The Library of Shadows

The Fades looked like sorority girls at alpha pi ohmygod.

A plume of sweet-pea perfume mixed with the stench of their decaying bodies—patches of papyrus-thin skin peeled off to reveal the bone-white below. Each of them wore ponytails at a migraine-inducing slope. Shadows clasped around their necks like cloaks, but beneath the shrouding black, Este glimpsed a swatch of velour, hot pink and shimmering with rhinestones. A vision of true horror.

When Este didn’t budge, Mateo ducked into the hidden corridor without her. She couldn’t look away from the Fades, no matter how much she wanted to.

Three sets of prying eyes, coated in milk white as if they had cataracts, zoned in like heat-seeking missiles to her beating heart’s bull’s-eye. The Fades drifted through the maze of desks and wooden chairs. They wielded the darkness, lashing tendrils of black mist obeying their command.

As they sang, their mouths didn’t form words Este knew, none that she had heard before. Latin, maybe? Ancient, definitely. It chained her at the back of the classroom, transfixed. The rising tang of panic slicked her throat until it felt like she couldn’t breathe.

The Fade dead center matched Este’s hypnotized gaze. In a stripe that slanted down the Fade’s face, receding skin cracked and curled like paper under a flame. The rest of her face remained unblemished, cheeks smooth and lips slathered in what Este could only imagine was coconut-scented Lip Smacker.

Flanked on either side of the frontwoman, the other Fades were in equally terrible condition. Their skin, different shades of weathered tan, sagged off their limbs. One of them swung a Birkin bag from her crooked elbow because apparently even walking corpses needed a place to hold their cell phones with the grim reaper on speed dial.

From the passageway, Mateo called to her over their singing. “It’s like you’re trying to get killed right now.”

The Fades upped their tempo, moving closer with every downbeat. Only a few study tables stood between Este and their outstretched hands. The realization was enough to launch her into motion.

Este darted into the corridor, and Mateo said, “Look who decided to show up. Help me shut this.”

She pressed her shoulder against the paneling as she hugged the candle closer, begging for the doorway to close as she pushed, but the tracks were as old as the library, rusted and stubborn.

“Why do they look like Paris Hilton knockoffs?” She couldn’t bleach the terror from her voice. Each breath was a pointed dagger, slicing through her ribs. Her shoulder was going to have the gnarliest bruise from all the times she slammed it against the plaster, but it had to be better than whatever the Fades would do to her.

“They look the same way they did the last time they came around. I guess they didn’t get the memo on the latest trends,” Mateo said, bracing his hands against the door. “Are you even pushing?”

“Obviously I am,” Este ground out.

She pressed her back into the door, trying not to think about the black clouds inching around the doorframe. With one final push from the two of them, the door slotted back into its track and rolled closed, right as one of the Fades’ hands was about to slip through.

Once it was shut, Este didn’t stop moving. She raced down the hallway and cupped her palm around the candle holder to keep the flame from blowing out. It did little to light their way. She could still feel the Fades’ darkness on the back of her neck.

The only thing standing between her and certain death was a semicorporeal asshole of a ghost who had made it perfectly clear he was capable of disappearing at any moment, which would leave her trapped in an abandoned service corridor with three spirits dressed like 1990s B-list celebrities.

To Mateo’s credit, he didn’t vanish. He kept her pace, step for step, even as his image faded in and out in the candlelight like television static. He angled his head toward her, probably waiting for some snarky remark, but she couldn’t shake the hollow feeling in her chest. Instead, she focused on the striped beige walls, on each footstep forward, on the way her lungs still rose and fell, alive.

As they reached the end of the hall, where the passageway forked into equally cobwebbed stairwells, a wintry gust blew in behind them. Fear clawed behind her rib cage as the Fades’ song swelled, a funeral dirge. A cloying dampness sapped the warmth from her skin, and the smell of wilting flowers gave Este’s gag reflex a workout.

“Which way?” she managed to ask as the Fades’ chill crept up the stairwell.

Mateo looked both ways and shrugged. “Both great options. Manet or mathematics?”

Este fought the urge to glance behind her, to see how close the Fades were. Their melodies echoed between the walls, urgent and insatiable. They sounded everywhere at once. She had to raise her voice above their harmonies to say, “Manet.”

Mateo pivoted left, and Este followed him around the corner, feeling heavier with each step upward. The Fades’ mist billowed after them, and the longer she ran, the harder Este had to fight not to give in. To let them take her.

Salvation was a hidden door at the end of the hall, and Este focused on the gilded ring of light coming from the other side. Mateo reached it first, vanishing and reappearing at its hinges. The Fades’ black tendrils curled around Este’s ankle, trying to drag her back into the fog.

Mateo extended the feather duster like a hand, and she grabbed on. He tugged her forward, and lunging through the opening, they landed with a thud in the dimly lit alcoves around the archives. Out here, the passage was disguised on the wall by a framed copy of Manet’s painting, Music in the Tuileries Gardens. Mateo latched the door shut behind them, and only then could Este finally breathe again.

Every echo of the Fades’ singing had dissipated, replaced by an uneasy silence in the main stacks. It had gotten late enough that the study carrels on this floor had been abandoned. No one had been around to hear them.

Despite the lights overhead, Mateo was whole next to her. Not some flimsy apparition, but as solid as ever. If her body weren’t fully engaged in fight-or-flight mode, she’d have asked him to explain a few pressing questions like why aren’t you invisible, and how is any of this possible, and, kindly, what the fuck just happened.

