The Library of Shadows

If she didn’t get a good night’s sleep soon, Este might actually be able to read the language of the dead without rivean ivy.

Her throat scratched every time she spoke, and her eyelids grated with every blink. A sheet of fog scrolled across campus as dawn’s first light lifted above the sycamores. Este and Mateo still had their research splayed across her bed. She didn’t mind spending their nights like this—together, The Book of Fades between them, and searching for clues in the pages of the books her dad had checked out. Tonight’s reading? The Old Farmer’s Almanac 1997. She’d made up most of her sleep during class, drooling onto wide-ruled composition notebooks and blushing when her teachers called her name.

But this morning, she had the added joy of a leftover caffeine headache, throbbing with each beat of her tired heart. The windowsill vase was empty of blossoms, every chance she had for glimpsing the language of the dead dried up. Their pale petals littered Este’s bedroom floor.

“What’d my dad need an almanac for anyway?” She covered her mouth, cutting short a wide yawn. The haze of sleep made her wonder if her thoughts were even coherent anymore. They’d been grasping at short straws for hours. “It’s not like he was a farmer.”

Mateo, who was no longer indebted to his circadian rhythm, looked bright-eyed as ever, shockingly solid as long as he avoided the beams of early-morning sunlight. He lounged on her pillows, one arm behind his head and the other grazing against the ridges of her hand where the nectar stained. It was all too easy to get used to this—a lazy togetherness, content in his company.

“You should get some rest, Este dear.” His voice sounded faraway, a tin-can telephone line.

Her pillow welcomed her as she slumped onto her mattress. They were so in over their heads. Too many dead ends, not enough clues to connect them. Este’s eyelids fluttered closed. It would feel so nice to take a nap. Fifteen, twenty minutes tops.

She wasn’t sure how long she lay there, somewhere stuck between consciousness and a silver daydream, but when she peeled her eyes open, daylight poured through the windows. All she saw was Mateo. The bridge of his nose, the dimple on his chin, the rim of dark blue around his irises. Beams of dazzling yellow illuminated her room, making him fade in and out of opacity as thin clouds wafted across the sun.

It wouldn’t be so bad, an eternity like this with him: crisp October breezes tapping at the windowpanes, wool-socked toes padding across polished floors, dawns and twilights running together like watercolors.

“Good morning, sunshine,” he said when her eyes finally reopened.

“What’s good about it?” Este groaned, stretching her arms over her head and a reluctant smile over her lips. She woke up her phone screen to see the time: 8:37 a.m.

8:37 a.m.?

“Oh no,” she said, flinging herself off the mattress. Black dotted her vision, and she caught herself on the bedside table, steadying only a moment before surging toward her closet.

Mateo pried himself from the blankets. “What, oh no?”

With her dad’s sweatshirt half-pulled over the tee she fell asleep in, Este mumbled, “Meeting with Ives. She moved it to Thursday this week, and I totally forgot.” Hair tangled over her face when her head popped through the neckhole. “I can’t be late.”

He propped up on his elbows, head tilted. “What’s the meeting about?”

“Well,” Este said, wiggling into a pair of denim jeans behind the closet door. “This week’s meeting is probably going to be about how I also slept through last week’s meeting.”

She hadn’t meant to, of course. But between the Fades’ attack and the late-night shifts, her body needed a break. Plus, she hadn’t exactly been eager to return to the library if that was the only place the Fades could reach her. And, besides, everyone deserved sick days, right? Ives hadn’t said anything to her about it, but the thought of the head librarian sitting in her office, tapping her nails against her desk two weeks in a row, sent shivers over Este’s skin.

In a frenzy, Este shoved her English textbook and the almanac they’d spent the last night staring at into her backpack. Mateo kept hold of The Book of Fades.

Standing in her doorway with her backpack slung over her shoulder, it felt humanly impossible to leave Mateo like this. All she wanted to do was waste the day away lying beside him, memorizing the dark ribbons of his hair and the slant of his smirk.

“I’ll be back before lunch,” she said.

“I’m not going anywhere.” Mateo’s mouth hung open, something lingering there, but whatever it was washed away with a shake of his head.

Brisk winds whipped Este’s hair across her face with cold lashes when she plunged out onto the worn paths. She swiped a finger underneath her eyes, smearing off yesterday’s mascara. On her trek toward the Lilith, she passed a few others, cramming for their exams or chugging coffees as they sprinted toward the science labs. Long nights and early mornings were prying up the school’s photo-perfect veneer.

