The Library of Shadows, page 8
Once it was shut, Este didn’t stop moving. She raced down the hallway and cupped her palm around the candle holder to keep the flame from blowing out. It did little to light their way. She could still feel the Fades’ darkness on the back of her neck.
The only thing standing between her and certain death was a semicorporeal asshole of a ghost who had made it perfectly clear he was capable of disappearing at any moment, which would leave her trapped in an abandoned service corridor with three spirits dressed like 1990s B-list celebrities.
To Mateo’s credit, he didn’t vanish. He kept her pace, step for step, even as his image faded in and out in the candlelight like television static. He angled his head toward her, probably waiting for some snarky remark, but she couldn’t shake the hollow feeling in her chest. Instead, she focused on the striped beige walls, on each footstep forward, on the way her lungs still rose and fell, alive.
As they reached the end of the hall, where the passageway forked into equally cobwebbed stairwells, a wintry gust blew in behind them. Fear clawed behind her rib cage as the Fades’ song swelled, a funeral dirge. A cloying dampness sapped the warmth from her skin, and the smell of wilting flowers gave Este’s gag reflex a workout.
“Which way?” she managed to ask as the Fades’ chill crept up the stairwell.
Mateo looked both ways and shrugged. “Both great options. Manet or mathematics?”
Este fought the urge to glance behind her, to see how close the Fades were. Their melodies echoed between the walls, urgent and insatiable. They sounded everywhere at once. She had to raise her voice above their harmonies to say, “Manet.”
Mateo pivoted left, and Este followed him around the corner, feeling heavier with each step upward. The Fades’ mist billowed after them, and the longer she ran, the harder Este had to fight not to give in. To let them take her.
Salvation was a hidden door at the end of the hall, and Este focused on the gilded ring of light coming from the other side. Mateo reached it first, vanishing and reappearing at its hinges. The Fades’ black tendrils curled around Este’s ankle, trying to drag her back into the fog.
Mateo extended the feather duster like a hand, and she grabbed on. He tugged her forward, and lunging through the opening, they landed with a thud in the dimly lit alcoves around the archives. Out here, the passage was disguised on the wall by a framed copy of Manet’s painting, Music in the Tuileries Gardens. Mateo latched the door shut behind them, and only then could Este finally breathe again.
Every echo of the Fades’ singing had dissipated, replaced by an uneasy silence in the main stacks. It had gotten late enough that the study carrels on this floor had been abandoned. No one had been around to hear them.
Despite the lights overhead, Mateo was whole next to her. Not some flimsy apparition, but as solid as ever. If her body weren’t fully engaged in fight-or-flight mode, she’d have asked him to explain a few pressing questions like why aren’t you invisible, and how is any of this possible, and, kindly, what the fuck just happened.
Instead, Este slumped to the floor, her legs giving out underneath her, and she counted her breaths to quell the quicksand panic bubbling up. If she moved too fast, it would swallow her whole. “They were singing, and I couldn’t even understand them, but it felt like, like I couldn’t breathe, like I was—”
“Dying?” Mateo propped himself against the bookshelf next to her, ankles crossed. Entirely unshaken by the last fifteen minutes. “The language of the dead can be exceedingly convincing.”
Her voice wobbled beneath the weight of the words. “Like the one the book’s written in?”
Mateo swiped a paperback from the shelf and tapped Este’s head with it. “You’re smarter than you look, Logano.”
So, he wasn’t bullshitting her.
Or, she thought callously, he still is.
There was no way to trust someone like him, and the worst part was that she couldn’t even decide which made him less trustworthy: the night’s realization that ghosts were real and he absolutely was one, or the privileged private-school glint in his eyes. He’d saved her tonight, but ultimately, he would use her to get what he wanted and then he would leave, exactly like he had in the spire.
“Oh, my god. I need to get downstairs,” she said, prying herself upright and blowing out the candle. The night had slipped away from her. “If Ives is still here somewhere, if she thinks I’m not taking this seriously—”
“Hey, hey, hey,” Mateo said, zipping around so that he stood in her way when she turned. “I thought we had a deal. I want to introduce you to the others.”
