The Library of Shadows

The spire looked almost exactly how Este left it: moon-steeped and mesmerizing. A deeply floral scent swirled through the air as purple blossoms fanned their petals and stretched toward the bloated full moon.

Mateo was practically glued to Este’s side. He kept peering down at her, concern etched into the lines of his face, and Este made a pointed effort not to look back at him as he said, “Drinking nectar from a poisonous plant, Logano? Not exactly scholastic research.”

“Mr. Donohue would beg to differ.” They waded through the shelves to an east-facing window. A bouquet of blossoms clustered at the sill. “According to him, translation inherently changes the contextual meaning of writing. This is my chance to read the words just like my dad did. And, plus, maybe it’s not even that poisonous.”

“It is,” Aoife chimed from her other side. The rest of the ghosts insisted that they joined Este and Mateo for the spire escapade since their lives literally depended on it, which meant Aoife had appointed herself as director of poison control. She dipped into her knapsack and retrieved the slim, blue text of herbal remedies that Este’s dad had checked out. Her finger trailed along the ink as she read. “Rivean ivy is known to cause mild to moderate irritation when coming in contact with skin.”

Este raised her eyebrows. See? Not so bad.

Aoife turned the page. “It says that the nectar, when ingested, is a virulent poison capable of causing fatigue, increased heart rate, hallucinations, delirium.”

“So,” Este tried, “like a hangover?”

Aoife snapped the book closed. “And even death.”

Okay, she got the point. Her stomach lurched like when she’d finished a bowl of bad clams on Cape May, and she pinched her lips together, biting back the taste of bile. “I guess that’s to be expected. Trying to read the language of the dead, and all that.”

Aoife faded back toward the others, admonishing Daveed about not disrupting the archives, and Mateo pivoted toward Este. The moon cast his features in a dewy light.

“You don’t have to do this.” Mateo’s voice was cautious, a whisper against the snowbanks to keep from instigating an avalanche.

“I need to know what he saw.” Este’s resolved hardened as she said it. She couldn’t speak the whole truth—that some buried part of her hoped maybe there was something written that would only make sense to her, that she was the only one who could piece together her father’s clues. That drinking the nectar would bring her closer to him.

Hopefully in the metaphorical, emotional way and not the physically unliving way.

“What if it’s a mistake we can’t undo?” Did Mateo’s voice crack? He brushed a hand across the skin of his neck, shaking his head.

A smirk crawled up Este’s lips. “Are you worried about me?”

Since she couldn’t reach out and touch him, to plant a hand on his rising shoulders or smooth her thumb over his cheek, she instead clutched the spire key. Mateo glanced toward its intricate carving, the sharp teeth.

“You’re extraordinarily troublesome,” he said with a smile that made her heart thud twice as hard.

She had to turn away before she said something she regretted. Like how there was a smaller voice in her head—an intrusive thing she hadn’t asked for—whispering that if the nectar thinned the veil between worlds enough to let her read the language of the dead, it might also bring her closer to Mateo. Close enough to hold his hands or loop one of his curls around her finger.

Este took a vine between her fingers, and sticky sap coated her skin, oozing from the ivy’s pores as she plucked the blooms off one by one. But when she separated bud from vine, the petals withered into useless brown ribbons.

“You can’t pick them?” she asked.

Mateo stepped forward. He rested his palm on the shelf next to Este’s head, leaning toward her. “Este, maybe we should—”

There was a bouquet of vibrant purple by his leather shoes, and she lunged right through Mateo’s body to reach them.

Mateo shook out his bones. “It’s like I’m invisible.”

As Este crouched down, she dug Ives’s letter opener from her back pocket. She’d swiped it from her desk this afternoon so that they could return the key again once they were finished with it. Using the sharp end of the gold tool, Este sliced through the greenery and uprooted the cluster, vine and all.

She and Mateo met the others in the middle of the spire where the bookcases created a space wide enough for a desk with a high-backed chair. Este cradled the flowers in her palm. Eight petite blossoms with their mouths open, a well of ambrosia in the middle. “Someone brought the antidote, right?”

Luca laughed, a sound like cut glass. “This is preposterous. Let us read the book to you.”

“She’s right. You could die,” Daveed said.

Este scoffed. “Says the literal ghost.”

“I’m with them.” Aoife moved a piece of hair behind her ear so that Este had to look into the hardened steel of both gray eyes. For emphasis, no doubt. She gripped the pendant at her neck like a crystalline safeguard. “The energy is all wrong in there.”

“The antidote?” Este asked again.

Daveed shrugged, tapping an envelope in the side pocket of his JanSport. “I had to sneak into the cafeteria to get it all. Even with it, I still think this is a terrible idea.”

