The Library of Shadows

Este staggered backward so that she wouldn’t get knocked over as Mateo clicked the lock into place, bolting them into the study. Her entire body went stiff, elbows jammed into her sides to keep from shaking and palms slicked with sweat.

In the darkness, the details of his face were fuzzy, but he certainly didn’t look like a century-old spirit. Although he did still wear a collared shirt and tailored pants suspiciously similar to the ones she’d last seen him in. His satchel hung across his torso, heavy. Half of Radcliffe’s student population looked like that, while the other half wore mixed-and-matched lululemon leggings and copious amounts of plaid. It was hardly enough evidence to convict him as a ghost.

Este opened her mouth to reprimand him and demand he return the stolen book, but he pressed a firm finger against his lips. He met her glare for only a moment before slouching forward to listen through the keyhole.

“Don’t shush me.” She took a step toward him but then faltered. Not even the hot blood pounding in her ears could drown out the distant hum of song as it surged again. “Give back the book, you thief.”

With his ear still pressed to the door, he whispered, “Now’s not the time for name-calling. Keep it down.”

“It’s not name-calling if it’s true.” She refused to whisper on his behalf. Let whoever he was hiding from find him. He probably stole from them, too. “And trust me, there are far worse things I’d like to call you. For starters, you’re a lying, scheming, son of a—”

A feather duster smothered her words.

Mateo reeled back, shaking out the duster, while Este spat clumps of feathers, her lips matted with grime. He was unbelievable.

“What is wrong with you?” she hissed.

He kept his voice low and level, scarcely louder than a whisper. “I’m trying to avoid some unwanted company, and if you were smart, so would you.”

The singing subsided again, ebbing and flowing like the wind. Only once the third floor was completely quiet did Mateo’s posture loosen. He moved deeper into the room and rested against the study tables. He pointed the feather duster around the room. “Are you taking candle making as an elective?”

There was not a single, minuscule chance in hell Este would admit that she had briefly tried to talk to the dead via three-wick candle.

“This isn’t about me,” she said instead. “This is about how you used me as collateral damage in your plot to steal a first-edition text.”

He flipped the feather duster through his fingers, sending motes into the air. A flash of lightning illuminated them like glitter in Posy’s snow-globe crystal ball. Thunder knocked against the windows, and every nerve in Este’s body went on high alert.

“The Book of Fades is better off missing,” Mateo said, tucking the duster into his back pocket. “Trust me.”

Este could’ve choked on the venom that coated her tongue. It was his fault she was in line for the academic guillotine, his fault she might have to leave the only place she thought she could finally feel at home. And he didn’t even care.

“Trust you?” she spat. “You’re the last soul on earth I’d trust.”

The clock on the wall was moments from striking midnight. She’d wasted too much time upstairs chasing ghosts. She didn’t have time for more mind games, and she certainly wouldn’t give him an opportunity to absolve his guilt with sweet nothings and a smirk. He’d talked his way into this, but Este would make sure she had the final word.

Adjusting her grip on the history books, she marched toward him. “Hand it over, and I’ll never speak to you again, okay? I need to get back to the circulation desk in case there are more books to be shelved or repairs for the archives or—”

“You’re working in the archives?”

Something in Mateo’s voice stopped her, the way it caught in his throat like a belt loop on a kitchen drawer. His eyes dipped to the place where the key had been looped around her neck.

The hollow singing returned, resonating through the third floor’s patterned walls. Not one, but three, in perfect harmony. Would they ever stop singing?

“All thanks to your little disappearing act upstairs. I’m lucky I didn’t get thrown out immediately.” The sopranos’ song surged. A nerve in her eyebrow was about to start twitching—she could feel it. “Now I get to listen to the world’s most devoted a cappella group every night.”

She unlocked the door and hauled it open only for Mateo’s palm to slam it shut again. “Este, don’t leave.”

He stood over her, arm outstretched around her. His chest nearly touched her back. This close, he smelled like wet ink and cedar smoke. She twisted to face him, craning her neck to look him in the eyes. Had he always towered over her like this?

Shadows spilled down his face in stark contrast with the blue-tinged light from the storm. Lightning struck. In the brightness, his body flickered, faded. Transparency lapped at his features, like he was a theater projection when the lights turn on, there but unseeable.

One moment, he was standing in front of her, solid in the shadows.

When she blinked, he was across the room, leaning against the windowsills.

Este flattened herself against the door, one hand on the doorknob. She needed to get out of here, but she couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. She sucked air in through her nose and pushed it out through her mouth, but even her dad’s breathing techniques couldn’t slow the white-hot adrenaline pumping through her veins, telling her to run, run, run.

Mateo was a ghost. The same boy in the photo from September 1917 traced his eyes over the shape of her in the darkness. Sizing her up. Wearing her down.