When she climbed up the Lilith’s polished stairs, the head librarian’s office was closed. Este gave the handle another tug, but it didn’t budge. Locked tight. No light filtered beneath the doorway. Had Ives even bothered to show up this morning to give Este the benefit of the doubt? What kind of high schooler didn’t occasionally screw up and lead a conniving yet adorable ghost to a cursed ancient text, get optioned for sacrifice, and forget her morning meetings?

Behind her, the door to the spire creaked open, and Este spun on her heels with her arms up to block her face. Instinct. Where she’d expected the Fades’ molding hands despite the glow of morning light drenching the fifth floor, she found Ives with a red handkerchief tied around her head like Rosie the Riveter.

The head librarian dropped a cardboard box at the foot of the door to prop it open. The stairwell’s yawning cavern didn’t look any more welcoming in the daylight, still thick with stale darkness and clammy stone walls. Ives brushed off her hands and wiped a bead of sweat from her forehead.

“Miss Logano,” she said, out of breath. “I’d begun to think you were avoiding me.”

Este yanked her sleeves over her palms, balling the extra fabric up in her fists. She raised her shoulders and plastered on her best please don’t kick me out face, which she hoped shared uncanny resemblance to Posy’s sorry I ate your last ramen expression. Big eyes, pouting bottom lip—knowing but apologetic. “Sorry I’m late. Do you need help with anything?”

Ives wiped a hand across her face and left a dirt smudge. She peeked back over her shoulder before nodding with a smile. “I figured it was time to do a few repairs upstairs, and a couple extra hands from a future librarian couldn’t hurt.”

Future librarian. The words rang like a dinner bell, calling Este home. She still had a future. But how many chances—second, third, fourth—could Ives give her before she ran out?

Ives nudged the cardboard box toward her, and Este scooped it into her arms. Her side groaned with the effort, but she tried not to grimace.

“Carry that while I grab the pruning scissors.”

“The what?” Este asked, but Ives was already unlocking her office door. She returned with a pair of hedge trimmers the size of Este’s torso. The box she gave Este held a half-dozen cheesecloth pouches, a couple spray bottles, and a jar of dirt wriggling with worms. These weren’t any repairs Este was familiar with.

Ives trudged up the stairs, and Este echoed her footfalls. The heavy spire door clanged shut behind them, dousing them in a stiff black darkness. Este knew to expect windows halfway up, but it didn’t stop the prickly chill from creeping up her spine.

Without looking back, Ives said, “I trust you’ll ensure all books stay on the shelves this time, Miss Logano. This is a privilege, not a right.”

Este gulped. “Of course.”

When they pushed through the door at the top of the stairwell, the spire basked in dewy morning light. Este wondered if the awe would ever wear off. All these relics, the jewels and the gemstones, the art and the arcane, all preserved through the years as if time itself could not breach the restricted collection.

“I found the spire key in the archives a few days ago,” Ives said. Her blades sliced through a thick band of greenery, and all the color seeped from the stem. The cut section faded to black and dried like a snakeskin. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

Este tugged her hair into a ponytail to get it off the nape of her neck, now flushed red with guilt. Through her foggy memory, she recalled the chime as the key slid across the splintered floors, but between the poison in her veins and the Fades at her back, she hadn’t picked it back up.

“N-no,” Este said.

“Sometimes it’s better to prune things back before they get unruly,” Ives said to the ivy as she trimmed. Another snip. Another vine blackening and curling. “Have you seen anyone hanging around the archives during your shifts?”

Este rattled her head with her lips shrunken into a sour stripe. Meanwhile, Ives wore the same practiced smile, but it didn’t reach her eyes. Dark hollows had begun to form under her eyes, and the concealer she’d used to cover them caked into seams where the crow’s-feet spread. Midterm stress must have been getting to her, too.

“I see.” Ives pointed to the cardboard box with the sharp edge of her trimmers. “We’ll clean up the floors and plant new seeds for the bookcases.”

Este nudged a creeping vine with the toe of her sneaker. She could almost see the place where she’d walked with the ghosts, footsteps carving through the layer of dust on the stone floors. “Is this safe for the books? The plants.”