Este shifted toward Mateo. She raised her eyebrows as if to say, Back me up, Radcliffe. If he went along with it, they all would. It was evident in the way their feet and shoulders angled toward him—the sun to their summer blooms.

He wrung his hands out. “We don’t know how long the effects last or how quickly it’ll work.”

If she tried a drop of nectar now, she’d still have plenty more chances.

“We shouldn’t even be up here,” Aoife said sternly. The voice of reason. “At least wait until you’re in a controlled environment.”

But the blossoms’ honeyed scent pulled Este in. If she didn’t try it now, all her bravado would evaporate. Mateo must have read it in her eyes because he sighed and said, “Hand her the book.”

Aoife huffed as she pried The Book of Fades from her backpack but made a point to hold on to it for the time being. Like raising a glass for a champagne toast the way people did at weddings in the movies, Este lifted a bloom in front of her. “To my father.”

And the ghosts echoed, “To Dean.”

Este pinched the dark purple nodule at the center of the flower. As she extracted it, a globe of golden nectar gathered at the end of the stem.

It happened all at once. Heat flared on Este’s tongue where the sap dripped. Citrus and rich vanilla, a taste unlike anything she’d ever had, spread through her mouth and sent static through her limbs. A flush climbed her neck, her cheeks. The tips of her fingers tingled.

“Do you feel anything?” Luca asked, her round eyes growing wider somehow.

Aoife’s nose was back in her herb book. “Temperature rising? Heart racing? Impaired vision?”

“D,” Este said, the word trailing from her lips too slowly. A dreamy haze edged her vision, casting everything in an ethereal glow. “All of the above.”

She put her hands to her mouth, feeling the stretched skin of swollen lips, and her eyes sank half-lidded. When she looked at Mateo, he was wreathed in opalescent light despite the dense clouds outside. An ember glowing in the night. Her torchlight out of the darkness.

“Her pupils are dilated,” Aoife said, scribbling something. Her voice was a message in a bottle, floating away.

Mateo was the only clear thing in a world of star-webbed wonder. If she focused on the architecture of him—his pointed arch brows, his starched white shirt and the barrel vault curve of his shoulders beneath—she could stand steady.

Luca asked, “Este, can you check your pulse?”

Este dutifully put two fingers on her wrist. “One, two, three . . . four . . . eight, ten, twelve, um, seventeen. One hundred.”

But her gaze didn’t move from Mateo, and his eyes didn’t leave hers. He was handsome, so handsome. Was that the ivy talking? No, she definitely thought he was cute. Why try to deny it? Maybe she’d kiss him. She wanted to feel his hands on her. Why did he have to be soooooo dead?

Este reached for him, and when she moved her arms, they were weightless. Her hand caught on a bookshelf beside him instead. She blinked once, twice. That wasn’t where she meant it to go. A confetti giggle lifted out of her. Sweat clung to her body, burning her up from the inside out.

More. She wanted more. Another drop of ambrosia. Another taste of eternity.

“I think you’ve had quite enough for one night,” Mateo said, handing the ivy blossoms off to Daveed, who tucked them in his backpack. Had she spoken? Her lips were hot, smiling. She couldn’t stop laughing. “Why don’t you sit down and try to read?”

Este aimed for the desk chair. The bookcases she bounced against kept her upright. “Thank you,” she said to them, bowing to their sturdy mahogany.

Her swirling thoughts were interrupted by a click, click, click that struck a Pavlovian spear of fear through her heart, even as it trampolined around her chest.

“It’s Ives,” she breathed, pressing her hands to each side of her head to stop the pounding. “I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead.”

“You gotta get her out of here, chief,” Daveed said, shaken. “We’ll make a distraction.”

Mateo nodded in slow motion. Or maybe that was Este’s brain working in slow-mo. His mouth was moving, but she couldn’t hear him. She couldn’t listen past the tide of blood in her ears, like she was wading through her own mind to reach the shores of consciousness. Next to him, the other ghosts vanished one by one until he, alone, stood in the doorway beckoning.

A crash echoed through the stairwell, and Ives’s clicking heels stopped. When they resumed, they grew farther and farther away with each resounding step.

“Nice work, Daveed,” Mateo whispered.

Este closed the spire door behind her, locking it after a few missed tries, and stumbled down the stairs once Mateo confirmed the coast was clear. Which would have been way easier if she weren’t kind of drunk right now.

Out on the fifth floor, the study carrels were empty. Light poured from beneath glass green table lamps, all of it streaking together in one long-exposure blur as Este whipped around corner after corner, following Mateo.

A pantsuit stopped them in their tracks. Ives stood against the balcony railing, her arms crossed and steam practically pouring out of her ears. The look of a woman who knew the spire key was missing. Again. No one was coming or going around the fifth floor without her seeing them. And they had about thirty seconds before she spied them at the base of the spire, guilt written all over their faces.

