The Library of Shadows

He looked like a Greek sculpture.

Mateo was soaked from head to toe, water contouring the white planes of his collared shirt to every line and dimple of his torso. Phidias himself would have envied the immaculate wet drapery, carving marble features beneath the flimsy fabric. Mateo’s hand had frozen in midair, poised to knock, and now he brushed it over the back of his head as a coy smile dawned. Droplets sprayed from his hair as he shook it dry.

Then, as if remembering their latest argument, his eyes rounded, cheeks drew downward, and he bobbed a step back.

Este wiped a stray bead of water off her lip. It tasted like copper. The clunk they heard must have been Safety and Security searching for a fabricated leak and causing a real one. Mateo appeared to have been caught in the deluge. What had he said? Something about ghosts and plumbing?

“Oldest excuse in the book,” she said, not fighting the matching grin that creeped up. They stood like that for a moment, all the unspoken things taking up space between them, until Aoife coughed conspicuously behind Este.

“Oh, were you two leaving?” Mateo threw a thumb over his shoulder, stepping aside in case they wanted to get around him.

Este shook her head no, but Aoife said, “I am.” Two stark syllables as she slipped back into the buttoned-up version of herself Este knew well. She vanished from sight, nothing left of her but a sliver of shadow, and one of the candles shivered as she passed them and headed out into the hallway.

Este backed into the lounge, and Mateo followed. The door clicked shut behind them. Alone together at last. She said, “I was actually coming to find you.”

Mateo moseyed around the edge of the room, hand skimming the spines of books lining the shelved walls. Este ran over her list of confessions in her head. Standing in the center of the lounge, she picked at the loose threads of her shirt.

“I’m sorry that I—”

“Este, dear, I thought you’d be—” A slow, hesitant smile bloomed across Mateo’s face. “You go first this time.”

He met her in the middle. Her heart thumped, thankfully still beating but a gentle reminder of everything at stake. Her only option was to say everything and get it out in the open. There was no other way around it. The truth was the very least she could offer him.

Este sucked down a deep breath that reached every corner of her lungs. “I’m sorry, Mateo. I know you’re not the enemy. I was scared and foolish and wrong, so wrong, to believe you could be. You asked me to believe you, and I should have.” She cleared her throat. “I know you’re not the Heir of Fades.”

His voice dipped low, rasped like a deckle edge. “You don’t have to be sorry for anything. It was my fault for not telling you the whole truth, but I couldn’t let anything happen to you. It was my fault you were in the spire. I never meant for you, for anyone, to get hurt.”

“It’s not you,” Este said, words cracking down the middle. “You’re not to blame for any of this. Ives is.” She reached for his hand and found it heavy in hers. Their fingers threaded together. Este memorized the groove of his knuckles and the callus between his index and middle fingers where a pencil would sit. She squeezed his hand like if she held on hard enough, she might be able to pull them both back to the world of the living.

He stared at their clasped hands, mouth open. “How—why?”

“It’s been an interesting few days.” She untangled their fingers to hold his hand face up and traced patterns along the flat expanse of his palm.

Her shoulders felt lighter with one difficult truth out of the way. The next one, unfortunately, was going to be much harder to speak around the lump in her throat.

Este closed her eyes. Some things were easier to admit in the dark. “I was scared and hurt, and when you gave me The Book of Fades, I returned it to Ives. I thought it would be safe that way.”

When she opened her eyes, a fold had formed between Mateo’s brows. “That’s not exactly what I meant when I told you to take it with you.”

Este hated how her voice cracked. The walls of the lounge shrunk around her. “I’m so sorry. It’s over. Where the Fade touched me, it . . . it’s not getting better. I’m dying, Mateo.”

Mateo cupped her face in his hands. A look she’d never seen before fixed itself on his face—something between agony and apology. He wrapped his arms around her, and her cheek pressed against his chest despite the wet wrinkles of his shirt. There was no heartbeat, no rise and fall of bated breath.

She would’ve given anything to stay like that forever with him, but he deserved more. Whatever it took, she would give him another chance at life.

“The Fades only came back when I showed up. They need my soul, but there’s still time.” She was grateful that she couldn’t look him in the eyes as the words tumbled out. The thought had been formulating at the back of her mind for a while, but it wasn’t so much of a plan as it was frantic desperation. “Maybe they’ll leave again if I leave, too.”

His hands gripped her shoulders, holding her at elbow’s length so that she had no choice but to watch as a spark flared behind his eyes, determination refusing to become a smothered ember. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“I think it could work.” She tilted her head back, pinching her eyes closed, and composed herself for a split second. “You’d have to wait until Ives died of old age, of course. Steal back the card and make sure no other Loganos ever ended up in the library. It could take another thirty years, maybe forty, fifty, I don’t know, but eventually it will happen. And maybe, with her gone, your souls would be free. You’d come back to life.”

Mateo’s fingers found her chin, tilting her head so that she’d face him. “But you never would. If you walk out of those gates like this, you’ll be gone forever. I won’t lose you like I’ve lost everyone else. We’ll figure something else out.”

“But you’ve waited so long for this—”

“I don’t want to know another life without you in it.”

His thumb ran figure eights across her cheekbone. He must have felt the frantic pace of her heart, clinging to what little life it had left, as it thrummed inside its ivory cage.

Don’t wait to tell him.

Aoife’s words echoed through Este’s head. She knew she should tell Mateo that, in another version of reality, she wanted them to spend fall break in France with her classmates, sipping cappuccinos and debating which Gilded Age writer was superior. She should tell him that she wanted them to have gray hair and laugh lines and all the quiet moments that came between. She should tell him that even though she was never supposed to know him, knowing him made her a better version of herself. An Este who wasn’t afraid of the dark crevices of her heart. An Este who learned it was possible to hurt and hope at the same time.

