The Library of Shadows, page 23
“It’s not you,” Este said, words cracking down the middle. “You’re not to blame for any of this. Ives is.” She reached for his hand and found it heavy in hers. Their fingers threaded together. Este memorized the groove of his knuckles and the callus between his index and middle fingers where a pencil would sit. She squeezed his hand like if she held on hard enough, she might be able to pull them both back to the world of the living.
He stared at their clasped hands, mouth open. “How—why?”
“It’s been an interesting few days.” She untangled their fingers to hold his hand face up and traced patterns along the flat expanse of his palm.
Her shoulders felt lighter with one difficult truth out of the way. The next one, unfortunately, was going to be much harder to speak around the lump in her throat.
Este closed her eyes. Some things were easier to admit in the dark. “I was scared and hurt, and when you gave me The Book of Fades, I returned it to Ives. I thought it would be safe that way.”
When she opened her eyes, a fold had formed between Mateo’s brows. “That’s not exactly what I meant when I told you to take it with you.”
Este hated how her voice cracked. The walls of the lounge shrunk around her. “I’m so sorry. It’s over. Where the Fade touched me, it . . . it’s not getting better. I’m dying, Mateo.”
Mateo cupped her face in his hands. A look she’d never seen before fixed itself on his face—something between agony and apology. He wrapped his arms around her, and her cheek pressed against his chest despite the wet wrinkles of his shirt. There was no heartbeat, no rise and fall of bated breath.
She would’ve given anything to stay like that forever with him, but he deserved more. Whatever it took, she would give him another chance at life.
“The Fades only came back when I showed up. They need my soul, but there’s still time.” She was grateful that she couldn’t look him in the eyes as the words tumbled out. The thought had been formulating at the back of her mind for a while, but it wasn’t so much of a plan as it was frantic desperation. “Maybe they’ll leave again if I leave, too.”
His hands gripped her shoulders, holding her at elbow’s length so that she had no choice but to watch as a spark flared behind his eyes, determination refusing to become a smothered ember. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“I think it could work.” She tilted her head back, pinching her eyes closed, and composed herself for a split second. “You’d have to wait until Ives died of old age, of course. Steal back the card and make sure no other Loganos ever ended up in the library. It could take another thirty years, maybe forty, fifty, I don’t know, but eventually it will happen. And maybe, with her gone, your souls would be free. You’d come back to life.”
Mateo’s fingers found her chin, tilting her head so that she’d face him. “But you never would. If you walk out of those gates like this, you’ll be gone forever. I won’t lose you like I’ve lost everyone else. We’ll figure something else out.”
“But you’ve waited so long for this—”
“I don’t want to know another life without you in it.”
His thumb ran figure eights across her cheekbone. He must have felt the frantic pace of her heart, clinging to what little life it had left, as it thrummed inside its ivory cage.
Don’t wait to tell him.
Aoife’s words echoed through Este’s head. She knew she should tell Mateo that, in another version of reality, she wanted them to spend fall break in France with her classmates, sipping cappuccinos and debating which Gilded Age writer was superior. She should tell him that she wanted them to have gray hair and laugh lines and all the quiet moments that came between. She should tell him that even though she was never supposed to know him, knowing him made her a better version of herself. An Este who wasn’t afraid of the dark crevices of her heart. An Este who learned it was possible to hurt and hope at the same time.
No matter how hard she tried, the words didn’t come. He blinked in anticipation, eyes flicking toward her open mouth. She didn’t know how to say all those things at one time. She didn’t have that kind of language in her vocabulary anymore.
Instead, she lifted onto her toes and kissed him once, like a long pull from a bottom-shelf whiskey bottle—something she wasn’t supposed to have but wanted anyway. She let it speak for her.
Mateo made a soft, surprised noise and leaned in. He was solid beneath her fingers. She splayed her hand across his cheek, holding him steady. The pressure of his lips against hers made her head spin, stars circling behind her closed lids.