She was paralyzed as he stalked back across the room. All she had to do was open the door. But he knew where The Book of Fades was. So, shaking, she held her ground as his hand hovered over hers. The shape of it was staticky and only half opaque. She could still see the silver rings around her knuckles, the crooked notch in her middle finger where she’d broken it years ago.

When he wrapped his hand around hers on the knob, a night-cool wind grazed her skin, but nothing else, nothing more.

She didn’t feel him at all.

“You’re him, aren’t you?” she whispered, and her mouth was dry as sand in an hourglass. His hand had gone through hers—through. “You’re Mateo Radcliffe.”

“So, you do know that anything in the spire is rightfully mine for the taking.” There was a click as he spun the lock. Trapping them here. Together. He lowered until his lips were only millimeters from her ear. “I know you’re mad at me. Stay mad if you want. But I promise you, I’m not the worst thing haunting this school.”

She sucked in a breath of stale library air, filling her lungs to the brim just to feel alive. It reignited her resolve. She’d never met anyone as infuriatingly insufferable as him before—dead or alive. “If you’re a ghost, couldn’t you have just floated through the walls to get the book yourself? Instead, you had to drag me into this?”

Mateo slipped his hand back inside his pocket, but Este still felt the remnants of an ancient cold where his fingers should have skimmed her skin. He vanished and reappeared at one of the study tables. “I can’t walk through walls.”

Narrowing her eyes, Este asked, “What kind of self-respecting spirit can’t do that?”

“For someone who doesn’t believe in ghosts, you sure have a lot of opinions about them,” Mateo scoffed, scrubbing the back of his head. “I didn’t lie. The spire was overgrown with rivean ivy, remember? I can’t touch it—no ghost can. Things that aren’t alive are perfectly real to us, but we can’t touch anything living.”

“Allergic,” she said, remembering his shitty attempt at an excuse.

“Exactly. Even if I’d had the key, I still needed the help of someone living to get inside.” His gaze ran the length of her body. “And you are incredibly alive.”

Este ground her heels against the floorboards. The rightful heir to the Radcliffe legacy didn’t need to know the way her stomach had bottomed out at the sight of him. The things that would do to his already monstrous ego were unimaginable. Thankfully, in the dark, he might not have been able to recognize the pink flush that swept over her cheeks when he looked at her like that—like she was the ghost, and he could see straight through her.

In the hall, a familiar click tapped along the floorboards, and Este recognized it instantly as Ives’s high heels. She could end this now.

Este was about to holler for her when Mateo cleared his throat. “What’s your big idea, Logano? Let Ives catch you slacking on the job? Tell her a ghost stole her precious book?” He dipped into his satchel and retrieved The Book of Fades. She recognized its black binding and metallic embossing immediately. “If you call Ives in here, I’ll vanish and take the book with me. You need me just as much as I need you.”

Something sharp jammed in her windpipe. Unless she wanted another lecture, she needed to get back downstairs before Ives realized she had gone MIA, but none of it would matter if she didn’t have the book. She couldn’t let Mateo out of her sight again.

Mateo trailed his thumb down the gold-edged pages. With every flash of lightning, the shape of him vanished, leaving the book floating in midair until the darkness returned. He reappeared in front of her, holding the book so that she could see the gilded pages.

Nothing was printed on them.

Her throat was sandpaper, chapped with raw anger. “You nearly sacrificed my entire academic career for a book filled with blank paper?”

“It’s not blank.”

“I’m looking right at it. There’s nothing written in this book, Mateo. I’m not an idiot.”

“Neither am I.” When he rolled his head back, stretching the tense planes of his neck, a grin crept up Este’s lips. She had to admit that she kind of liked getting under his skin. If he even had any. “The language of the dead does not belong to the eyes of the living.”

“What?” she said with half a laugh. “What sort of cryptic bullshit is that?”

Este reached for the book, but he jerked it above her head.

“Chapter one: embalming the spirit,” he recited, eyes scanning the page as if there were words pressed into the parchment, index finger skimming along imaginary ink. “Bearing the Fades’ touch, fragments of life cling to earth and cannot traverse the lasting path. These, we call ghosts. When damned—”

“Cut it out!” Este snarled. “Tell me the truth, or I’ll tell Ives you have the book.”

“I think it’s best we keep the head librarian out of this.”

Este couldn’t believe him. “You’re the one who brought her into this in the first place.”

“While that may technically be true,” Mateo said as he fanned through the pages again, “it’s not wholly accurate.”

He stopped toward the end where a jagged seam split the book, a crease where pages had been torn from the binding. Simply imagining the shredding sound the paper must have made was enough to raise goose bumps on Este’s arms. A note had been written on the previous page, circled and with an arrow drawn to the ragged edge.