“Other what?” Este barked. “More Fades? I think I’ve met enough of your friends for one lifetime.”
“No, there are only three of those, and they came right from the pages of this book.” With one hand he tapped the binding of The Book of Fades through his bag. The other arm slotted sideways against the bookshelves, creating a barrier.
As if that could stop her. She slipped through his body like it was a sheet of rain. On the other side, she shook out her limbs. Walking through a ghost had not been on her junior-year bingo card.
No faster than she blinked, he was in front of her again. “These are friends, and I promise it’ll only take a few minutes.”
His dark hair curled like ink in water, and his lashes cast slender shadows across the sharp edge of his cheekbones. She traced the veins on the backs of his hands to where they disappeared beneath the rolled sleeves of his button-down. He looked so, so solid, but she’d felt the truth.
“No, I have to get back to work. I’m not letting you mess this up more than you already have.” Este pinched the bridge of her nose. Was this a joke to him? “As much as I hate to admit it, maybe you were right. What am I supposed to tell Ives? That I got chased by a demented glee club, and that’s why I missed half my shift? There’s no way.”
“I take it you’re bad at group projects.” Mateo paused along the balcony railing. From here, Este could see the entire library—including the empty chair at the circulation desk where she was supposed to be. “Listen, Logano. We’re a team now, you and me. You can’t expect someone to do all the work for you, but you can’t do it all alone either.”
For someone who died before using a toaster, he sure thought he was the coolest thing since sliced bread.
Este crossed her arms, clenched her jaw. Ives hadn’t given her a group project—Este had begged for a chance to prove she wasn’t a troublemaker. And yet trouble was exactly what she’d gotten herself into tonight. Thanks to Mateo. Again.
But now Este also had a grocery list of everything that was at stake, and her eyes betrayed her by swaying toward his leather satchel and the tome inside. Ives wouldn’t let her keep studying at Radcliffe Prep unless she returned The Book of Fades, and Mateo wouldn’t let the book out of his reach until the missing pages were found.
Not to mention that the rules of her reality had changed, and Este no longer had the playbook. Mateo knew that, and by the looks of the well-worn smirk playing on his lips, he knew that she knew it, too.
Mateo said, “If you don’t keep your end of the deal, I won’t keep mine either. The book technically belongs to me anyway. I am a Radcliffe, after all.”
Taking exaggerated steps, he backtracked down the aisle, leaving her speechless in his wake. He looked over his shoulder with every slow-motion movement. Waiting for her to stop him.
Mateo feigned a cough to keep her attention. “I said I’m leaving.”
At least with him, she had a chance. Someone who knew the ins and outs of the Lilith. Someone who was around when the blueprints were first sketched, who could help her avoid the wrath of the Fades, and who might have seen her father when he was a student.
There were so many questions that she couldn’t answer herself—had her dad ended up in the wrong places at all the wrong times like her? Did he know, just like her, what lurked around the historic buildings? And, quieter, an acrid question, stale and unspoken on the back of her tongue: was the ghost of him here somewhere?
“You’ll never see The Book of Fades again,” Mateo crooned. He rounded the corner of the shelves, lost behind well-loved editions of classics like Of Mice and Men and Waiting for Godot. He shuffled a few steps before sticking his head back out to say, “It’ll be gone forever.”
But if she and Mateo worked together, she could learn why her dad stole the key to the spire and retrace his steps through the Lilith. Even if it meant working with someone who was sure to make her grind her teeth into a pulp by the end of the quarter.
Este pushed down the metallic taste of pride and self-preservation and said, “You’ve got twenty minutes.”
“Welcome to the team!” Mateo said, launching a triumphant fist into the air. He didn’t wait for her, breezing around the stacks. “But if you can’t keep up, I’ll have to demote you to junior varsity.”
Este frowned and punched an alarm on her phone. She’d give him twenty minutes. Not a second more. “Don’t make me regret this.”
Mateo grinned, a widespread thing that crinkled the corners of his eyes. “Wouldn’t dream of it, dear.”
