The Library of Shadows, page 9
Este nodded, focusing on the shape of Mateo’s hands—now held on either side of his face—rather than the darkness edging her vision like she might pass out at any moment. This was all too much.
“But when the Fades attacked us, they took half our souls as sacrifices.” Mateo overlapped his hands so that they were neither wholly together nor apart.
“They killed you.” Este blinked, processing. “But no one ever found you. Your bodies, I mean.”
“You’re looking at them,” Aoife said.
Mateo nodded. “What’s left of both our bodies and souls are tethered here, trapped between realms. Shadows of who we used to be.”
“That’s why you can’t touch anything living.” Este rubbed at her temples, trying to sift through every crooked piece of the puzzle. “Your bodies are dead, but what’s left of your souls is still alive. Like, you’re stuck in the center of the world’s worst Venn diagram.”
Aoife flipped another page in her book, barely glazing over the words. Este could only imagine how many times she’d read it. “Exactly.”
“So much better than the alternative, though.” Luca twirled a strand of hair around her finger, bored.
“Everyone else left. All the other ghosts, they moved on like Henry.” Este chewed on the edge of a fingernail. She really hated that this was making sense. “But you four haven’t. Because you want to come back to life someday.”
“By George, she’s got it!” Mateo clapped his hands together and pushed himself off the couch.
The faint glimpse of teeth Este flashed was probably more grimace than grin. Her brain hurt. It felt like an ice pick had been jabbed behind her eyes. Repeatedly. She needed to rewire her entire consciousness, reboot her system.
She glanced at her phone’s timer: five minutes to go.
There was one more thing she needed to know before she left, one nagging fear clinging like caramel to her molars: “Am I the only one who can see ghosts?”
Luca chimed a stream of lilting giggles, making Este’s stomach turn to curdled milk.
Aoife’s steadfast voice broke through, saying, “No, of course you’re not. Anyone can see us if we want them to.”
A layer of pressure evaporated off Este’s chest. “Haven’t people noticed you haven’t graduated? Don’t people come up here to study?”
“Not many, no. Rumor has it, the senior lounge is haunted,” Mateo said with a wide smile and a wink.
It happened all at once, like a flame being snuffed out. One moment, the ghosts were there, and the next Este sat alone, surrounded by an empty velvet chaise, a vacant tartan chair, and a leather love seat. All that remained was a fading fire desperate to be stoked.
Even though she couldn’t see the ghosts, the air was thick with their presence, the hair on her arms standing on edge. Electric, almost. Daveed laughed from nowhere. Aoife’s book fanned to the next page, seemingly floating above the seat of her chair. Squinting, Este could make out the slightest silver outline of Mateo’s shoulders in the firelight.
She was definitely going to hurl.
“Alright, alright. One thing at a time,” Mateo said, flashing back into view. He commanded the room, understated but respected. Like whatever he said, they’d do. “She’s had a lot to process since our little run-in with the Fades.”
The rest of the ghosts flashed back to reality, and Aoife’s eyebrows had raised precariously high. “They really are back?”
Mateo nodded. “They haven’t changed a bit since the nineties.”
Luca made a disgusted grunt. “Someone should really tell them that brown lip liner is so out.”
The book in Aoife’s hands closed with a snap. She stood, pacing, and said, “I’m pretty sure the Fades don’t care that they look a little outdated, Lu. They haven’t taken a sacrifice in thirty years. They’re out of practice.”
Luca flashed Mateo a saccharine smile, sweet and light but sour underneath. “Your parents, may they rest in peace, can kindly kiss my round behind when I finally make it out of this purgatory. I don’t care if they never opened The Book of Fades; they should’ve never brought it here.”
Mateo ignored Luca’s harping and returned his sights to Este. His gaze was so pointed it ran shivers down her arms. “The last time the Fades appeared was the year Dean Logano locked the spire door. Since then, nothing. Until now.”
“But now that we have the book back, it could almost be over, right?” Daveed asked. His face turned to stone, hardened around the edges. “Do you have any idea how much I miss french fries?”
