The Library of Shadows

Everyone huddled around Este’s shoulders, craning for a better view of the pages. Daveed’s eyes shifted from the paper to Este’s face one, twice, before he finally said, “But what do we do with them?”

“That’s what I can’t figure out.” Este sagged against the shelves. Her waist rioted beneath the weight of her own body, begging for relief. “This chapter is about summoning the Fades—the ceremony, the smoke, the whole shebang. It’d make more sense for my dad to steal it if he were trying to rule the Fades, not escape them.”

“Perhaps that’s exactly why he didn’t want my sister to have them.” Mateo hummed, thumbing through the chapter again and again until handing it back to Este. She stuffed the pages back into her pocket for safekeeping. “Maybe we missed something in an earlier chapter that will tell us how to release the souls? It’s all connected.”

“We need the rest of the book,” Este said, the realization hitting her with the weight of an encyclopedia. “You’re right. Ives told me the book needed to be returned in one piece. It didn’t matter which chapter he took. They need to be bound together again.”

A deep-bellied groan cut off her thought and scattered the ghosts, each drifting out of sight. The Fades’ cold front swept down the hallway, and the Paranormal Investigators pressed themselves into the shadows of the bookcases. The figures haunted toward the senior lounge, knuckles clicking and a putrid breeze preceding them.

Este pressed a firm finger to her lips, begging Shepherd not to say something stupid and get them all killed. She didn’t come this far for a your mom joke to ruin them. Only after the Fades swiveled right, following the scientific journals toward forgotten histories, did Este fill her lungs again.

“Since I gave the book back to Ives, I’m sure it’s already back in the spire,” Este said, focusing on the scuff marks her shoes left on the floor rather than the inevitable way that everyone’s faces fell.

“Can we sneak up there somehow?” Arthur asked.

“The door’s locked, isn’t it? That’s, like, its whole thing,” Posy said, picking at the hem of her sleeve. Nervous, maybe, finally facing the spirits she’d been so keen to hunt at the beginning of the semester.

“There’s another way up,” Este said as Mateo’s shape re-formed next to her. He had told her the truth the first day she met him, whining as they hiked the spiraling stairs to the archived collection. “There really is an elevator in Ives’s office, isn’t there?”

Mateo’s hand fit into hers, skin against ancient skin. He pressed a kiss to her knuckles, the sensation swirling fizz through her entire body. “Este Logano, you’re a beautiful mastermind.”

But Bryony made a hideous noise of disbelief. “Breaking into the head librarian’s office is Mission: Impossible.”

“We could take the long way,” Daveed offered. “Go through the service hallways. They connect to her office, don’t they?”

Mateo released Este’s fingers so that he could grip his hands behind his back and stretch the lengths of his neck. “Via brick wall. We’d have to deconstruct century-old masonry to even enter.”

“Not to mention,” Luca said, “what would we do if she goes back inside her office?”

“We split up,” Este said. All eyes on her. She straightened her shoulders. They were relying on her. Yes, it meant she might let them down. But it also meant that she had backup. “One group will distract the Fades and preoccupy Ives, while the other goes to the spire, finds the book, and finishes this before she realizes we’re there.”

“How are we going to keep her busy?” Posy asked.

Este swiveled to face Arthur, her mouth scrunched up in a devious grin. She raised her eyebrows, and his furrowed.

“Oh, no,” he said, elongating each vowel.

“You’re the best actor I know,” she said, laying the charm on, heavy as honey on a biscuit. It didn’t matter that he was, in fact, the only actor she knew.

Arthur nodded once and fastened a serious expression on his face. He shook out his neck, circling his shoulders. His lips flapped together as he warmed up his vocals. “Peaches and princes, peaches and prunes.”

Shepherd squinted. “That sounds like the worst fruit salad in existence.”

“Do you need medical attention?” Aoife asked.

Arthur held out a flat palm to shut them up. “Let me warm up. If I’m doing this, I need to get into character.”

“While you do . . . whatever that is,” Luca said, “Daveed, Aoife, and I can distract the Fades.”

Aoife’s flat expression didn’t shift when she added, “It’s not like they can kill us any more than they already have.”

Mateo wrapped his arm around Este’s shoulder. “Then, we’ll take the elevator.”

All nine of them nodded, each with their own mission. This wasn’t a job for one person. Too much was at stake for that. They could do this if they did it together.

The ghosts vanished, trailing the scent of molding bouquets through the stacks, which left Este and Mateo with a loose-lipped Arthur, Posy and her headlamp, and Shepherd, who clutched his lacrosse stick with both hands.

When they reached Ives’s office, the door was closed, and a thin strip of yellow poured out from the seams in the threshold. She was inside. A cold chill on the back of Este’s neck told her that the Fades weren’t far, but she could only hope the others were masters of distraction.

As Arthur approached Ives’s door, the rest of them crouched behind the nearest bookshelf. Posy flipped off her headlamp as the office’s light flooded the dark floor.