“Oh, yes. Rivean ivy has unique protective qualities.” The blooms were closed in the daylight, but the fragrance seeped from the pores of each stem like an uncontainable magic. Ives drew a long breath through her nose, relishing. In contrast, the scent sparked trippy flashbacks that made Este’s empty stomach clench in defense. She tried not to look too green. “Good for keeping out all kinds of pests. Ladybugs, beetles, roaches.”

Ives instructed Este how to plant the ivy seeds, and her hands followed like they were pulled by puppet strings. Her fingernails scraped half-inch divots into soil tucked in clay pots. She poured a teaspoon of seeds into each, covered, and spritzed. Este lost track of how many she planted.

As she went, Este skimmed the bookshelves like she might see the imprint of her father’s fingers on the bindings. He’d either stashed the stolen chapter somewhere in the Lilith or shredded the paper, sent it to recycling, and let the invisible ink wash away to be remade into stationery or grocery sacks. This whole search could be useless.

“I should be thanking you,” Ives said.

Este gaped. “You should?”

Ives propped one of her pots on top of a bookcase. Her long, black curls wore white streaks of dust that instantly aged her. It reminded Este of Mateo, trying to trick eternity to show him what might have been. “You returned the spire key to me in the first place. These magnificent heirlooms could have been lost forever.”

There was no vocabulary for saying sorry and you’re welcome at the same time.

Clapping the dirt off her hands, Ives said, “I want to show you something.”

Este followed the head librarian around the last corner to the center of the spire. The ceiling’s coned point loomed overhead, glittering with gossamer cobwebs. Oil paintings, charcoal sketches, and ribbon-tied scrolls dotted this final concentric ring of shelves, and in the middle sat a high-backed chair dressed in embroidered black and Robin Radcliffe’s desk.

“They say that when Lilith and Mateo were kids, they loved to read in the spire with their father. A quiet place where anything was possible between the pages of a book.” Ives ran her hand along the chair’s chiseled armrest. “This library has been that for many people, myself included. Do you have a place like that?”

Este’s mouth formed a small circle, tongue pressed behind her teeth, ready to say No, I don’t, but she stopped herself. Even in the inconstancy after her mom uprooted their lives on the west coast for a pledge of nomadic isolation, libraries had been her one sliver of comfort.

They were all different but somehow all the same. She loved the smell of yellowed pages, the way each wrinkled sheet held inked stories and a piece of every person who had read them—sand from high schoolers’ spring-break vacations, smudges from dirty fingers, perfume trails of illicit affairs.

Whether her mom was working in Tacoma or Tampa, Este could wander the stacks without getting lost, following the familiar trail of decimal points to any destination. Recipes for no-bake cookies? Turn right at 641.81. Techniques of rococo painting? Straight ahead to 709.4. Eliot’s unmetered poetry? 821.9.

Libraries were the rope tying her to the fading memory of her father. Her soft landing, her solace.

Ives didn’t wait for her to answer. “I’ve noticed the company you keep,” she pressed as if searching for the weak spot, the tender bruise that would make Este squeal.

Este’s mind flared with images of the ghosts, laughing as they sailed through the stacks on the ladders. Was having fun cause for expulsion? “You have?”

“You don’t want to get too close to the Fades,” Ives said, sharp and cold as an ice pick. “Not while The Book of Fades is still missing.”

It felt like Este’s body had been dunked into one of those carnival booths. Like a scrawny ten-year-old with the arm of a fastball pitcher hit the bull’s-eye and flushed Este beneath a tide at a county fair. “You know about the Fades? I didn’t think you’d believe in ghosts.”

She’d assumed Ives would discount the school’s ghost stories as child’s play the same way Este had written off Posy’s paranormal antics at the beginning of the school year. A stroke of severity washed across Ives’s face, one that revealed she definitely didn’t think this was a game.

“Certainly, I do. I know everything that goes on at the Lilith. I’ve been tasked with protecting The Book of Fades like every head librarian has since the Radcliffes were alive. The Fades have wreaked havoc on this school for the last century. It’s my duty to safeguard the book and control them. And I have for my thirty years as head librarian.” Her nails rapped against the glass inlay on the empty case where The Book of Fades should’ve been. “Without this book in my care, the Fades can be quite unpredictable.”

Well, Este couldn’t argue with that. She had the scars to prove it. But Ives knowing about the Fades kind of made her feel like she’d just donated blood on an empty stomach. “Have you ever seen them?”