She was kissing Mateo Radcliffe, and Mateo Radcliffe was kissing her.
His hands skimmed down the length of her waist, and when she tore herself away, she could feel the heat of her blood humming beneath her skin: on her cheeks, on the slim of her neck, on the ridges of her spine where he traced his fingertips. He was careful at first—slow and patient—but Este was a storm that swept him up. She closed the space between them as his palms slid down the bell of her hips, gentle over her split side, until his hands were underneath her, pulling her closer.
Mateo dropped onto the chaise, shoving aside the mountain of throw blankets and quilts. He tugged her onto his lap, and the soaked fabric of his shirt was cold against her skin as she pressed into him. His mouth found the hollow beneath her ear, the smooth stretch of her neck, the curve of her collarbone.
With his lips against her skin, his hands shimmied beneath her sweater, gingerly over the soft of her bandaged skin. He pushed the fabric up and over her head, tossing it to the floorboards. Goose bumps spread like wildfire down her skin. The sports bra she had on was hardly impressive lingerie, but Mateo didn’t seem to care. When he looked at her like that, with the crooked smirk she’d come to love, every one of her senses shifted into high alert.
With a finger latched to her belt loop, he reeled her closer as he reclined on the velvet. He propped a hand behind his head as one of her legs slotted between his. His other hand brushed through her hair, weaving between the strands, as she worked the buttons of his shirt and kissed down his chest as she went. One button, two buttons, three. The drenched cotton brushed aside, leaving cool patches on his skin.
She paused against his breastbone. Resting her head against his chest, she imagined the thrum of his heart, the way it used to beat. Este ran her fingers tenderly over the length of his sternum as if she could stir it awake. With peppered kisses back up to his lips, she lost herself in him.
The door creaked open as Daveed said, “Yo, Este, have you seen—whoa, sorry!”
Este jolted upright, throwing her hands across her chest, and rolling off the chaise. She landed on the heap of blankets, but they barely softened the sharp jab to her side.
“Daveed!” Mateo lurched forward, fumbling for his buttons as Este dove back inside her sweater. He stood, frazzled. There was no way to hide the crooked way his shirt fell over his shoulders, the rumpled tousle of his curls.
“Next time put a sock on the door, dude.” Daveed retreated into the hallway as quickly as he’d opened it.
Mateo offered a hand to Este, helping her up. “I should’ve known we were on borrowed time.”
Maybe it was the way he looked at her, blithe and bashful, bottom lip sucked between his teeth like he could still taste her there, that stoked the flame of defiance. Or maybe it was the infectious heat radiating from the Fade’s mark on her waist that reminded her what fate was waiting for her on the other side of the door. But mostly, it was the adjective he chose.
“Borrowed,” Este repeated. She said the word over and over, two syllables dripping off her tongue, before gripping both his shoulders with white knuckles. “Consider it a loan. I knew it had to mean something.”
Brilliant as he was, Mateo blinked like the cogs of his brain had seized.
“The souls are loans, Mateo. Like library books.” Her head was spinning with possibilities. Her weary body demanded she’d need to sit back down soon, but she was on the brink of a breakthrough. “Ives doesn’t own them. We can get your souls back.”
“Ives must have already put the book back in the spire, and I don’t think saving our souls from an eternity under her control is going to be as simple as stamping a borrowing card.” Something gleamed in his gaze, affectionate and amused. “Although, I have to admit, I’ve never tried it.”
This wasn’t over yet. It couldn’t be.
Este dropped Mateo’s hand, and she was pretty sure she saw him form a pout before she paced away. She drifted back and forth, fingers pressed to her temples. She needed to work through her tangled thoughts out loud. “Could you repeat everything I just said back to me?”
“Okay, um,” he stammered, sinking back onto the chaise. “Dean wrote, Consider it a loan. Stolen souls are like library books. Dean also left the book’s epigraph in the Hesper Fountain. Ives has the book but not the missing pages.”
