The Library of Shadows

It was 8:04 p.m. when Este stepped out into the night cold. She’d gotten carried away with the ghosts and should’ve left sooner. If there were two things her roommate believed in, they were ghosts and punctuality, and the Paranormal Investigators had a strict no-tardiness policy.

October’s northern wind frosted every windowsill, and Este buried her chin into her bulky cowl-neck as she veered beneath the amber lamplight toward the edge of campus. Heat radiated through the stained-glass windows as Este bounced up the porch steps, and the whole place smelled like cinnamon and steamed milk.

Half museum and half coffee shop, The Ivy had become their official meeting place. A hundred years ago, the teetering Victorian housed the Radcliffes’ groundskeepers, but at some point in the last century, walls had been demolished on the first floor to accommodate age-worn tables, soaked with spilled espresso. The entire upstairs was devoted to small permanent exhibits with black-and-white photos of Sheridan Oaks, Vermont, in the 1900s. Now, it was the school’s unofficial study break zone.

Este worked her way through the crowd to the espresso bar in the back where she ordered her regular—black with a pump of vanilla syrup—and snagged a seat in the last booth next to Posy’s orange bob.

Shepherd’s wide frame lounged across the inside seat next to her, and Este tried to keep her eyes from darting to the place where his hand rested on Posy’s knee and retreated. Were they a thing now? How could she have a new thing and not tell her?

Bryony and Arthur sat across the scuffed wooden table that had been carved and painted in the familiar shape of rivean ivy blooms. Their mouths hung silent, the words on their tongues evaporating as soon as Este sat down.

Este’s eyes shifted between the club members’ faces. They all stared back. It felt a little too much like walking into the room as a kid when her parents were arguing about where to put the dishes or how to hang the Christmas lights. Arthur took a long slurp of his iced latte.

So, she’d bailed on History Buffs, but she hadn’t exactly expected to become the club pariah.

“Thank you for joining us,” Posy said, words taut as a trapeze artist’s line. She’d procured a purple folder seemingly from thin air. “First order of business: our suspect list for the Heir of Fades.”

Este’s mind spun. She hadn’t thought Posy was paying attention to Dr. Kirk’s throwaway comment. But Posy always paid attention when it was about ghosts.

“What do you know about the Heir?” Este asked. “And didn’t Dr. Kirk say that there was basically a zero percent chance of any Fades actually being at Radcliffe? Aren’t they super rare?”

Posy gave her a look and Este gulped, hoping it wasn’t too obvious. Unfortunately, lately, Posy was a bloodhound, sniffing out all Este’s lies. “I told you I’ve been doing research in the archives. I’m practically an expert now, and I promise you, they’re here,” Posy said, her fingers clenched around her papers, but her words stayed even. She skimmed through the folder overflowing with tabbed papers and wrinkled receipts, snippets from newspaper clippings and scans of age-old texts.

Behind those, old photographs of the Radcliffe disappearances had been paper clipped to printouts of forum threads surrounded with the smudged ink of handwritten notes. Este glimpsed the stark contrast of Aoife’s pale skin with her blue-black hair captured in 38 mm, a sepia-toned rendition of Luca’s curls, and a disposable-camera-lens flare washing over Daveed’s face. The next page revealed a familiar, arrogant grin and inkwell curls that sprouted warmth in Este’s chest. A red sticker had been stamped onto the corner.

“Mateo?” she asked, reaching for his photo, the same one Este had seen on the forums.

“You recognize him?” Posy asked, her eyes blazing.

“From the website,” Este said quickly, as four sets of eyes trained on her. “Plus, if . . . you’re saying he’s a ghost . . . he can’t be . . . the Heir.”

“Yeah, I thought you said the Heir was supposed to be immortal or something,” Shepherd said. He rested his arm along the back of the booth, the kind of thing only a boyfriend did.

Arthur steepled his fingers beneath his chin. A single, sterling silver half-moon cuffed his ear. “In a way, ghosts are. They’re not not immortal since they’re trapped in the mortal realm forever.”

Este downed a big swig. At this rate, she’d need to switch to decaf before her heart pounded out of her ribs. “Wouldn’t immortality imply not being dead already? Because ghosts are sort of alive and dead at the same time.”

“Of course they’re dead. That’s, like, Ghost 101,” Bryony said.

One of Este’s nails frayed where she picked at it. She tucked her hands beneath her thighs where she couldn’t do any more damage to her manicure and huffed an irritated breath out her nose. “They aren’t living, but they’re not wholly dead either. Like the middle of a Venn diagram.”

“And you’re the expert now?” Arthur asked.

“No,” Este said quickly. “I just . . . I just thought.”

Posy shuffled her papers to regain everyone’s attention. “Whoever the Heir is,” she said, licking her thumb to preen through the pages, “they’ve been here for an awfully long time. They’d know a lot of people, but somehow they’ve kept their secret.”

In her squirrelly cursive, Posy had written the rest of the names of the founding family—Robin, Judith, and Lilith Radcliffe—as well as a few of the tenured teachers like Dr. Kirk, Ives, and Mr. Liebowitz.

“Or someone’s keeping it for them,” Arthur noted.

“What’s the point in protecting someone immortal?” Este asked.

“They might not be protecting the Heir,” Posy said. “Maybe they’re protecting something else. Everyone has something they can’t stand to lose.”

Este scooted Mateo’s photo away from the rest of the suspects. “Well, it’s not Mateo, so mark him off your list.”