They turned a tight corner toward a collection of dictionaries, words from every corner of the world bound and kept safe. The shelves were wider here, the books thicker. A tacky layer of dust coated everything in gray. Este peeled it up as she ran her fingers along the bound spines and jotted dust dictionaries onto her mental to-do list.
Mateo rolled to a stop in front of an arched green door marked Senior Lounge on a burnished plaque.
“Look decent, everybody,” he said with the gusto of a circus ringleader as he nudged open the door. “We’ve got a live one.”
Ten
Este was the only one in the study who didn’t look like her outfit had been ordered out of an old Sears catalog.
The senior lounge was cozy, walls lined with texts in varying shades of timeworn brown and woven carpets layered over the splintered floors. In the middle, a sitting area had been arranged with mismatched furniture that somehow all looked like they belonged: a tartan armchair with carved claw arms, a deep blue velvet chaise, a love seat upholstered with scuffed leather. Draped over the pieces were the three students Este had seen Mateo with.
Except this time, she knew to look for their blurred edges.
The far wall was lined with shelves that flanked both sides of a smoldering fireplace. When you were the son of the school founder, apparently the no open flames rule didn’t apply to you. The ghosts feathered out at the edges as the firelight crested.
One of the ghosts cleared her throat with a petite ahem. She sprawled out on the chaise’s tufted cushions, long and lithe as a matchstick flame with red-hot curls flaring out around her shoulders. “Aren’t you going to introduce us, Matty?”
“Este, meet Luca van Witt,” Mateo said. The amusement in his eyes made her think he relished seeing Este like this—stunned silent. “She’s been at Radcliffe since 1927.”
Luca popped to her feet, her toes tucked inside a pair of T-strap heels. She’d shawled herself with the same heavy mink coat Este had seen her in before, despite the embers flickering in the fireplace. Este wondered, then, if she didn’t have a choice. Luca moved with the same ancient grace that Mateo did, comfortable in an ageless body, but on the outside, she was still sixteen. She circled Este like she was a contestant on a makeover show, her ice-blue eyes squinting and scrutinizing as she scanned from her sneakers to the staircase spiderwebs still clinging to her hair.
“Este, you say?” The way she said it—mouth puckered, eyebrows pinched—made Este iron out the kinks in her spine. Suddenly, she was entirely too conscious that she was the only one in the room with hot blood pounding through her veins.
Finally, Luca asked Mateo, “This is the one you won’t stop talking about?”
Mateo rubbed his palm across the back of his neck. “Yes, this is Este Logano.”
Her name in his mouth sounded like a threat and a promise. Este wasn’t sure she wanted to be either of those things to any of them.
“Oh, right. Dean’s girl.” Luca touched a wine-colored nail to her lips as if to swipe any lipstick smudged by the severity of her sneer.
The mention of her father’s name sent alarms clanging through Este’s head.
“Dean? My dad, Dean?” she asked, stifling the whispering part of her that begged her to stop fraternizing with the dead like it was normal. “You knew him?”
“All of us did. Knew of him, at least. I don’t think he wanted much to do with us.” This ghost had a stack of books balanced on her cross-legged lap. She perched on the plaid chair, with a deluge of impossibly straight black strands draping to her waist. Her skin was so pale she might as well have been transparent. Apropos, given the whole ghost thing. “Aoife Godrich. Fall of 1967.”
Ee-fuh. Two syllables, and Este could still hear the way Posy said it last week on her impromptu ghost tour. While Dr. Kirk paraded them around the Lilith, Posy had rhapsodized about these spirits with her EMF reader screaming the whole way.
Aoife’s eyes were haunting pools of pale gray, but her face showed no signs of age. Este eyed her old-school outfit: an oversize T-shirt with a gaudy stone pendant resting on her chest. She didn’t have to stand for Este to recognize the denim fabric bunched by her ankles as the hem of bell-bottoms.
“The Radcliffe disappearances,” Este said, the cogs fitting together. “A student every ten years, like clockwork. That’s you.” She peered around the room, scanning their timeless faces as she went: “1917, 1927, 1967 . . .”
