The Library of Shadows

Given the circumstances, the last thing Este wanted to do was go to a party.

“Dr. Kirk said we’ll get extra credit if we go,” Posy said as she paced around Este’s room, picking up scraps of fabric and dropping them back down when she decided they weren’t fashionable enough. “And it’s not a party, it’s an interactive trivia night sponsored by the history club.”

“Where there will be music and costumes and the need for small talk,” Este said. “Sounds like a party to me.”

Guilt thrummed along Este’s bones. In a perfect world (you know, one where she wasn’t actively being haunted), she wouldn’t have bailed on trivia night. She’d have willingly dressed up in whatever goofy ensemble costume Posy chose and sipped cider and gotten ten bonus points for attending. But in real life? Her waist ached beneath its fresh bandages, and the last thing she wanted to do was wipe on a smile and parade around the Lilith as if she hadn’t seen what lurked in the shadows.

Posy had no idea. She was wasting her time digging through the closet for an outfit Este wouldn’t wear. “Please, please, please come with us. It’ll be so much fun. The Paranormal Investigators are all dressing up as the school’s ghosts.”

Este’s eyes widened. “You’re what?”

“Yeah, like, I’m going as Aoife. I found the perfect necklace at a vintage shop in town. I wish you could’ve come with us, by the way.” She clawed through Este’s drawers, tossing bras and socks over her shoulders. A B-cup landed on Este’s head, and she shrugged it off with a scowl. “Arthur’s dressing up as Luca. Bryony’s coming too—did you two ever meet? Her costume is going to be amazing. And, there’s that ghost from the thirties named Henry, so that’s who Shep’s going as.”

“Tell me you’re kidding,” Este said. She even laughed because how could it be anything besides a joke, but Posy’s set jaw didn’t flinch. “You shouldn’t be trying to sniff out the ghosts. You don’t know what you’ll find or how dangerous it could be.”

“Yeah, but . . . that’s the whole point of being Paranormal Investigators.” Posy donned a confused smile. “And what about Mateo? Don’t you want to find him? I’m still convinced he’s your thief, you know.”

A knife twisted in Este’s gut. She’d definitely been avoiding him—but in her defense, she’d been avoiding basically everybody. The pages were still missing, her dad’s clues had led them to dead end after dead end, and every time she approached the senior lounge’s door, she’d turned around. What could she say to Mateo? Forget the demented a cappella group—the scariest part about all this is how much I miss you when you’re not around.

“Although, if you wanted to, maybe you could—”

“I’m not going, Posy.”

Posy stopped moving. One of Este’s sweatshirts fell from her fingers. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

The bleeding from the Fade’s touch may have finally clotted, but the radiating pain still spread like dandelion seeds floating through her body. She’d felt a pang in her shoulder, a throbbing in her knee, and a pinch in her head. They’d always subsided as quickly as they came, but her nerves had been a wreck, too. Every motion in her periphery looked like the decaying flesh of a Fade, even in broad daylight.

She kept telling herself that if the pain got worse, she’d tell Posy everything—the ivy nectar, the Fade attack, how she was right and Mateo Radcliffe was her thief, and how she couldn’t forget the way his hands felt on her skin. That’s what roommates were supposed to do, right? Trust each other? But now, she wasn’t sure if Posy would understand or if she’d simply add Este’s experience to her list of paranormal encounters without ever taking two seconds to consider the kind of danger she’d be in if she knew the truth. And if she realized that Este had been lying to her this whole time? She’d leave, and Este would be alone again.

Her roommate whined, “You only get two years at Radcliffe, and Ives is just going to trap you in those archives? Like you’re a prisoner? Like you’re a work mule?”

“Like I’m trying not to get expelled?” Este countered.

“You’re a babe who deserves to go to a party.”

“So, you admit that it’s a party?”

With a groan, her roommate closed the door behind her on the way out, throwing one more pleading glance over her shoulder before giving up, and Este circled her neck to ease the thousand pounds of built-up pressure. She dragged her textbook off the top of the pile. The pages fell open to the chapter she’d been reading—maybe because she’d fallen asleep with her cheek squished to the print at the circulation desk a few too many nights in a row.

The words fuzzed around the edges as Este tried to focus. Her eyes flitted toward the purple blooms on her windowsill yawning in the filtered moonlight. Este had swiped them from the senior lounge earlier this week when it looked like no one was around, and they’d managed to stay perky with their stems dipped in cool water. She hadn’t dared touch her tongue to the nectar again.

With their lilac petals outspread, dousing her room with their dizzying scent, Este couldn’t help but think of Mateo. They weren’t that different, he and the rivean ivy. Both of them held tight to what few threads of life they had left, and both were bound to land her in an awful lot of trouble if she wasn’t careful.

