
“Can you feel the temperature of the air?” Aoife asked as they walked. “Have you lost your sense of taste? Can you do a cartwheel?”
“What does that have to do with being dead?” Este asked as they nudged through the senior lounge’s green threshold. She sighed as she landed on the soft curves of the velvet chaise, her waist throbbing and legs aching.
“Your center of gravity shifts, and centrifugal force doesn’t work the same,” Daveed said, lighting a few candles so they could actually see. “I found out the hard way.”
Este rubbed soothing circles into the skin above her eyebrow. “Duly noted.”
The door slipped open, and Este lurched upright, but it wasn’t Mateo. Luca slipped inside with a debutante smile on her red lips. “You look worse than the Fades.”
Este didn’t have time to be offended—frankly, she couldn’t even argue—before a weighted blanket landed firmly on her belly, knocking the air out of her, and then another. Aoife dove into the lower cabinets for spare comforters and knitted throws, piling each of them onto Este in a colossal heap.
Luca perched on the cushion next to her. “We used to have all-night study sessions up here. That should keep you warm.”
“I’m sure I can find something to dull the pain.” Aoife turned another page in her book, skimming her fingertips over the lettering as Este succumbed to the gravitational pull of the chaise and all nine thousand of its new blankets.
And on top, the ghosts splayed across her chair like a patchwork quilt of bygone eras. Their presence warmed some long-dormant creature inside Este that now raised its head for the first time after a cold winter.
She cleared her throat, suddenly choked up. “I made a mistake, and I need to apologize to Mateo. Where is he?”
“He went out looking for you,” Luca said. “He said you were leaving, but he also said he’d never met someone as magnificently stubborn as you.”
Este’s voice snagged on the way out. “He lied to me. And I . . .”
Technically, Mateo had said he couldn’t tell her that he wasn’t the Heir of Fades. She’d misread it as self-preservation, used his diversion to convince herself of his guilt, but the truth was that he’d only been trying to save her like he saved her dad. If she’d left earlier, if she’d run and not looked back, she might have been safe. He’d only been trying to do what was right.
Weeks ago, Mateo had said he didn’t want to get the ghosts’ hopes up when he believed there was a way to bring them back to life in case he let them down again. Without Mateo’s death first feeding the Fades, Ives never could have wreaked havoc on Radcliffe’s students, wielding immortality like a blade. He must have blamed himself for their deaths. The burden fit him like well-worn denim.
Except he wasn’t the one who was going to disappoint them—Este had willingly handed The Book of Fades over to Ives. He’d given it to her, trusted her with it, told her to take the book with her when she left. And she’d betrayed him, all of them. They deserved to know the truth.
“I turned The Book of Fades in. I didn’t know it was her.” With each word, some part of her cracked open. She didn’t know when she started crying, only that tears dribbled off her chin. “I thought I was helping, I thought I—”
“Ives?” Aoife asked. “Ives is the Heir?”
Este nodded. “Ives is Lilith.”
Luca tucked a blanket tighter around Este. “Este, Este, Este. It’s going to be alright.”
It was the kind of white lie you told little kids when they messed up—everything was decidedly not alright, and the jury was still out on all future alright-ness.
Somewhere downstairs, there was a crash and a subsequent scream. The shrill note shot through the floorboards, jerking Este to attention. The sudden movement made her side stitch.
Daveed jumped to his feet, but he smoothed a cool mask over his face when he looked at Este. Apparently, she looked fragile enough that he needed to tiptoe. “Luca and I can go take a look.”
Luca mimed a fake yawn as if shrieking was common practice within the Lilith. “Me? Haven’t I done enough today?”
Daveed hauled her up by the hand. “Bro, I am not going alone. Are you serious?”
“Bro. I hate when you call me that. So unseemly,” Luca whined but followed Daveed through the doorway.
Which left Este under Aoife’s care. She shuddered beneath the iron gaze of the gray-eyed ghost. Stretching for levity, for anything to break the silence, she asked, “So, how bad is it, doc?”
“Honestly, I thought you’d already be dead,” Aoife said, gesturing vaguely at Este’s body, the way it shimmered in the candlelight.
Este couldn’t wash away the bitter tang of rising panic. She would become as dead as them. “Will it hurt? When the Fades finally . . .”
Aoife shook her head. “At first. Then, it’s like floating or falling. A weightless plunge. It’s not a bad way to go.”
A laugh forced its way between Este’s lips. She spread her hands as if painting a headline. “An Eternity of Purgatory Earns Rave Reviews from the Critics.”
The light dimmed behind Aoife’s eyes. “I suppose it could’ve been better. Not having to watch everyone you love leave, knowing they’d grow old without you, would’ve been nice, I imagine.”
Este muttered quiet condolences, the same kind she hated receiving after her dad passed. Looking at Aoife like this, snug in the shape of a sixteen-year-old hippie, it was all too easy to forget she should have been nearing eighty, drinking lukewarm bourbon and watching golf championships at max volume in a retirement home somewhere sunny. Instead, she was still here, still smooth-skinned after all those years.
“You know how I said I’d traded shifts that night?” Aoife said. “I had a friend who had been assigned the late shift originally, but he was exhausted that night. He’d been running himself dry for weeks, doing too much for too long, and I . . . well, I would have done anything for him.”
Este couldn’t close her mouth, stuck in an open cavern. “Did you know what would happen to you?”
“No, but I saw what was happening to him. I never told him, but I loved him, and he was miserable—always tired, failing classes. It was him or me, and if one of us had to suffer, I was going to choose me every time.”
