The Library of Shadows

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.

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?