Her feet stopped moving. “What did you say?”
Mateo rested his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, and he looked up to echo, “Ives has the book but not the missing pages?”
“No, the poem in the Hesper Fountain,” Este said. She scrolled back the panel to reveal the chalkboard with their harried thoughts from a few weeks ago. With a piece of chalk, she added the word love next to Mateo’s curved penmanship, the words life and death leftover from their last brainstorming sesh. “Life, death, and love. You’re a genius.”
“Thank you?” Mateo said, more question than statement.
She grabbed his face and planted a kiss firmly on his lips. “Gather the rest of the ghosts in here. I’ll be back before you know it.”
“Este, where are you going?” he asked, but she was already halfway out the door.
Her dad’s voice filtered through her memories. Everything you need to know, you can find in your library, he’d said. They’d searched the Lilith from ceiling to floor, peeked inside every hidden passageway, and pried open every locked door. Este only had one place left to look.
Twenty-Eight
Este was eight the first time her dad took her to the library.
Her birthday was firmly situated in July, at the peak of summer’s heat, and she remembered the way the library’s air conditioner swept stale breezes through the stacks, winding around her legs like snakes that made her shiver. The bespectacled woman at the circulation desk waved to them as they walked in. They filled out sheet after sheet of paperwork, and in turn, the clerk slid a thin, green library card across the counter. Este had been barely tall enough to reach.
That afternoon, they left with a pile of paperback chapter books tucked neatly into the back of a blue wagon. Este knew how libraries worked: the books weren’t hers forever, only for two weeks, and that was enough. She would read them over and over until she had nearly memorized the pattern of ink on the pages, so that even when they were back on the shelves where they belonged, she could carry a piece of their stories with her.
Her dad was the one who introduced her to that world, and she could still see the day in a grainy, sun-bleached film photo.
Este trudged toward her dorm room as a tempest roared with bough-breaking gusts and downpours like down comforters, thick and enveloping. Biting rain soaked her straight to the bone marrow. Her teeth clattered, waist drummed with pain, and shoulders sagged in relief as she thrust into her Vespertine suite.
Thankfully, there was no trace of Posy and the others. Their uncomfortable brunch felt like a lifetime ago. The day, now dark, had slipped away from her, but at least her roommate and the rest of the PI club were probably heading to the Burlington International Airport by now, trading Vermont for Versailles.
The pile of yearbooks still sat faceup on her unmade bed, but Este lunged for her suitcase. Inside, she found three photos. In one, her dad grinned outside the suite to his junior-year dorm room, Vespertine Hall 503A. In the next, he shook hands with Robin Radcliffe’s statue in the middle of the Hesper Fountain. And lastly, in a cracked frame, he stood outside the Paso Robles City Library with an eight-year-old Este by his side. She gripped her brand-new library card in one hand and wrapped the other around her dad.
Digging deeper, Este peeled out wool socks and consignment-shop sweaters and at the bottom, next to a few stray lip balms and wrinkled syllabi she hadn’t looked at since the start of the school year, sat a small, green book.
As far as books were concerned, this one was nondescript. There was no title, no dust jacket, no gilded lining. When she and her dad returned home from the city library on Spring Street that day in July, there had been a small stack of wrapped presents waiting for her on the kitchen table. The best day of her young life had just kept getting better. She’d peeled off glittering wrapping paper in long streams. Her dad sat next to her, tapping his fingers against the tabletop in anxious anticipation, and her mom buzzed around the kitchen, lighting cake candles and dimming the lights.
Este ran her hands along the book’s smooth cover now the same way she did after she unwrapped it, heart swelling with appreciation as she memorized the texture of the backing. She pried open the front cover, loose from years of reading and rereading. Underlined on the first page, her dad had written, From the library of Este Logano.