Instead, Este slumped to the floor, her legs giving out underneath her, and she counted her breaths to quell the quicksand panic bubbling up. If she moved too fast, it would swallow her whole. “They were singing, and I couldn’t even understand them, but it felt like, like I couldn’t breathe, like I was—”

“Dying?” Mateo propped himself against the bookshelf next to her, ankles crossed. Entirely unshaken by the last fifteen minutes. “The language of the dead can be exceedingly convincing.”

Her voice wobbled beneath the weight of the words. “Like the one the book’s written in?”

Mateo swiped a paperback from the shelf and tapped Este’s head with it. “You’re smarter than you look, Logano.”

So, he wasn’t bullshitting her.

Or, she thought callously, he still is.

There was no way to trust someone like him, and the worst part was that she couldn’t even decide which made him less trustworthy: the night’s realization that ghosts were real and he absolutely was one, or the privileged private-school glint in his eyes. He’d saved her tonight, but ultimately, he would use her to get what he wanted and then he would leave, exactly like he had in the spire.

“Oh, my god. I need to get downstairs,” she said, prying herself upright and blowing out the candle. The night had slipped away from her. “If Ives is still here somewhere, if she thinks I’m not taking this seriously—”

“Hey, hey, hey,” Mateo said, zipping around so that he stood in her way when she turned. “I thought we had a deal. I want to introduce you to the others.”

“Other what?” Este barked. “More Fades? I think I’ve met enough of your friends for one lifetime.”

“No, there are only three of those, and they came right from the pages of this book.” With one hand he tapped the binding of The Book of Fades through his bag. The other arm slotted sideways against the bookshelves, creating a barrier.

As if that could stop her. She slipped through his body like it was a sheet of rain. On the other side, she shook out her limbs. Walking through a ghost had not been on her junior-year bingo card.

No faster than she blinked, he was in front of her again. “These are friends, and I promise it’ll only take a few minutes.”

His dark hair curled like ink in water, and his lashes cast slender shadows across the sharp edge of his cheekbones. She traced the veins on the backs of his hands to where they disappeared beneath the rolled sleeves of his button-down. He looked so, so solid, but she’d felt the truth.

“No, I have to get back to work. I’m not letting you mess this up more than you already have.” Este pinched the bridge of her nose. Was this a joke to him? “As much as I hate to admit it, maybe you were right. What am I supposed to tell Ives? That I got chased by a demented glee club, and that’s why I missed half my shift? There’s no way.”

“I take it you’re bad at group projects.” Mateo paused along the balcony railing. From here, Este could see the entire library—including the empty chair at the circulation desk where she was supposed to be. “Listen, Logano. We’re a team now, you and me. You can’t expect someone to do all the work for you, but you can’t do it all alone either.”

For someone who died before using a toaster, he sure thought he was the coolest thing since sliced bread.

Este crossed her arms, clenched her jaw. Ives hadn’t given her a group project—Este had begged for a chance to prove she wasn’t a troublemaker. And yet trouble was exactly what she’d gotten herself into tonight. Thanks to Mateo. Again.

But now Este also had a grocery list of everything that was at stake, and her eyes betrayed her by swaying toward his leather satchel and the tome inside. Ives wouldn’t let her keep studying at Radcliffe Prep unless she returned The Book of Fades, and Mateo wouldn’t let the book out of his reach until the missing pages were found.

Not to mention that the rules of her reality had changed, and Este no longer had the playbook. Mateo knew that, and by the looks of the well-worn smirk playing on his lips, he knew that she knew it, too.

Mateo said, “If you don’t keep your end of the deal, I won’t keep mine either. The book technically belongs to me anyway. I am a Radcliffe, after all.”

Taking exaggerated steps, he backtracked down the aisle, leaving her speechless in his wake. He looked over his shoulder with every slow-motion movement. Waiting for her to stop him.

Mateo feigned a cough to keep her attention. “I said I’m leaving.”

At least with him, she had a chance. Someone who knew the ins and outs of the Lilith. Someone who was around when the blueprints were first sketched, who could help her avoid the wrath of the Fades, and who might have seen her father when he was a student.

There were so many questions that she couldn’t answer herself—had her dad ended up in the wrong places at all the wrong times like her? Did he know, just like her, what lurked around the historic buildings? And, quieter, an acrid question, stale and unspoken on the back of her tongue: was the ghost of him here somewhere?

“You’ll never see The Book of Fades again,” Mateo crooned. He rounded the corner of the shelves, lost behind well-loved editions of classics like Of Mice and Men and Waiting for Godot. He shuffled a few steps before sticking his head back out to say, “It’ll be gone forever.”

But if she and Mateo worked together, she could learn why her dad stole the key to the spire and retrace his steps through the Lilith. Even if it meant working with someone who was sure to make her grind her teeth into a pulp by the end of the quarter.

Este pushed down the metallic taste of pride and self-preservation and said, “You’ve got twenty minutes.”

“Welcome to the team!” Mateo said, launching a triumphant fist into the air. He didn’t wait for her, breezing around the stacks. “But if you can’t keep up, I’ll have to demote you to junior varsity.”

Este frowned and punched an alarm on her phone. She’d give him twenty minutes. Not a second more. “Don’t make me regret this.”

Mateo grinned, a widespread thing that crinkled the corners of his eyes. “Wouldn’t dream of it, dear.”

They turned a tight corner toward a collection of dictionaries, words from every corner of the world bound and kept safe. The shelves were wider here, the books thicker. A tacky layer of dust coated everything in gray. Este peeled it up as she ran her fingers along the bound spines and jotted dust dictionaries onto her mental to-do list.

Mateo rolled to a stop in front of an arched green door marked Senior Lounge on a burnished plaque.

“Look decent, everybody,” he said with the gusto of a circus ringleader as he nudged open the door. “We’ve got a live one.”