The Library of Shadows

Ives couldn’t be Lilith Radcliffe because if Ives were Lilith Radcliffe, then Este had just handed The Book of Fades right back to the Heir, and if Este had done that, then they were all royally fucked.

She wrapped her arms around her knees as she bent them to her heart. Jagged, shredding sobs clawed out of her chest. She pressed her palms to her eyes as she wept for herself, for her father, for the ghosts they shared.

Este stared at the photo of Lilith in 1917, a bright-eyed fifteen-year-old with the gleam of amusement in her eye. She’d returned every ten years like clockwork and wormed her way into the lives of the sacrifices until they trusted her.

God, and she’d trusted her. Chosen her word over Mateo’s.

Everything they’d worked for had been compromised, and it was all her fault. She’d offered The Book of Fades to the Heir on a silver platter, and she hadn’t even known it. She hadn’t found the missing pages, Mateo thought she hated him, and when he found out what she’d done, he’d have every right to despise her as well.

When Este saw Ives yesterday, she had looked significantly older than Lilith did in the photos, but she wasn’t The Walking Dead either. Without her dad’s sacrificial soul, Ives must have aged in accordance with time for the last thirty years, which put her squarely at forty-five. That was soccer-mom territory. How was Este supposed to realize she had been born in the early 1900s?

When her dad left Radcliffe Prep, he’d saved three decades’ worth of students from being sacrificed, but that wouldn’t save Este now. Death was painted in faded grays, not stark black or white. She was a contrapposto marble sculpture, one foot in the grave and the other on solid ground. A sigh cleaved Este’s chest, deliberating which to bury, herself or the hatchet.

It was within her right, she felt, to be mad at Mateo for not telling her the truth about Ives. She’d spent weeks kissing up to a known murderer, and he hadn’t said a word. He’d let her yell at him and encouraged her to leave. Why? To save her?

Then, breaking through the brume of her memory, she heard Posy’s words through the coffee-drenched haze of The Ivy: Maybe they’re protecting something else. Everyone has something they can’t stand to lose.

When they said chivalry was dead, Este didn’t know to take it literally.

He’d been trying to protect her. Was she any better than him? Este couldn’t count on one hand the details she’d hidden from Posy in a feeble attempt to keep her safe. It worked, too. Shutting her out, letting her down. It meant that Posy was preparing to soar across the Atlantic for a relaxing fall break filled with profiteroles and pirouettes.

But it didn’t feel good to keep secrets or lie to the people she cared about most. It was like chugging a strawberry milkshake only to have her nerve endings seize up, freezing her throat and chest and brain. She’d wanted it, but not like this. If she hadn’t pushed everyone away, then maybe she wouldn’t have had to face this alone.

Este pressed a gentle finger into the swollen skin on her side and gasped in staccato bursts at the knife-point sear that followed. She knew, and maybe deep in the folds of her consciousness she’d known all along, that a Fade’s touch would always kill. It wasn’t the rivean ivy sap on her fingers that let her feel the solid weight of Mateo’s hand in hers. For weeks, she’d been slowly dying. Life, too, wasn’t the harsh beam of a fluorescent bulb, on or off. It was a dimmer switch, a candlewick burning down to the quick. Fading and fading away.

Dread and disassociation sparked inside, burning a hole through her chest. She was here in the bathroom, body failing before her eyes, but she was also thirteen again and crying next to the stucco exterior of the funeral home. In the reflection of her toothpaste-flecked mirror, she saw the ghost of someone she once was.

A shuddering breath escaped from her lips. She closed her eyes tightly and opened them again, trying to ground herself back in this reality. Before she lost her dad, it was impossible for her to know she needed to learn the sound of his voice and the way he laughed across the dinner table before it was gone forever. Watching her grieving mom caravan aimlessly around the country, Este had buried her heart, letting the weeds grow wild. She’d assumed that if no one could be hers forever, they didn’t need to be hers at all.

But her dad had also been the first person to show her how to search for books at the library. She’d found security among the stacks in those lonely days, and the stories Este read stayed with her long after the two-week borrowing period. Mateo was right—the words on the page were always there waiting for her. And Este missed the comfort of something that understood the quiet parts of her, the curls like inkwell spills and the blue-eyed windows, the lilting whispers and the laughter.

She couldn’t let it end like this.

Right now, every other Radcliffe Prep student was probably either tucked behind a desk studying for a midterm exam or on their way to some extravagant fall-break excursion. Since Ives had The Book of Fades and the Borrowing Card of Death, what would stop her from pricking her finger to write someone else’s name? No one was safe.

Este put a call on speakerphone as she clipped fresh bandages into place and shimmied into a knit sweater. The phone’s trill was cut off when the Safety and Security receptionist answered with two annoyed syllables: “Yeah, what?”

“Hi, Tammy,” she said sweetly. “Long time, no talk. I’m calling to report an incident at the Lilith.”

“All incidents at the Lilith need to be reported to the head librarian. Let me transfer—”

“No, no!” Dammit, Este thought as she slid into her sneakers. The wounds around her waist protested as she bent her knees to her chest to tie her shoelaces in double knots. She’d need something bigger to convince Safety and Security to evacuate the library—and she needed to get everyone out before the head librarian grew horns and a red tail, or whatever it was the Heir of Fades would do. On her way out the door, she dropped her keys. Bending over, she muttered, “Rats.”