No matter how hard she tried, the words didn’t come. He blinked in anticipation, eyes flicking toward her open mouth. She didn’t know how to say all those things at one time. She didn’t have that kind of language in her vocabulary anymore.

Instead, she lifted onto her toes and kissed him once, like a long pull from a bottom-shelf whiskey bottle—something she wasn’t supposed to have but wanted anyway. She let it speak for her.

Mateo made a soft, surprised noise and leaned in. He was solid beneath her fingers. She splayed her hand across his cheek, holding him steady. The pressure of his lips against hers made her head spin, stars circling behind her closed lids.

She was kissing Mateo Radcliffe, and Mateo Radcliffe was kissing her.

His hands skimmed down the length of her waist, and when she tore herself away, she could feel the heat of her blood humming beneath her skin: on her cheeks, on the slim of her neck, on the ridges of her spine where he traced his fingertips. He was careful at first—slow and patient—but Este was a storm that swept him up. She closed the space between them as his palms slid down the bell of her hips, gentle over her split side, until his hands were underneath her, pulling her closer.

Mateo dropped onto the chaise, shoving aside the mountain of throw blankets and quilts. He tugged her onto his lap, and the soaked fabric of his shirt was cold against her skin as she pressed into him. His mouth found the hollow beneath her ear, the smooth stretch of her neck, the curve of her collarbone.

With his lips against her skin, his hands shimmied beneath her sweater, gingerly over the soft of her bandaged skin. He pushed the fabric up and over her head, tossing it to the floorboards. Goose bumps spread like wildfire down her skin. The sports bra she had on was hardly impressive lingerie, but Mateo didn’t seem to care. When he looked at her like that, with the crooked smirk she’d come to love, every one of her senses shifted into high alert.

With a finger latched to her belt loop, he reeled her closer as he reclined on the velvet. He propped a hand behind his head as one of her legs slotted between his. His other hand brushed through her hair, weaving between the strands, as she worked the buttons of his shirt and kissed down his chest as she went. One button, two buttons, three. The drenched cotton brushed aside, leaving cool patches on his skin.

She paused against his breastbone. Resting her head against his chest, she imagined the thrum of his heart, the way it used to beat. Este ran her fingers tenderly over the length of his sternum as if she could stir it awake. With peppered kisses back up to his lips, she lost herself in him.

The door creaked open as Daveed said, “Yo, Este, have you seen—whoa, sorry!”

Este jolted upright, throwing her hands across her chest, and rolling off the chaise. She landed on the heap of blankets, but they barely softened the sharp jab to her side.

“Daveed!” Mateo lurched forward, fumbling for his buttons as Este dove back inside her sweater. He stood, frazzled. There was no way to hide the crooked way his shirt fell over his shoulders, the rumpled tousle of his curls.

“Next time put a sock on the door, dude.” Daveed retreated into the hallway as quickly as he’d opened it.

Mateo offered a hand to Este, helping her up. “I should’ve known we were on borrowed time.”

Maybe it was the way he looked at her, blithe and bashful, bottom lip sucked between his teeth like he could still taste her there, that stoked the flame of defiance. Or maybe it was the infectious heat radiating from the Fade’s mark on her waist that reminded her what fate was waiting for her on the other side of the door. But mostly, it was the adjective he chose.

“Borrowed,” Este repeated. She said the word over and over, two syllables dripping off her tongue, before gripping both his shoulders with white knuckles. “Consider it a loan. I knew it had to mean something.”

Brilliant as he was, Mateo blinked like the cogs of his brain had seized.

“The souls are loans, Mateo. Like library books.” Her head was spinning with possibilities. Her weary body demanded she’d need to sit back down soon, but she was on the brink of a breakthrough. “Ives doesn’t own them. We can get your souls back.”

“Ives must have already put the book back in the spire, and I don’t think saving our souls from an eternity under her control is going to be as simple as stamping a borrowing card.” Something gleamed in his gaze, affectionate and amused. “Although, I have to admit, I’ve never tried it.”

This wasn’t over yet. It couldn’t be.

Este dropped Mateo’s hand, and she was pretty sure she saw him form a pout before she paced away. She drifted back and forth, fingers pressed to her temples. She needed to work through her tangled thoughts out loud. “Could you repeat everything I just said back to me?”

“Okay, um,” he stammered, sinking back onto the chaise. “Dean wrote, Consider it a loan. Stolen souls are like library books. Dean also left the book’s epigraph in the Hesper Fountain. Ives has the book but not the missing pages.”

Her feet stopped moving. “What did you say?”

Mateo rested his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, and he looked up to echo, “Ives has the book but not the missing pages?”

“No, the poem in the Hesper Fountain,” Este said. She scrolled back the panel to reveal the chalkboard with their harried thoughts from a few weeks ago. With a piece of chalk, she added the word love next to Mateo’s curved penmanship, the words life and death leftover from their last brainstorming sesh. “Life, death, and love. You’re a genius.”

“Thank you?” Mateo said, more question than statement.

She grabbed his face and planted a kiss firmly on his lips. “Gather the rest of the ghosts in here. I’ll be back before you know it.”

“Este, where are you going?” he asked, but she was already halfway out the door.

Her dad’s voice filtered through her memories. Everything you need to know, you can find in your library, he’d said. They’d searched the Lilith from ceiling to floor, peeked inside every hidden passageway, and pried open every locked door. Este only had one place left to look.