“So, Ives crossed his name out, and the Fades took you instead?” Este asked. Even speaking their name in the library felt like a death sentence. She could practically feel their Charonic hands tightening around her throat.
“Yes,” Aoife said. Her voice didn’t waver, and her shoulders didn’t bow, but something shifted in her posture, and for the first time, Este knew its name.
Love was the dreamy, offset look Aoife wore and the heartbreak written on her face without a hint of regret. It was the same way Posy edged into Shepherd’s body in the corner of the booth when there was plenty of room to stretch out. It was her mom on the road to anywhere, every eighty-miles-per-hour twist down a turnpike, every cold-salami deli sandwich, every middle-of-nowhere pit stop in a desperate hope to find a sliver of the man she couldn’t keep. And it was Este, searching for Mateo in the stacks, whispering to him in the back of class, closing her eyes as his lips brushed the soft skin of her hand like it might last.
It was love, and it always had been.
The moment passed when, outside, a gale screeched. The sound struck the Lilith and pierced Este’s chest, between rib and tendon. The longer the storm raged, the wilder the winds.
Este stood too suddenly and black rushed to her head. Her pile of blankets streamed lazily onto the floor. “I have to find a way to fix this.”
“There’s no glory in trying to do everything on your own.” Aoife reached for the pendant at her neck, a smooth onyx oval encircled with silver. Maybe it was a gift from her lost love. Her face fell back into its comfortable steel trap—cold and indifferent, protective—but her words were spoken in a delicate timbre that made Este think she still had one hand dipped in her well of memories, that maybe she wasn’t speaking only to Este but also to herself.
Aoife’s gray eyes zipped toward Este, who was suddenly more interested in her cuticles and the rough edges of her fingernails. The ghost said, “If you feel the way I felt, don’t wait to tell Mateo. You don’t want to lose something you never had the chance to have. Trust me.”
Este considered pretending she didn’t understand what she meant, gaping at Aoife wide-mouthed and confused. That option flashed for a millisecond in her mind—an easy scapegoat, an excuse for the emotion bubbling inside her like water in the kettle on the stove, slow and then sudden.
Then, she thought about denying it. She could write everything off as a misunderstanding, an incorrect assumption. Obviously, Aoife had meant she should tell Mateo about Ives’s knuckles tightening around The Book of Fades, dooming them all to failure, and not the way she wanted him, all of him, for all eternity.
But instead, Este matched Aoife’s challenge. She nodded once, curt and final. That was that. She would face love—its canyon cliff side, this suspension bridge between here and the point of no return—head on or not at all, and not at all wasn’t an option anymore. Her body was quickly decaying. Ives had The Book of Fades. She would either find a way to save them all, or she’d join the ghosts, and then there would be nowhere to hide from how she felt.
Este swiveled, favoring her good side as she marched toward the exit.
Okay. Okay. No turning back, not even when the storm let loose another sharp exhale and rattled the latched windowpanes. Not even when the marks beneath her bloodstained bandages begged her to stop fighting. Not even when she pried open the lounge’s door and Mateo stood on the other side.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “There’s a woman downstairs who thinks the drainpipes are possessed.”
Twenty-Seven
He looked like a Greek sculpture.
Mateo was soaked from head to toe, water contouring the white planes of his collared shirt to every line and dimple of his torso. Phidias himself would have envied the immaculate wet drapery, carving marble features beneath the flimsy fabric. Mateo’s hand had frozen in midair, poised to knock, and now he brushed it over the back of his head as a coy smile dawned. Droplets sprayed from his hair as he shook it dry.
Then, as if remembering their latest argument, his eyes rounded, cheeks drew downward, and he bobbed a step back.
Este wiped a stray bead of water off her lip. It tasted like copper. The clunk they heard must have been Safety and Security searching for a fabricated leak and causing a real one. Mateo appeared to have been caught in the deluge. What had he said? Something about ghosts and plumbing?
“Oldest excuse in the book,” she said, not fighting the matching grin that creeped up. They stood like that for a moment, all the unspoken things taking up space between them, until Aoife coughed conspicuously behind Este.
“Oh, were you two leaving?” Mateo threw a thumb over his shoulder, stepping aside in case they wanted to get around him.
Este shook her head no, but Aoife said, “I am.” Two stark syllables as she slipped back into the buttoned-up version of herself Este knew well. She vanished from sight, nothing left of her but a sliver of shadow, and one of the candles shivered as she passed them and headed out into the hallway.
Este backed into the lounge, and Mateo followed. The door clicked shut behind them. Alone together at last. She said, “I was actually coming to find you.”
Mateo moseyed around the edge of the room, hand skimming the spines of books lining the shelved walls. Este ran over her list of confessions in her head. Standing in the center of the lounge, she picked at the loose threads of her shirt.
“I’m sorry that I—”
“Este, dear, I thought you’d be—” A slow, hesitant smile bloomed across Mateo’s face. “You go first this time.”
He met her in the middle. Her heart thumped, thankfully still beating but a gentle reminder of everything at stake. Her only option was to say everything and get it out in the open. There was no other way around it. The truth was the very least she could offer him.
Este sucked down a deep breath that reached every corner of her lungs. “I’m sorry, Mateo. I know you’re not the enemy. I was scared and foolish and wrong, so wrong, to believe you could be. You asked me to believe you, and I should have.” She cleared her throat. “I know you’re not the Heir of Fades.”
His voice dipped low, rasped like a deckle edge. “You don’t have to be sorry for anything. It was my fault for not telling you the whole truth, but I couldn’t let anything happen to you. It was my fault you were in the spire. I never meant for you, for anyone, to get hurt.”