“He’s a suspect. If you did see his ghost, then we already know he’s a thief.” Posy riled through her notes until she found a newspaper clipping from the early twentieth century and slapped it on the table. An obituary. She’d scanned it and then taken the liberty of annotating the article with a pink gel pen. “It says right here, Robin Radcliffe is preceded in death by his wife, Judith Radcliffe. He is survived by his daughter Lilith and the heir to the Radcliffe legacy, Mateo. And since you’ve seen him—”

“That doesn’t mean anything.” Este crossed her arms, fingers clawing deeper into the elbows of her turtleneck with every passing second. “I wish I’d never even mentioned anything about the Mateo I met.”

“This kind of groundbreaking research is my life’s work, Este.”

“It’s my life!” Hot tears welled in her eyes. Maybe they’d spill. Maybe she wouldn’t even wipe them.

“If you didn’t blow us off every two seconds, maybe you’d see that I’m right.”

“I’m not—”

“You are! You’ve missed everything.” Posy’s voice cracked, and she shook her head, red crawling up the column of her neck as her eyes rimmed silver. “We barely even see you anymore. You’re just, like, disappearing, and you don’t even notice.”

The bell at the front door sounded, and a sweep of cold air pulsed through the bar. No one bustled in with it, shrugging off their scarf or folding their gloves into their pockets. Este didn’t need a thermal camera to know a ghost when she saw one. Or, in this case, didn’t see one.

A few crisp leaves trailed toward the bar as if following in the wake of someone’s steps, and while the rest of the coffee shop gossiped and laughed, no one noticed two drinks being scooped off the countertop, floating back toward the entrance in invisible hands.

“You’re seriously not even listening right now.”

“No, I am. I am,” Este stammered, turning back to the table. “Please, all of you, stay out of this. I know you’re trying to help, but I promise you it isn’t Mateo.”

“How can you be so sure?” Posy asked.

“Because I know him.”

Posy’s gaze turned dagger sharp. “You know him?”

“You mean you know of him?” Arthur asked.

“You mean saw his ghost once?” Bryony suggested.

“No, I mean . . .” Her throat constricted around the words. “I found him. After he stole The Book of Fades. And you were right, Posy. He was a ghost—is a ghost.”

Posy blanched. “So you can see ghosts, and you didn’t even tell me?”

Este shook her head. How could she sum up everything the last few weeks had been? “Ghosts, they aren’t like what you think. And Mateo, he’s not the Heir. He saved me from the Fades.”

Uncapping a gel pen, Posy jotted down a few notes in the margins of her scans. “You saw the Fades, too? What were they like?”

“They’re . . .” Este faltered. To Posy, this was a game, but Este knew that what waited in the archives was so much worse than a scary story. “You know what? I have to go actually.”

Posy blew a stream of bubbles through her straw. She slouched her cheek onto a bed of knuckles when she said, “The meeting just started.”

“I know, but Mateo’s going to help me study.” Este packed up her things. She had one more ivy blossom, one more chance to unveil hidden secrets in The Book of Fades.

“You shouldn’t be hanging around him,” Posy huffed, but there was something serious in her stare that said she meant it. “I’ve done the research and . . . and I don’t trust him.”

Este swallowed. “You won’t even know he’s there. You’ve never noticed him before.”

The bell at the door chimed as Este surged into the frostbitten evening. One of the Lilith’s windows must have nudged open because the Fades’ velveteen melody caught on the wind, a harrowed hymnal that carried her forward. Waiting for her in the shadows was Mateo, his hands holding two coffee cups and his smile broadening with every step she took closer.

“So, how was investigating the paranormal?” he asked as he handed her one of the confiscated drinks, and his form grew more and more solid as they walked.

Standing next to Mateo felt safe, warm, a respite from the night cold. Her fingers twitched, wishing she could clasp his hands in hers, but those sap-sticky, stolen touches never lasted. Instead, she clutched her drink closer, the heat seeping from her palms into her arms, all the way down to her belly. “Fine.”

A few dried leaves swirled as Mateo’s breezy figure slid through them. “I don’t believe you for even a second.”

Este shook out a breath that spooled in front of her in gauzy white ribbons. “Posy’s dating Shepherd, I drank a little too much coffee a little too fast so now I kind of want to throw up, and also Posy thinks she knows who the Heir is.”

They drifted into a grove of hemlocks, a pocket of darkness between streetlamps, and Mateo was cut in such sharp contrast that she could see every detail, every muscle, as his spine went rigid. “She does?”

Here, moonlight was trapped between evergreen boughs, only dripping to the sidewalk in slivers. Each footfall crunched against a layer of frost, and Este nodded, kicking a pine cone down the cobblestones.

Posy wanted her to believe it could be Mateo, but he’d protected her every step of the way. He’d been by her side in every shadowed corridor, every lightless place. Without him, she would have been lost. She swallowed his name like a key in a magician’s trick.

Instead, she tugged her sleeves down over her palms, crossing her arms tight as a shield against her chest. “She thinks it’s Dr. Kirk. Can you believe that?”

Mateo stared over her shoulder, down the path to the Lilith, where the Fades haunted the halls. He ran a hand through his mess of curls and refocused on her. The blues of his eyes faded. “Not a bad hypothesis, but as long as we find the pages, it doesn’t matter who the Heir is. Let’s grab our books and get to work.”