Her dad had taught himself to bind books, a holdover from his days at the library, and he’d woven together all her favorite stories. She recalled the scent of his cramped office—like repair glue and old books with fresh ink—so thick that for a second, she could’ve sworn she was there again.
Este’s fingertips pressed against his penmanship like it might make him feel closer. He had walked this path before. He knew the way. She didn’t have to do it alone.
A breath shuddered out of her as she flipped the page. She knew what came next. The first time she read these words, she hugged him in the kitchen. He was still alive, breathing and laughing and there when she needed him. Then, after he passed away, she had to skip past the dedication page every time she cracked open the storybook. It hurt too much.
She’d been avoiding that hurt for so long. But now, on the floor of her Radcliffe Prep dorm, with her back pressed against the stiff side of her mattress and her legs sprawled out in front of her, she read his inscription through a new lens. One she hadn’t dared look through since arriving at Radcliffe for fear of what she would find.
“There is life, there is death, and there is love—the greatest of these is love.” Her finger drifted over the smudged blue ink. He’d written it quickly, like he was running out of time. And he had been. Still, each crooked letter was his promise to her that even when he was gone, he would never truly leave her.
Este sucked down a steadying breath. She fanned past the fairytales and fables she’d committed to memory, straight to the last chapter where a signature block of blank pages had been bound past the last story.
She’d always assumed they were meant for her to write her own story someday, the way that some school texts had workbook pages at the back for assignments. All this time, she’d been too afraid to press pen to paper, too concerned with following his path that she never considered forging her own.
Now, as the pages unfolded in front of her, they weren’t blank at all. As promised, the answer she needed was found inside her library—the library of Este Logano.
Twenty-Nine
The missing chapter from The Book of Fades was bound in the back of Este’s storybook.
She recognized the text immediately, ancient and meticulous. Her stomach clenched as she fanned through the pages, and Este could read them without translating them from Latin, without squinting through the ivy blossom nectar, without even trying. The language of the dead was more legible to her than it had been all semester. The words ran together, spindly sentences next to sketched diagrams, all of it in thick, black ink.
For weeks, these words had been within reach. The reason Mateo had felt so real any time he was in her dorm was because of these pages, the tether to his soul stronger in their proximity—it had never been the ivy at all.
This chapter didn’t look particularly special at first glance—What had she expected? A resurrection checklist?—but there had to be something here worth protecting. Fingers crossed, Mateo would know what to make of it.
She didn’t have any other choice but to go back to the Lilith. She’d be that much more likely to end up skewered by the Fades’ fake nails, but Mateo was waiting for her. And since Ives had the book, who knew what she could do to him if Este was even a minute too late. Este would save him, even if it was the last thing she ever did.
Este closed her eyes and sent a silent plea to the patron saint of books to forgive her as she ripped the pages out and folded them into a tight square, shoving them deep in her pocket. When she stood, blood rushed to her head, and she held on to the post of her bedframe until it passed. Her body was running on fumes and scraps of bacon from breakfast.
First: defeat the evil, immortal librarian ruining her life.
Then: consume an egregious amount of frozen Tater Tots because that was basically the only thing left in her freezer.
Este halted by the front door. She’d left her coat discarded on the floor of the senior lounge, but a thundercrack snapped the sky in half and reminded her that she wouldn’t make it back to the Lilith like this without the pages getting drenched. Posy’s coat had disappeared from the hanging rack by the door, prepared for a brisk week of sidewalk cafés and window-shopping. Este needed something that would protect all of her. A poncho or a tarp or a—
She’d emptied the contents of her closet, shoving it into duffel bags and suitcases, and left behind splotches of peeled wallpaper, a few rusted racks, and a burgundy stain in the woodgrains that Este hadn’t questioned for the sake of her own sanity. In Posy’s room, she checked the usual places—the back of her desk chair, the hook on the closet door—but Posy must have already packed her rain slicker and her peacoat.