“Rats?” A spark of interest ignited in Tammy’s ordinarily monotone drawl. “Been trying to get those nasty suckers out of the walls for months.”

“What?” she asked, locking her door. “Oh, yes! Rats! And, um, a water pipe burst? Yeah, there’s water everywhere. I guess the rats chewed through it. Is there any way you could send maintenance to help clean it up?”

More clicking. “Yes.”

“How soon?”

Tammy’s acrylic nails clacked against the keyboard. Her voice eased back into her usual drone. “How much water?”

Este clicked her phone back to normal audio and tucked it between her chin and her shoulder as she took the Vespertine Hall stairs in leaps, nearly face-planting when she fumbled the landing and scrambled outside, ignoring every dagger pang twisting through her waist. “It’s leaking . . . sludge. Thick, brown sludge. Smells like pennies and sulfur. I really don’t think it’s safe for students.”

Tammy smacked her gum. There was a stream of steady air and then a quick pop, like she’d dug her nail into a bubble. “You think it’s toxic?”

“Pennies and sulfur, Tammy. I’m in the restroom, and it’s like someone tried to summon a demon here.”

“Gonna have to close it down until we can get it cleaned up. And you’ve gotta report this to Ives. Transferring you now.” But her words peeled apart, sound waves unraveling as static rustled the line.

Sandpaper against wood grain. Polyester track pants swishing with every step. The crackle of a bonfire, flames licking the summer air and embers drifting into the thicket, or a pyre preparing to burn her at the stake. That was the sound of the static that replaced Tammy’s pinched soprano. The last sound Este heard before the Fades sang.

“The dying light with shadowed hands will spin you in eternal dance. What blooms tonight—”

Este halted on the cobbled sidewalks, the boughs of evergreen trees reaching toward her like greedy hands. A veil of darkness washed over campus, blotting out the afternoon light. Black creeped at the corners of her vision. Night had come early.

“—a secret sworn, and you are ours until the morn. The dying light—”

The song of the Fades wove through Este’s rib cage, squeezing until she’d run out of room to breathe. Somehow, she managed to have the wherewithal to end the phone call. Their voices extinguished, but their haunting melody dragged Este closer to the Lilith. On the one night she knew she shouldn’t, she had to go back.

The library was a formidable beast of Bodleian proportions built from carved arches, pedimented windows, and balustraded parapets. Low-hanging, full-bellied clouds parted for the spire. A storm was brewing, and Este was about to walk right into it.

A Safety and Security officer with a walkie-talkie pinned to his chest held the door open for everyone leaving, and Tammy’s deadpan seeped through the tiny speaker: “Go ahead and evacuate.”

A rush of students flowed out the front doors and down the shallow steps, but Este swam upstream. She pushed through the current into the atrium. Shadows wept beneath the sconces, flooded the floorboards, and wedged into every nook and cranny of the first floor. The central staircase rose before her. She needed to get to the senior lounge, even if her side bled with every groaning step.

She made it to the fifth floor before she saw Ives, weaving through the collection. Este lunged behind the stacks, keeping the head librarian within view between the tops of books. Despite her silk blouse and tailored pants, the knowledge that she was looking at a century-old Lilith Radcliffe shot chills across her frame.

She squinted to keep her sights set on Ives. The head librarian pivoted, and for a moment, Este was certain she targeted her between the shelves. Desperation flashed across her features—the hunger of a starved hunter. Este refused to even breathe with Ives’s jungle-predator gaze searching through the stacks. Maybe she deserved to die for walking straight into the devil’s lair on the darkest night of October.

Overhead, a streak of piercing white flared, and thunder crashed—a jarring boom, close enough that books rattled against their shelves. Every light in the library zapped out at once. The wall sconces sizzled, electricity fried. As the storm opened up, sheets of rain hammering against the glass ceiling, Este was enveloped in an instantaneous darkness.

Three visions in hot pink seeped out of the shadows beside the head librarian. She lifted a hand, little more than an outline as Este’s eyes adjusted, but the Fades were unruly. They tugged a sheet of black across the fifth floor, a hum on their chapped lips as they stalked along the balcony’s ledge. Looking for dinner, no doubt.

“I said stay,” Ives grumbled to her ghouls. “Why won’t you listen to me?”

Este tiptoed down the aisle without taking her sight off the back of the Fades’ tracksuits. To get to the senior lounge, she could skirt the perimeter, taking the scenic route through jade relics and antique atlases. It would take longer than cutting through the bookcases, but she might make it in one piece without being skewered by a rhinestone manicure. She had until moonrise to make it out alive, but only if she didn’t get caught.

Beneath her, a floorboard creaked.

So much for that.

The Fades’ frontwoman with her straw-blond ponytail whipped around at the sound, and a frigid wind blew with it, rustling book pages. Este dipped toward the floor, burrowing into a ball. Please don’t see me, please don’t see me. Her spine trembled as the Fades leered toward her hiding place.

Another jagged stroke of lightning painted the sky, blinding and then black again.

“This way,” Ives boomed. “I said this way.”

Este didn’t dare breathe until the warmth returned to her fingers, the only sure sign that the Fades had moved on.

She’d cried more in the last two days than she had in years, and salt water edged her lash line. Este rested her head against the top of her knees, lungs aching. She didn’t see the frayed hem of bell bottoms until they lined up with her toes. Aoife’s voice was a flat can of soda when she whispered, “On a scale of one to ten, how dead are you?”