The Library of Shadows

The notification that had interrupted her meeting with Ives flashed on her phone screen. It wasn’t a text from Posy like she expected but a Pizza Town coupon. This Side of Pizza-dise! A deal so good you’ve Gatsby kidding! The bubbly cartoon letters advertising extra cheese were antithetical to everything Este felt right now. Not even BOGO 50 percent off pizzas could fix this.

Este tabbed open Instagram. Her feed was embarrassingly bare. Spending nearly every waking hour in the library didn’t make for many photo ops. She scrolled through photos of her classmates—a girl from her poetry class posted an aesthetically pleasing Emily Dickinson–themed flat lay, a senior on the rowing team documented his practice regimen, and a few of the theater kids promoted their next program. She typed Posy’s handle into the search bar and clicked her chipped nails against her case as it loaded.

Posy had captured the entire quarter in still frames. Her photos were carefully curated, all with matching colors and thoughtful editing. Some boasted doodles and handwritten captions more like a collection of Polaroids than social-media posts.

First, a selfie of Posy and the Paranormal Investigators this afternoon, crowded around a picnic table on the greens with heaps of textbooks piled next to coffees the size of their heads. Then, a photo of Shepherd kissing Posy at the Hesper Fountain, rivulets of sparkling water streaming behind them, one of her legs bent at the knee and a bouquet clutched in her hand. Este kept scrolling. Posy and Bryony grinning in their History Buffs outfits, an overhead shot of their séance setup, and a photo of the Paranormal Investigators’ club flyer.

At the top of the page, a green dot flashed next to Posy’s name. Active now.

Este pressed her fingers beneath her eyes to catch a few stray tears. Posy had shown up for her, relentlessly so, but not now. Not when Este needed her most. She’d pushed her away so many times that she almost couldn’t blame Posy for not texting back.

Around her, the rest of the student body filtered into their classrooms, and Este should have been one of them. How was she supposed to focus on Mr. Donohue proselytizing about the genius of Virginia Woolf when everything she thought she knew was turning to dust in her hands?

Instead, her feet carried her to the library and upstairs to the senior-lounge door. She hesitated with her hand halfway to the knob. Weeks ago, when she first stepped through that door, she’d barely believed in ghosts, but somewhere along the way, she’d done more than just believe. She’d begun to trust them. All of them. She wasn’t sure what would be worse—the ghosts knowing Mateo was the Heir this whole time and not telling her or them not knowing at all?

If they were his accomplices, walking into the lounge was a death sentence. But if they didn’t know, if they were kept in the dark like she was, then she owed it to them to discover the truth. It was what a friend would do. And maybe, just maybe, she was wrong about Mateo. They had stockpiled bits and pieces of the past—surely something in them could clear his name.

The study was quiet when she walked in. Aoife had traded her typical hardback nonfiction books for a paperback romance, and now she and Luca giggled over the saucy bits. Daveed dragged an ink pen over the pages of a notebook, dangling upside down on the sofa cushions.

“Hey, Este,” Daveed said. “How’s it hanging?”

She marched to the trick floorboard and stomped down on it so that the other side leveraged up and she could reach in for the stack of clues. “It’s been better.”

“What’s eating away at you?” Luca asked, peeking over the cover of the bodice ripper she and Aoife each held one side of.

On the table in front of her, Este spread out the evidence they’d gathered—The Book of Fades’s borrowing card in its plastic bag, the almanac, books on poetry and herbal remedies from her dad’s circulation history, and the scroll of parchment from the Hesper Fountain—like maybe she could summon the solution. But she’d looked at these clues so many times that they’d burned into her retinas, she could map out every spill of ink with her eyes closed, and she still didn’t know what her dad was trying to lead her to.

“What was it like for you?” Este asked the phantoms, her chin in her hand. “When it happened.”

“I’m actually still a virgin,” Daveed said.

“Not that,” Este chided. “I meant when the Fades separated your body from your soul. Do you remember it?”

“Plain as day,” Luca piped up. “Or, as night, I suppose. It was late on October 25, and I was taking books back to the archives when the Fades sank their claws into me. I never saw them coming.”

“Because it was so dark in the archives?” Este asked.

Luca frowned, a distant thing. “I know how it sounds, but it was almost as if they were the dark. There was nowhere for me to run.”

Este scooted the borrowing card closer. Next to Luca’s name, her death date had been penned in blood red. She found Aoife’s name next. Someone else’s name had been scribbled out, with Aoife Godrich crammed on the line below. “Aoife, did you die on October 3?”

Aoife eyed Este like she was annoyed to have her reading interrupted. “I did. I was supposed to work that morning, but I’d traded shifts. One minute I was shelving books, and when I woke up, I was here with the others.”

“And Daveed,” Este said, “October 22?”

Daveed flipped off the couch and landed wobbly on his feet. “Yeah, I was working that night and a couple friends stopped by. One of them asked me to grab a book for her. Next thing I knew, everything went black.”