A fluke. That was what Mateo called it when his hand skimmed her cheek. The ivy had made him real to her. She could do it again if she wanted. Those honeyed blooms could draw her deeper into the veil between worlds, close enough to death to touch him, and all she had to do was taste another drop. Was the dry mouth, the hallucinations, the fever that threatened to burn her up worth the trail of his fingertips over her arms, her waist, her thighs?

She shook her head. Pull it together. Those flowers were supposed to be used for research purposes only, and she’d wasted the first one in the spire. Refocusing on her textbook, her eyes followed her index finger along the path of letters that, if she could screw her head on straight, were supposed to be teaching her about the invention of the Gutenberg printing press.

A knock on the front door jolted Este upright. Posy’s distant footsteps padded to the door, and voices faded through the dorm—she must have ushered the Paranormal Investigators into her room. Este eased back down with a groan, favoring her right side.

When she wrapped herself in her blankets, a frozen gust swirled through her bedroom as if her windows had come unlatched and let in the night. Her door eased open with a mind of its own.

The Fades couldn’t be here. She had never seen them outside the Lilith, but Este pinched her eyes closed. I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.

She waited to open them until the draft passed, warmth returning to her extremities, but when she did, a figure appeared next to her on the bed.

A scream tore up Este’s throat. She clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle it as soon as she recognized the slope of Mateo’s broad shoulders, the rebellious curls dripping over his forehead.

Posy burst through the bedroom door, and Mateo blotted out as quickly as he’d appeared.

“Oh, you’re still in bed,” she said, deflating. She’d fastened a long, black wig to her head and now brushed one of the loose strands from her face. “I thought maybe you decided to come and burned yourself with your curling iron or something.”

Este forced a feeble grin. “Sorry, false alarm.”

Arthur, Shepherd, and a girl Este vaguely recognized from the Safety and Security office trailed in behind Posy. A bloated silence filled the room, pressing uncomfortably against them. Este shifted her eyes to Bryony and asked, “Who are you dressed as?”

Bryony wore a black shirt with a high-neck collar that looked more like Wednesday Addams than any of the ghosts Este had met. Her sleek brown hair had been piled on top of her head and tied with a thin black ribbon, and she teetered in platform heels that looked like a nightmare for waltzing across Radcliffe’s cobblestone paths.

Bryony straightened her shoulders. “Lilith Radcliffe.”

“Cool,” Este said, training her voice to be even despite the way Mateo shuffled on the sheets next to her. Could they tell? Besides, she doubted the real Lilith frequented glitter eye shadow and a cat-eye liner sharp enough to kill in the early twentieth century. “Well. I’ll be here. You all have fun.”

When the Paranormal Investigators drifted back into the living room, Mateo reappeared, and his outline had a hard edge—his presence strong, even this far from the Lilith. It was dark in her room, and the remnants of the ivy nectar in her system must have made him look more real. He flashed an easy grin as he sank deeper into the bedding. “She looked absolutely nothing like my sister.”

“You know, most people start with hello?”

“Hello, Este, dear.” He stretched his arms behind his head. Este hated how comfortable he looked on her bed, but she hated worse how she didn’t even really hate it at all.

Seeing him here in her bedroom, surrounded by her stuff—her wrinkled photographs and gas-station postcards, her half-empty coffee mugs, and her bookshelf crowded with fables plucked from trips she and her father took to the secondhand bookstore on Twelfth Street—felt like an optical illusion. He belonged to the Lilith’s mahogany shelves like dust illuminated in streaks of crescent moonlight, not hogging half the square footage of her twin-size bed.

Este shook out a breath and tried to loosen the worried knot tucked under her sternum. Mateo had to have a reason for showing up unannounced, and reasons like that weren’t usually good ones.

“Why are you—”

“I wanted to make sure—”

They both clamped their mouths shut, waiting. Finally, Este cleared her throat with a flimsy cough. “Sorry, what were you going to say?”

Mateo fiddled with the button on his sleeve. Before she remembered he couldn’t blush, Este half expected to see a swath of red wash over his cheeks. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought he was nervous. “I wanted to make sure you were doing okay.” His eyes dragged to the vulnerable hollow of her waist and back up.

Tonight, the nail marks burned low and slow, only registering in the deepest creases of her mind. If she didn’t move the wrong way, she could almost forget they were there until a stray twinge spiked. Frankly, she’d had worse period cramps.

“I’m fine,” she said as she thumbed through the pages of her textbook. “Just trying to cram in some extra studying since Ives gave me the night off for the history club party.”

Mateo peered around her knees to see the cover of her textbook, and he cocked an eyebrow at the title. “If you need help, I know a little bit about history.”

Este groaned, leaning her skull against the headboard. “I could bomb all my classes and it wouldn’t even matter if I’m going to get expelled anyway.”

“You’re catastrophizing,” he said gently.