The last ghost sat with his back against Aoife’s armchair, all laughter and long limbs. He drummed his fingertips against the floor like he needed to keep them occupied. His deep brown skin and warm eyes made him look more alive than Este knew he must have been for decades.
“1987, baby. Daveed Hewitt.”
She should’ve guessed as much, given his flattop haircut and his neon windbreaker.
“My roommate is obsessed with you,” Este blurted, soaking them all in. Vignettes of Radcliffe Prep’s past. “I mean—with ghosts.”
And she’d been right.
Este could tell Posy everything. About Mateo, the ghosts, the Fades. Her roommate probably already had some kind of Fade detector or a sachet of Fadesbane or something stashed away to make sure Este wouldn’t get her soul scooped out like a serving of stracciatella gelato while searching for the pages.
Or maybe it would be better to keep this to herself. She couldn’t, in good conscience, let Posy poke her gadgets into the Lilith’s every corner and cranny—not while the Fades were on the loose. She might get into the kind of trouble Este wasn’t sure she knew how to get her out of.
“I remember her,” Luca said, easing back onto her chaise with the grace of a classical goddess. For a moment she paused, drawing in a deep breath she didn’t need, and Este wondered if she expected to be fanned with palm leaves and hand-fed grapes. “That cute little redhead with the gizmos. She and her friends were snooping around the study rooms earlier. If she wanted to be friends, she should’ve just asked.”
Okay, it was official. There was absolutely no way Este would open that can of worms with Posy.
“Who’d want to be friends with you?” Daveed prodded. His laugh was as light and fleeting as soda bubbles.
Luca zipped a string of pearls around her neck and clicked her tongue behind her teeth. “Everyone knows I’m the life of the party.”
Este fought the smile that threatened to spill onto her lips. Seeing them like this, so lively, so genuine, made that permeating nauseated feeling come back with a vengeance. She wasn’t supposed to be making friends with them. She was here for answers, and that was all.
“Shouldn’t there be a few more of you?” Este dared farther into the room, settling on the lip of the leather sofa. “Lilith—is she here?”
All eyes turned to Mateo, and he shook his head. “She didn’t become a ghost, no.”
“What about my dad? After he died, did he ever come back here?” The sound of her question was small but somehow still too loud in the quiet study, competing only with the crackling firewood.
“Not everyone becomes a ghost.” Mateo’s voice was down-feather soft and warm, his gaze didn’t waver, and his words were measured as if expecting each syllable to shatter her. “Like the book said, the Fades took our souls and trapped us here. Only those of us who died at the hands of the Fades are ghosts, just a trace of who we’d been.”
Este gulped down the bitter taste of disappointment. She’d always known it was too much to hope for—that her dad was out there, somewhere, waiting for her. But she’d seen a lot of things tonight she would’ve sworn were impossible a week ago.
“So, what?” she asked. “You have to stay here? Forever? Haven’t you ever tried to leave?”
Mateo shook his head. “Henry did. 1937. He walked right out the front gates. Didn’t make it past the bend in the road before we watched him disappear, and he never came back.”
“It worked? He was set free?” Este scrubbed a hand over her forehead, checking for a low-grade fever that would explain why she was here debating the existence of ghosts.
“Darling,” Luca said, somehow patronizing, “if I walk out those gates, I’ll cease to exist. And I cannot become an unmarked grave.”
“Oh, yes, you deserve a shrine.” Aoife huffed a stiff sigh.
Luca stuck out her tongue.
Mateo dropped his satchel and joined Este on the couch. “Once Henry left, he couldn’t come back. To keep our physical forms, we have to stay at Radcliffe. We’re tied here to the Fades.” He curled his hands into circles, one in front of the other. “Imagine your body and soul are two rings. When you’re alive, they’re together in one perfect circle. When you die, they separate. Your soul leaves this world for the next, and your body stays behind. Cremated, buried in a casket—”
“Fed to sharks,” Daveed offered.