“What are you doing here?” Ives barked.

Arthur launched straight into a fabricated sob story about failing his acting midterm because he was in the middle of memorizing his monologue when the power went out. He wept believable tears, gripping onto Ives’s shoulder and dragging her by the sleeve of her silk blouse toward the stairwell.

Arthur flung his hands around in wild gestures, but his words were muffled with dramatic sobs. It wasn’t enough. Ives’s smile turned sinister. “Tell me where Este Logano is, and I’ll make sure you get the leading role. How does that sound?”

Este’s life flashed before her eyes, and it had a Tony Award–winning soundtrack.

“She left already,” Arthur said instead of ratting her out so that he could be a shoo-in for Erik in The Phantom of the Opera. Este sucked a breath in through her teeth, relieved. “I heard she was going skiing at Sugarbush for fall break.”

Ives rolled her eyes and angled back toward her office. “You’re not half the actor you think you are. Tell Este that I’m waiting for her. All other students must leave the Lilith immediately.”

“It isn’t working,” Posy whispered over Este’s shoulder. “What do we do?”

Bryony pushed out a stiff breath. She straightened the shoulders of her coveralls, smoothed down her hair. “I’m going in.”

Este’s mouth fell open. “Bryony, what are you—”

But she was gone, steering across the open floor with her head high.

“Head Librarian Ives,” she said too loudly. Her tone kicked into the snotty, entitled cadence Este and Posy had first heard at the Safety and Security office. “I believe my parents donate good money to this school so that the lights stay on. Wait until my mother hears about this.”

“Dolores Pritcher is the least of my worries,” Ives snarked.

Just as Ives was about to close the door, Bryony said, “I know where Este is.”

Ives inched the door open wider. “Is that so?”

With their efforts combined, Arthur and Bryony lured Ives away from her open doorway. The door inched closed behind her, and Este clutched Mateo’s hand as they sprinted toward the office. Shepherd jammed the end of his lacrosse stick into the doorway at the last second, saving it from latching shut.

The office dripped in golden light from a menagerie of candles. The only lights left on in the entire library. Lopsided stacks of books, wrinkled papers, dried droplets of spilled ink covered every inch of her desk. The desperate searching of a desperate woman. She hadn’t known the pages were missing until Este handed her the book back.

“No offense,” Posy said as she wandered through the amber alcove, “but I don’t see an elevator.”

“Look again.” Mateo paced toward the wooden hatch on the wall and tapped his knuckles against it. A low-end echo responded. The sound of an empty elevator shaft.

Este had seen it during every meeting, but it wasn’t anything special. The Lilith was filled with hidden doors and secret passageways, so she hadn’t given it much thought. In the corner, a small brass latch clamped it shut. The key was surely dangling from Ives’s wrist right now.

“Letter opener?” Mateo asked.

She lifted the gold tool from Ives’s desk and slotted it into the hole. She was practically a professional locksmith by now. The mechanism inside clicked as pins moved into place, and the door loosened enough for Este to scrape her fingernails beneath the ledge and pry it open.

“You call that an elevator?” Shepherd asked.

Inside, a book trolley sat on rusted wheels. The dumbwaiter was only wide enough to fit a single cart, a box with an old-fashioned pulley system installed as an easy way to transport books in and out of the spire. The rope was frayed, which was not the most reassuring.

“Our chariot has arrived,” Este said to Mateo.

They dragged the cart out of the elevator, trying and failing to keep its clanging wheels quiet. Este folded herself into the plywood box first, her back against the flimsy board, and Mateo followed. There was nothing to hold on to, and they had to hope the old joists didn’t decide to give out.

The machine groaned as Shepherd and Posy wound the rope around their wrists and pulled. The cart lurched along the guide rails with each tug, and the light from the office was lost behind the stone walls of the chute. The weight of everything waiting for her, whether salvation or certain death, flattened against Este’s ribs until each breath burned.

“You okay, Logano?” Mateo asked, nudging his shoulder against hers. In the lightless chute, she couldn’t follow the lines of his mouth, but the lift of his smile was self-evident.

For a moment, there was only the sound of aching metal not up to current building codes. The rope creaked but didn’t split. Blood rushed through Este’s head, pumped by her weary heart.

She raked her teeth across her bottom lip. “What will happen when we get upstairs? To you? To us?”

When the pages pressed back against the book’s spine, would the ghosts earn a second chance at life? Would she get lodged in the in-between, stuck in the same collegiate purgatory? Or would their souls go on once and forever toward the same peace her dad had found?

“I’m not sure.” His hand found the soft bend in her neck, thumb tracing the line of her jaw as he nudged her to face him. “But whatever it is, I’m by your side.”

Don’t wait to tell him. But she couldn’t form the three simple syllables.

Not because they weren’t true but because the dumbwaiter thudded against the machinery at the top of the elevator shaft, and the words died on her lips.