“It is, by definition, a catastrophe.” The words were a block of ice in her throat. She didn’t want to believe it could really happen, but midterms were coming up quickly, her grades were still shot, and they were no closer to solving her dad’s riddles than before.

“Maybe a distraction, then?” He fumbled in the leather satchel he’d dropped next to the bedframe and retrieved The Book of Fades. “There might be something else in here that will help us know where Dean would’ve left the pages. I thought you might want to try again.”

The memory of saccharine ivy coated her tongue. “I think we both saw how well that worked out. That stuff is practically ghost booze.”

Mateo angled toward her. “I think you mean boos.”

Este tucked her laugh down inside, folding it neatly against all the other things left unsaid. She pressed her cheeks between her hands to feel the smile on her face, one that didn’t care how stupid it was that she actually liked being around a century-old phantom.

It had been easy enough to convince herself that pushing him away was the smartest thing to do when she’d been able to keep him at a safe distance—far enough away that neither of them would get hurt. But here, next to him, it was impossible to want to be anywhere else. Being near him made her heart beat faster and her head feel light—intoxication by osmosis.

“Wait.” Este’s head whipped toward the moonlit night outside her window. “Maybe there’s another way. Osmosis.”

Mateo’s forehead wrinkled. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”

Este peeled herself off the bed and drew a single blossom from the vase on her window ledge. The smell alone was enough to make her knees weak, or maybe that was from the soft underbelly of Mateo’s gaze as it followed the swing of her hips back to the sea of duvets. She flipped the book open to a page near the back where the rough hem of her dad’s stolen chapter lined the spine.

The pages looked gray today, as if a faint wash of ink had spilled over them. Still, the words were invisible to Este, but if she squinted . . . no, she was just tired, her eyes scratchy.

“What if I don’t drink it? Like, a contact high,” Este said. She pinched the node in the center of the bloom and extracted the droplet of nectar. Maybe the deadly poison in its DNA could lift the ink through the veil for her to read without her ingesting the nectar. This would either go incredibly well or horribly, destructively wrong. Her eyes darted to Mateo’s face. “Do you trust me?”

“Explicitly.”

The bead of sap seeped into The Book of Fades’s ancient pages.

Mateo stifled a surprised gasp with a fistful of knuckles. “Never mind. I take it back.”

“Too late,” Este whispered. As the nectar’s dark trail crawled toward the edges of the page, spreading across the parchment, she hoped she didn’t regret it. Even if she didn’t flunk out, Ives would never let her stay an archival assistant if she knew she’d defiled the very book she was supposed to be returning safely.

Este splayed her hand against the damp page, delicately turning it to make sure it hadn’t stained through. The nectar stuck to her palm, the crevices between her fingers, the skin under her nails, but at least she wasn’t hallucinating. Unfortunately, nothing else was happening either.

Her shoulders drooped. “I thought that maybe it would, I don’t know, activate the ink or something.” She flipped the cover closed. “It was a long shot anyway.”

“No, wait.” Mateo’s finger caught the page and reopened the book, his face somehow paler than usual. He squinted at the pilled paper, heavy brows knitting themselves closer together. “Something’s happening.”

The wilting blossom slipped from Este’s fingers. “It is?”

He put his face mere millimeters from the parchment. “The ink is fading. I can still read it, but it’s faint.”

Este skimmed the page from corner to corner, searching for a hint of something beneath the ivy’s dew. She counted the seconds in Mississippis, the way she and her mom would measure thunderstorms. When nothing happened by the time she reached ten, she was about ready to drip the remnants of the rivean ambrosia into her mouth out of desperation. But then a pen stroke appeared, thin and weak but there indisputably, and Este clutched the book closer.

Word after word manifested on the parchment like morning glories under dawn’s first light. The light gray text was tiny, Latin, and pushed aside by diagram boxes with captions and dictionary entries for words she’d never seen before.

“This is it,” she breathed. This was what her dad read in the spire thirty years ago. What might have convinced him to steal the pages and run.

Mateo’s fingers found hers, and he coiled their hands together. With the nectar coating her palm, he was solid in her grasp. He brought her finger to his lips, brushing the skin of her knuckle gently there.

A match strike lit in Este’s stomach, and the embers wound along a wick, one that would explode with either flames or fireworks, but there was only one way to find out. Heat rushed through her body, even from the smallest touch.

“Life and death together,” Mateo read, “create the complete human experience—no one without the other. What, then, perseveres? Like an oath sworn in blood, love ties the living to the dead, for you cannot know darkness without first knowing light.”

As Mateo translated each line into English, the words were still unfamiliar to her—love was just another dead language. He turned page after page in the study of shadows, and his thumb traced lazy circles on her hand in time with the cadence of each sentence. Este’s eyes locked on the shape of his lips, the vowels and the hard consonants, like she would find all the answers she ever needed on them.