Consider it a loan. DL97.

The blue ink had been smudged; crooked letters looped together like an afterthought. The ink had seeped into the page, like it had been written and dried eons ago.

“DL97, what does that mean?”

“It means someone decided it was a good idea to vandalize school property.” Mateo closed the book with a snap and tucked it back into his satchel. “You think Ives would readily accept a book with missing pages?”

There weren’t enough adjectives in the English language to describe him. Incredulous, presumptuous, pretentious. Este squinted. “What did you do with them?”

“Wrong again,” he said with a pretentious inflection that made her roll her eyes. “If I knew where they were, I wouldn’t be here right now. This book is the reason I’m a ghost, and it isn’t complete without the missing chapter. I’ve been trapped at this school for a hundred years, but if we can find those pages, I can come back to life.”

“We?” Este balked.

“When I’m alive again, I’ll give you the book, and you can do whatever you see fit with it. Turn it in, burn it with hellfire and brimstone, I don’t care.” He leaned a forearm on the door over her head, a little too close for her liking. She tilted her chin to look up at him, coiling her arms against her chest to hold herself together. “Or don’t, and I’ll keep the book. You can transfer back to your old high school, right?”

It was blackmail. And it was working.

Before she could answer, black mist spilled beneath the door, streaming through the cracks in the seal and putting Posy’s borrowed fog machine to shame. Darkness shrouded the study like a thick, wool shawl. The temperature plummeted so fast Este’s breath could’ve spooled in silk white strands, and she wouldn’t have been surprised.

“Hold that thought,” Mateo said. “As much as I’m sure the Fades would like to meet you, we should go.”

Este’s gaze flicked toward his bag, The Book of Fades inside. Her voice cracked when she asked, “The Fades? Those Fades?”

“Lovely girls when they aren’t harvesting student souls.” Mateo plucked the lavender candle off the desk. He produced a box of matches from his pocket—the same kind Ives had in her office.

“Did you steal those, too?”

Strike and spark, he lit the wick. Mateo’s form wavered in the dancing candlelight. “Honestly, Este, is now the time to condemn me for my past transgressions?”

The mist swirled until she couldn’t see the floor beneath. It sucked the oxygen out of the air. Heart hammering, Este could barely think straight. “Right, so, how do we get out of here?”

He offered her a sly smile. “We?”

God, he sent her blood pressure through the roof. “I swear, if you disappear on me again.”

“I won’t,” he said, and the gleam reignited in his eyes, “if you promise to help me.”

Este backed away from the door as the wood turned frigid behind her. The Fades must have been desperate to get in. “And if I don’t?”

Mateo sliced his hand across the vulnerable skin of his neck, sucking air between his teeth. Este pressed her lips together, flattening them into a fine line, but Mateo wasn’t finished. His tongue sagged out of his mouth, and he rolled his eyes until their whites flashed.

“Not the time,” Este snapped.

“Is that a yes, then?”

The word spun through Este’s mind.

Yes would mean risking her chances of staying at Radcliffe Prep, but her hopes of continuing her archival studies were already dissolving like sugar on her tongue. She had gone MIA for long enough during her shift that Ives could reject her on truancy alone. The thought was like a bricked ankle, sinking her to the bottom of Lake Champlain.

Yes would also mean lying to the head librarian, dodging Ives’s questions about the book’s whereabouts. But maybe Mateo was right. Wouldn’t it be better returned with all the pages intact? Wasn’t that what an archival assistant was meant to do—preserve priceless tomes and ancient texts?

Mostly, yes would mean avoiding whatever unholy thing lurked beyond the door’s bronze hinges, and that was enough at the moment.

The syllable hung heavy on her lips, the way stolen sips of whiskey coated her tongue. Sweet and burning all at once. “Yes.”

“Excellent choice, Logano.” Mateo paced to the far side of the room and counted his steps out loud. Este trailed close behind. At twelve, he nudged a bisque panel with his shoulder, and it sank deeper into the wall. A hidden door.

He pushed the paneling to slide it open, but the new door got stuck on its tracks. Jammed.

“Can’t you hurry?” Este asked, climbing onto a chair so that the ink-black fog couldn’t reach her. Her ribs cinched tighter. Her breaths came quicker.

Mateo pushed against the panel with a groan. “Believe it or not, I could use some assistance.”

Este scrambled down. She kicked her foot against the paneling, and the plaster gave with a groan. Mateo scrolled it sideways like a pocket door, revealing the open maw of a dark passageway.

He handed her the candle, and she held it like a lifeline. Not even lavender essential oils could calm the dread surging through her as the study room door blew open. A tempest brewed as three shaded figures stormed into the room.

“If you don’t want to die tonight,” he said, prodding her forward with the feather duster, “you can’t let them touch you.”