Este picked at her cuticles, worry spreading through her body like a windstorm. A migraine clawed at the corners of her mind. Whatever her dad had done in the spire, maybe he had accidentally stopped the Fades, sure, but he had also stopped these ghosts from finding their way back to the living. How had he gotten wrapped up in all this? And how on earth was she supposed to know how to fix it?
Before she could say anything else, her phone’s alarm sang the brass intro to “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire. It was her favorite song, one she inherited from her dad. Hearing it always took her back to the kitchen, him spinning her and her mom around, all of them sliding in socked feet.
“That’s my cue.” Este thumbed off the music. She pushed up from the sofa cushions and dusted off her jeans. “I’ll be here, like, every night, so maybe I’ll see you around.”
A bloated beat swelled through the lounge. Aoife looked at Luca who looked at Daveed who looked at Mateo, like they all knew some inside joke Este didn’t know and probably didn’t want to be a part of.
Mateo flashed into view across the room. She would not be getting used to that. He hauled open the green door. “I’ll walk you downstairs.”
“You’ve done more than enough tonight,” she said sourly.
“I insist.” He donned a wild smile, a glimmer in his dark blue eyes like gold on the bottom of the seafloor. The kind that made Este’s knees feel gooey without her permission.
The door latched behind them, but Este didn’t wait for him. She plunged into the stacks, weaving through the shelves toward the cedar staircase as fast as her feet would carry her. She must have had mountains of work collecting on the circulation desk that needed to get done tonight.
“Este, hold on!” Mateo called after her.
Este spun on her heels. She did not have time for this. “Look, I get it. We find the pages and get rid of the Fades. Bada bing, bada boom. I get to stay at Radcliffe, and you get a life. Or is getting me fired also a part of your big plan?”
Mateo’s hands gripped the shelves on either side of them. “I don’t have a plan. If we can’t find the pages now, we’ll have to wait another ten years for the Fades to return. If they return. And if they’re gone, the tether to our souls is gone, too. This might be our only chance. The others . . . I can’t let them down again.”
Este watched for a flinch in his stance, a nervous flicker in his features, but there was none. He stood perfectly still, peering down at her with a seriousness washed clean of performative arrogance. His posture had lost every ounce of pomp and circumstance and replaced it with something a lot like desperation.
“Why now? Why’d they come back?” Este still had over an hour left of her shift, and she knew that every time she closed her eyes, she’d see those gory hands reaching toward her in the dark. “Are the other students in danger? Am I?”
An anvil hit her chest when Mateo didn’t protest.
“I’m afraid so,” he said, after much too long. “I don’t know who or how they attack, but I know they’re confined to the walls of the library. Stay out of the shadows as much as possible. If you hear them singing, just run—don’t listen and don’t look back.”
Her voice wavered. “What do I do if they find me again?”
“I’ll be there,” he said without hesitating.
And, damn it, despite herself, Este believed him. If he wanted to let the Fades have their way with her, he could’ve left her in the classroom. She was stubborn, but she wasn’t stupid enough to think she would’ve made it out alive without him. Even the thought of the Fades’ song sent fear spiking through her heart like a stake in the earth.
Almost as much as the familiar cadence of Ives’s heels currently climbing up the stairwell did. The telltale sign of Este about to get her ass chewed out by the one woman who held the fate of her academic career in her painstakingly manicured hands.
“Don’t say a word of this to Ives,” Mateo said, dropping his voice so that she had to lean in to hear him. He swiped a few books from the shelves and piled them in her arms. “About the book, about me. Act like you lost track of time shelving books, and that’s all.”
Then, Este stood alone.
At least, it looked like she was alone. She swiveled her head side to side, searching for any evidence of his presence, a faint outline or the wafting smell of Vermont cedar, like a candle that had just been blown out.
“Mateo?” she whispered.
Only the click of footsteps drawing nearer answered. She dragged in a deep breath, ready to face Ives, but Este stepped forward right as Mateo’s chest appeared back into reality mere inches from her nose.