Este tried to imagine it—the suffocating snare of the Fades’ grasp, the light blotting out into nothingness, and the waking up dead. “Did you know? That you’d died?”

“Not at first. But I remember Mateo bringing me here, sitting me down by the fire.” Daveed shook out his shoulders like he could still feel the cold.

“Could he touch you?” Este asked.

But Daveed rattled his head. “I don’t remember.”

If Mateo were the Heir, and he had been immortal, he wouldn’t have been able to physically interact with any of the ghosts until . . .

“Why are you asking?” Aoife scrutinized Este with a precision that cut straight to the quick.

Este tapped the card marred with their names. “The Fades didn’t kill me. There’s no date next to my last name. But the days you died, they’re on here.”

Aoife looked at Luca who looked at Daveed who scrubbed the back of his neck. “Maybe they weren’t hungry yet?”

Somehow, Este was pretty sure loss of appetite wasn’t a huge concern for the Fades.

“But that doesn’t explain Mateo,” she thought out loud, dread welling at the base of her sternum. The date next to his name was smudged, mostly unreadable. October something, 1917. “He told me that it happened to him in the spire, but . . . that doesn’t make any sense.”

She’d never seen the Fades venture beyond the third floor, the darkest corners of the library. When she escaped them, their tendrils recoiled from the light as if singed like the edges of paper curling up into ash. They were clearly most powerful in the darkness, and there were more windows in the spire than she could count—she couldn’t imagine the Fades lasting more than a minute in the moonlit landing.

And that made Este think of Robin Radcliffe writing about his late wife by the light of the stars, which she quite frankly did not want to think about right now or ever again, because a love that persistent, that loyal, that defiant of death made her chest feel too tight for reasons she didn’t care to examine. Robin must have known something she didn’t. He’d sat in that spire, charting the stars and penning love letters to the dead. He knew the skies better than anyone.

Este touched the curled edge of the newspaper clipping. October 15, 1917: the night that the fire started in the spire, when a spark erased some of the most precious Radcliffe memories, including Robin’s letters. Any sage wisdom he might have left in those pages had cindered.

That was why her dad checked out the farmer’s almanac—not for a quick-start guide to growing his own vegetables, but to see the moon and stars in memoriam.

“Luca,” she said suddenly, “I need you to grab almanacs for each of your death dates. This year, too.”

While Luca collected those, Este traced her fingers down the pages of the 1997 almanac’s chart of historic moon phases. The new moon came and went on October 1, only to return on October 31. But someone—her dad?—had only circled the first date with the broad stroke of a blue pen. Luca splayed the rest of the almanacs out over the coffee table, and the ghosts gathered around the table, vultures hungry for answers.

“Look up the moon phase for the night you were sacrificed,” Este instructed, tabbing through the pages of the current year herself.

Daveed found his first. “New moon.”

Aoife said, “Me, too.”

“Me three,” said Luca.

“That’s why the Fades couldn’t fully sacrifice me before. It can only be done during the new moon. That’s when the night is darkest, and that’s when they’re strongest.”

Este flipped through the pages until she reached the moon phases for 1917. Her dad’s blue ink circle outlined October 15. For a long, shocked moment all she could do was stare at it, heart thundering and head dizzy with shards of black. Her stomach clenched like she was on the precipice of a free fall, the tipping point between being on top of the world and bottoming out.

The night of the new moon was the same night of the fire in the spire.

Embers flickered in the fireplace, casting streaks of light and long shadows as they breathed. Este recalled the words from The Book of Fades, the way Mateo’s voice sounded as he read You cannot know darkness without first knowing light. With Mateo’s blood on the pages, a match in his hands, and a moonless sky, the Fades must have been summoned that night, drawn out of the shadows created in that blaze.

The Heir was Mateo. It had been Mateo this whole time.

And she’d fallen for his lies the whole time she’d been falling for him.

“Este, are you okay?” Luca asked as Este lurched out of her seat.

The ghosts watched her, waiting. Every drop of self-assurance left her bones at the sight of them. If she told them the truth about Mateo, what good would it do? They must have already known. He told her that he didn’t want to let them down—what bargain had they already struck?

She fanned ahead to the current month in the current year for an answer some part of her already knew. A pit opened up in her stomach so deep Este thought it might swallow her whole. The new moon this October was tomorrow night, and she was the soul du jour.

“Um, yeah,” she said, flustered. “I . . . I can’t stay.”

She shoved the catalog card into her bag, heart racing.

Apparently, she was like her dad, after all.

Following his footsteps, that was why she’d come here. She always imagined that meant drinking coffee by the carafe in between classes and losing track of time at the library. The truth was that his footprints led past the iron gates, back down the mile-long driveway, and as far across the country as he could get. The Fades could only hurt her here, and she needed to be as far from the Lilith as possible when her time came.

She needed to get out. Out of the Lilith, out of Sheridan Oaks, out of the state. She might get all the way to California and sink her knees into the desert dirt before she stopped looking for shadows over her shoulder.