“If she finds out I stole her key—” The rest of Este’s sentence was swallowed up by a hiccup.

“This way,” Mateo said, yanking down a copy of Wuthering Heights, and it opened a door into a hidden hallway. “Left, down, down, right, up. We’ll come back up to the fifth floor closer to the senior lounge, so she won’t see us, okay?”

Este had become so used to plunging into dark corridors that she barely stopped to wonder if she’d get a face full of spiderweb. She chanted his directions over and over in her head, and Mateo was back by her side as soon as he clamped the door closed.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Great,” Este said, holding on to a rickety banister for dear life as they raced down two consecutive stairwells. “No, bad. I don’t know. I can’t feel my face.”

“Daveed has the antidote. You’ll be okay.” When they reached a fork in the hallway, Mateo nudged open a hatch that they had to crawl to access. “Stay close,” she heard him say, but then she’d lost sight of him. The room was so dark Este couldn’t see her hand in front of her. Where were they?

In the back of her mind, a song started playing, crackling to life like a needle pressed to vinyl. Este swayed, eyes drifting closed. She hummed the melody, lazy legato notes. She’d heard it before, but where?

“This is my favorite song,” she said, a sloppy string of syllables. She spun and spun, hands lifted overhead. Maybe she could reach the stars, dangle off the crescent moon. Instead, she got swept up in a cold front.

When Este pried open her eyes, she didn’t see Mateo, but a candlestick lit in the distance and some blessed part of her brain that hadn’t been inhibited by the nectar recognized the dimly lit bookshelves as the archives.

“Este, this way!” Mateo called.

Out of the black formed three ghoulish figures.

She rubbed her eyes as if to scrub away the flower’s toxins and blot out the Fades, but it didn’t work. They were there, not a hallucination but truly there and wrapped in a haze she couldn’t shake.

Nausea churned in her stomach. She lurched down the aisle toward Mateo’s voice and the light from the candlestick. The Fades’ song cut through the ivy’s trance, and this time when their chorus echoed, Este understood. They sang for her.

“The dying light with shadowed hands will spin you in eternal dance.”

Este might have been drunk off nectar but hearing their clanging stanzas weave into words she could actually understand was enough to rattle some sense through her thick skull. She’d never live it down if she died at the hands of a few velour-clad sorority girls that doubled as supernatural hit men.

As their black fog swept through the bookcases around her, Este’s feet pounded against the splintered floors. She had to reach Mateo, but her feet tangled in themselves. Her knees hit the hardwood first, then her hands. Ives’s key scattered across the floor, ricocheting against the bookcases.

Este begged her legs to stand up. Her knees wobbled as she trudged forward, but the black crept closer, too.

“What blooms tonight, a secret sworn, and you are ours until the morn.”

The Fades lunged, zagging through the archives. They split up, each disappearing behind different bookcases. Este dragged herself toward the door, case by case, until suddenly, Mateo was next to her, flickering in the candlelight. He held The Book of Fades under her nose.

He was saying something, but his face swam in and out of focus. His eyes were ocean deep and wide with panic as the Fades’ cold crept closer and closer.

“Este,” he pleaded, “grab on to the book and don’t let go.” Her fingers found the leather binding, and she latched on. With the text clutched between her hands, Mateo dragged the book upward and Este along with it. “Just because I can’t touch you doesn’t mean I can’t help you.”

As they ran, cold lashed at Este’s ankles, frostbite licking at her skin. An ink-black tendril blew out the candelabra Mateo clutched; their only source of light reduced to smoke. Beads of sweat dabbed at her forehead despite the plummet in temperature.

Mateo jerked right, and Este’s hand slid off the book. Her hesitation was enough. The Fades’ frontwoman pounced with her hands outstretched, and even through the haze of the ivy, Este felt a sharp, hot pain under her ribs as those horrible, hot pink acrylic nails clawed down her side. She collapsed, and her breath came in jagged heaves, scraping for air beneath a corpse-cold tide of darkness.

Miles away, Este heard Mateo yell. Her nails dug into the floor, and she pulled herself upright, staggering down the aisle, guided by touch alone. One hand pressed to her side and the other felt along the bookshelves. Mateo must have opened the archives’ door because the dim light from the third floor suddenly pooled in front of her. Almost there. Almost there.

As soon as Este barreled out of the archives, wisps of black reached and recoiled. They curled back into the darkness, and Mateo slammed the door shut.

Acid flared where the Fade’s hand struck, and Este gulped down air, but it wasn’t enough. She burned from the inside out. As everything faded to black, she could still hear the Fades singing, “You are ours.”