“Yes?” he asked with a lopsided grin.
Este skittered backward, yelping, and immediately clamped a hand over her mouth. She peeled her palm away from her lips long enough to hiss, “What are you doing?”
“You called me? Would you rather I ignore you?”
“What? No. I mean, yes, actually. But you—” Este blew a stiff breath out through her nose. He somehow always managed to short-circuit her. “Get out of here.”
Mateo laughed, loud enough that Este was terrified Ives would hear and accuse her of having fun when she was supposed to be groveling for her forgiveness.
Instinctively, she pressed a finger over her mouth and shushed him.
He cocked his head with a smile. “You’ll make a great librarian yet, Este Logano.”
He vanished, and alone again, Este placed the books he handed her back on the shelf where they belonged. She tried to ignore the crescendo of Ives’s footsteps, tried to pretend like she’d been doing this, exactly this, for hours.
Ives announced her arrival with a clipped tsk. “Remember to straighten the books at the front of the shelf, not the back.”
Este gave a tight-lipped smile, scooting the books to the edge. “Right, of course.”
“How has everything gone tonight? I wanted to see if you were surviving your first night, since I know a new job can be quite daunting.”
Understatement of the century.
Ives nudged a few books into perfect alignment and raised her eyebrows. Waiting.
Oh, right.
“Fine, great. It’s been totally, completely normal tonight.” Este slotted the last book onto the shelf. “Practically a walk in the park.”
Behind Ives, Mateo faded back into her line of sight, hazy around the edges. He lowered both his hands as if to say, Simmer down, Logano. Even Ives raised an eyebrow. Este had laid it on way too thick.
“Not that I haven’t been working hard,” Este hurried to say. “These books don’t shelve themselves.”
Mateo gave a thumbs-up, and his form fizzled out. Could he mind his own business for once in his afterlife?
“I see. Anything you have questions about before I head out?” Ives asked.
“No, but actually,” Este said, riffling through the back of her mind for anything that could convince Ives she wasn’t an utter slacker, “I do need to get back downstairs to check in the books from the night drop.”
As they wound down the staircase, Este scanned floor by floor for malign shadows and listened for stray voices in the halls, searching for any trace of the Fades’ flesh-bare hands reaching for her. At the foot of the stairs, Ives bid Este good night with a yawn, and once the head librarian swept out into the rain-damp night, all that was left was Este and the library and a heaping stack of returned books waiting to be checked in and reshelved. After everything she’d done tonight, this was the easy part. This was where she belonged. No matter what Mateo said, this was her only mission.
Find the stolen pages, resurrect a few ghosts, get the book back, and clear her name.
Easy enough, right?
Eleven
“Why are you making this so difficult?” Este whined to the circulation computer.
The program the Lilith used for its circulation records probably predated Este’s entire existence, and let’s face it, the early 2000s were not known for their phenomenal digital prowess. When the page refused to load, she dropped her head against the desk. It had been two days since her brush with the Fades, but she was no closer to finding the missing pages—and much closer to single-handedly filing for a grant to update these dinosaurs to iMacs.
Tonight, the library’s first floor was dead quiet. The thing about a college-prep school was that students were supposed to actually prepare for college. The curriculum did not take that lightly. If she listened over the constant whir of the computer’s fan, she could hear clicking laptop keyboards and the occasional “Do we cite in MLA or APA format?” between friends.
“Working hard or hardly working?”
Mateo’s disembodied voice was the last thing she wanted to hear. She answered him with a grunt, refusing to lift her head.
“A bit of both, I see.”
He settled next to her. She could tell only by the way the air shifted and the wisps of hair that wouldn’t stay in her ponytail tickled the back of her neck—when she rolled her head to peek one eye open, his body was nowhere to be found.
Fine by her. She didn’t care to see him or his annoyingly long eyelashes right now. Even if she’d never admit it out loud, some part of her (deep, deep down) appreciated that Mateo hadn’t made himself scarce. He’d crept into her orbit during both shifts since the Fades fiasco.