Ives shrugged. “I imagine they’re as ancient as these walls. You know, Este, some things are inevitable. There is life, and there is death. Within the walls of the Lilith, all of eternity resides on these shelves. The Heir of Fades is also inevitable and will stop at nothing to stay as immortal as these books.”

Este nodded, but Ives’s soliloquy barely sank in through the blood pounding in her ears. Her body ran hot, a sheen of sweat gathering at her hairline. Even the things Este thought she’d figured out suddenly felt misshapen, the edges no longer lining up.

A metallic taste flooded Este’s mouth, one she couldn’t wash away. She grasped for every fragment of truth she had, trying to form the full picture.

Mateo was obsessed with resurrection, guilting her into helping him have a second chance at life. And the Fades. Este had only seen the Fades when she was with him. He could have been leading them to her, little more than a lab rat in a labyrinth. He said he needed The Book of Fades to come back to life. Maybe Shepherd had a point—if he were truly immortal, he’d still be alive, right?

Unless he’d only become a ghost thirty years ago after her dad escaped, immortality slipping through his fingers, tricking the other ghosts with his promises of new life. She assumed he’d been a sacrifice like the others, an unwilling participant in an immortal scheme. But what if, Este couldn’t believe she was thinking it, but what if he’d raised the Fades for himself?

He’d insisted that he required the help of a student, and Este was the perfect candidate. Her father was to blame for breaking the Fades’ vicious cycle, and her mother was a one-woman traveling show. There was no one waiting for her. No one to notice if she never came home.

Plus, her name was already written in blood.

On in the card he had just reunited with the book.

With her help.

The pot slid from Este’s fingers and crashed to the floor in a terracotta explosion. Soil stained her shoes, the floor, the grout between stones. It was as if all the air in the spire evaporated. She darted to the windows on the perimeter of the room and pried one open, pushing twice as hard when it snagged halfway up. She sucked down a long gulp of autumn air, begging her heart rate to slow with every inhale.

“I’ve spent my entire life studying this collection,” Ives said, cutting through Este’s spiraling thoughts. “There are things too valuable to lose here. If you know where The Book of Fades is, you need to return it. Imminently, Miss Logano.” Something dark passed over Ives’s face. It twisted her lips in an ugly sneer, like she hated the thought of what might happen without the book in her hands, the damage that might be done. And then her face relaxed. Maybe she had realized how much she had scared Este. “I’ll grab us a broom.”

As soon as Ives disappeared around the corner, Este slipped her phone out of her pocket and pulled up Posy’s contact. The motion was second nature—they were supposed to be friends, even with whatever that was at The Ivy last night. Their last text was a discussion of which animals they could successfully fight in hand-to-hand combat (Este: a quokka, Posy: what’s a quokka?) and Este typed something new.

emergency PI meeting before english

And then another, just to be sure:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Posy would know where to start, what to believe. She could help her sift through the accusations against Mateo, panning for truth like gold on a Colorado riverbank. Her roommate was the lifeline Este needed to feel tethered to the shore of the living rather than swept away into the strong currents of the Lethe, pulling her toward the realm of the dead.

Este reached down to the part of herself she’d bottled up when her dad died and uncorked it to pour a little more heartache in. She knew Mateo—she liked him, and she’d wanted him to kiss her in the senior lounge. He’d been growing more and more real to her with every day, and she hadn’t exactly been sad about it. This had to be one big misunderstanding.

Ives reappeared with broom in hand as Este nudged her phone back where it belonged. She brushed everything into a small pile and swept it into a dustpan. Este’s phone dinged, loud and obnoxious.

“Sorry,” Este said. “Probably my roommate. Actually, I need to go. Don’t want to be late for class.”

Ives sank into the seat, crossing one leg over the other. It was a sight to see—Ives in her gardening gear perched on Lilith Radcliffe’s chair, one hand cocked beneath her chin, red lipstick slanted into a smile. “Is it already time for next period? I always wish we had more time together. And with every hour that I don’t have The Book of Fades in my hands, it is more dangerous for everyone.”

Este stammered, unable to form a response. How could she think straight through everything? The Fades wanted her dead, and there was a nonzero chance that Mateo had been behind it all along. She’d trusted him, and he’d betrayed her—the realization was a silver dagger between the soft of her ribs, straight to her bleeding heart.

“Go on,” Ives said, batting her hand toward the door beyond the stacks. “But don’t be late for your shift tonight. This library needs you, Este.”