Thankfully, she hadn’t run into the Fades again since then either, but she’d found every excuse not to trek to the third floor. Just in case.
After she refreshed the page, a shoddy HTML version of the program buffered but nothing more. Patience was not one of her many virtues. Choosing the lesser of two annoyances, she said to Mateo, “I’m trying to run the catalog for every book in section DL97.”
The stapler, the tape dispenser, and the bottle of book-repair glue from her desk scooted across the table as if pulled by invisible strings. Then, the floating desk accessories began to juggle. Thank goodness her classmates were packed into the upstairs study carrels, too busy with the quarter’s first essays to wonder if Este had mastered the power of telekinesis or too sleepy to protest.
“Consider it a loan. DL97. Library book call number.” Mateo hummed, a thinking sound. “Okay, Holmes. I see where you’re going here.”
It wasn’t a bad guess. And, more importantly, it was the only lead they had. So, here she was, just a girl, sitting in front of the oldest computer she’d ever seen, asking it to show her some answers.
Finally, the computer speakers dinged. Este read the flashing black number at the top of the screen with a sigh she felt in her bones. “2,637 results.”
Mateo asked, “Wouldn’t it be just as easy to go to the second floor yourself to look through them?”
“If you want to look through all 2,637 books, be my guest.” Este clicked on the first book. The computer moaned in response as it loaded the new page. “In fact, I think you should get a head start.”
Mateo blinked into view. Even wrapped in a school sweatshirt and a turtleneck, Este shivered as his sudden appearance sent goose bumps down her arms. His existence was an ice-bath shock to her nervous system.
He caught the office supplies he’d been juggling and set them back on the desk. “You can’t get rid of me that easily.”
Said the boy who could quite literally disappear on command.
Este had finally begun to memorize where everything at the circ desk belonged. Tape dispenser: top-left desk drawer. Recycling can: under the Ellison machine. Flashlight: bottom drawer on the right. She had to shake the flashlight until the batteries lodged into place and the bulb ignited, but once it did, she pointed the beam at Mateo’s chest. Nothing happened.
When Mateo laughed, it tugged at Este’s seams, daring her to unravel. All these years spent trapped at the library, caught between dead and alive, and he still laughed like it didn’t matter.
From his pocket, he retrieved his matchbox and lit a solitary flame. When he cupped his palm around it, his hand faded out of sight. “Nice try, but synthetic light does nothing. It takes the real thing, right from the source. That’s what sees through us.”
He blew out the match, and Este waved away the smoke.
“The point is,” she huffed, “that we have to start somewhere.”
Mateo squinted at the computer screen. “And you want to start with Swedish-meatball recipes?”
Apparently, the Library of Congress classification system’s code for DL97 corresponded with Scandinavian history from 1900 to 1918. So, technically, they were historically accurate Swedish-meatball recipes.
“I don’t see you coming up with any better ideas,” Este snapped. They’d spent the last two shifts going back and forth about whether Consider it a loan meant the pages or The Book of Fades itself, but the pocket for the book’s borrowing card was empty, and none of its circulation records had been digitized—if it had ever circulated at all. Which left Este grasping at the second half of the clue, a rogue call number.
“1900 to 1918,” Mateo said, sighing. He hoisted himself onto the desk, bending one knee up so he could rest his arm on it. “Those were the good old days.”
It was also, conveniently, a time when the Radcliffes could have returned from an overseas trip with an incredibly cursed book. “What are the chances your parents went to Sweden?”
“After the Titanic? Zero. Before . . .” He considered this, bobbing his head on his shoulders like a grandfather clock. “It’s possible. They’d travel periodically, always leaving us at home and always coming back with trunks of books, these books.”
If she wasn’t careful, it would be all too easy to think of Mateo as any other classmate instead of the ghost of the founder’s son. She had admittedly gotten used to having him linger in her periphery. The same way she’d gotten used to wearing her first thong—she didn’t necessarily enjoy it, but it served its purposes.
