Page 10 of Silver in the Bone

“Do not,” I warned, “quote Nash at me.”

Cabell flinched, and for once, I didn’t care.

“Why do you always do that?” he asked. “Shut down any mention of him—”

“Because he doesn’t deserve the breath it takes to say his name,” I snapped.

Draping my leather satchel over my shoulder, I forced a tight smile onto my face. “Come on, we’ll check the library’s job board and then stop by the Sorceress Madrigal’s to give her the brooch.”

Cabell shuddered at the mention of the sorceress’s name. I patted his shoulder. In all fairness, she’d fixated on him at the consultation with an intensity that had alarmed both of us, even before she decided to lick a drop of sweat from his cheek.

I locked up and followed Cabell down the creaking staircase and out into the boisterous night. Tourists milled around us, merry and pink-cheeked from the crisp early-autumn air.

I narrowly avoided colliding with several of them as they craned their heads to gawk at the Quincy Market building. The sight of them leaning in for photos in front of restaurants, eating apple cider donuts, pushing strollers with sleepy kids up the cobblestones toward their hotels.

It was a vision of a life I’d never known, and never would.

Echoing laughter greeted us as we entered the atrium of our guild’s library, turning my skin as cold as the marble walls.

Nothing good ever came out of a Hollower fete, especially this close to midnight, when curses thrived and people’s judgment turned soggy with drink.

Now I wished we had stopped for dinner instead of walking over to Beacon Hill, where the library occupied an inconspicuous town house.

“Ugh,” I said. “Perfect timing.”

“You do have a knack for always running into the people you least want to see,” Cabell said. “It’s almost like the library is trying to tell you something.”

“That I need to find a way to steal their keys so they can’t get back in?”

Cabell shook his head. “When are you going to realize that pushing people away only ends one way—with you alone?”

“You mean my happily-ever-after?” I shot back, making sure I’d shut the door firmly behind me.

The All Ways door had been removed from a powerful sorceress’s vault over a century ago, when our Hollower guild was founded. Unlike the sorceresses’ skeleton knobs, which were used to anchor one fixed end of a particular Vein to the other, the All Ways door could open an infinite number of temporary passageways—it could take you anywhere you could picture clearly in your mind, so long as you’d been given a copy of the door’s brass key.

Cabell and I had inherited our membership key from Nash, who had received it upon the reluctant acceptance of his application to the guild. His required donation—the shield of Aeneas—had been a notable enough relic that the other guild members were willing to overlook his rather scruffy reputation.

The problem with the All Ways door was that the library became a required stop no matter where you were going. While we could walk to the library and wait for Librarian to notice us and open its hidden door, the easier method for entry—and the one most guild members used—was the All Ways door. All you had to do was stick your membership key into any old nearby lock, open the door, and you’d be there in seconds. We used the one on the linen closet in our North End apartment more often than not. Once at the library, we could use the key again on the knob of the All Ways door to continue to wherever we were headed next.

We’d be passing through again on the return trip, and my stomach turned, imagining multiple doses of this gathering.

The tension in Cabell’s face eased a bit as he leaned back, looking down the long, polished hall to the central chamber of the library. The warm glow of candles was an invitation and made the white flecks in the stone floor glow like a trail of stars.

“It’s not Friday, is it?” I asked. Friday-night show-and-tells were dedicated to the Hollowers drinking and preening about various relics they’d found and vaults they’d survived. Any hope I’d had of quickly saying hello to Librarian before heading out crumbled like clumps of sand in a fist.

“Tuesday. Looks like Endymion Dye and his crew are back from whatever expedition they were on, though,” Cabell noted.

Hating myself for my self-sabotaging curiosity, I stole a quick look down the hall. Sure enough, Endymion Dye stood at one of the work-tables, surrounded by guild members, all of whom were chirping and fluttering around him, trying to get a word of worshipful praise in. His shock of pure-white hair still came as a surprise, no matter how many times I saw him. It had been the parting gift of a sorceress’s curse three years ago.

My jaw tightened. There was something unsettling about him beyond his obscene wealth, beyond the fact that his family had founded this guild and he got to set the rules, beyond even the piercing gray eyes that seemed to cut straight through you. He had an elusive air, as if none of us deserved the privilege of knowing his true feelings or intentions.

Even Nash, the man who grinned his way through chaos, had given Endymion a wide berth. The guy’s into some hinky shit, Tamsy, he’d said one day as we’d passed him on the way to the sole guild meeting Nash had decided to grace with his presence. You steer clear of him, hear me?

The rare instances when I’d seen Endymion, he’d always been so perfectly composed that it was almost unreal to see him now, speckled with dust and grime from a recent expedition.

Still, he wasn’t half as annoying as his son, Emrys. The younger Dye, when not blowing through the inheritance no seventeen-year-old deserved, or bragging about whatever relic he and his father had found, seemed to exist solely to test the limits of my sanity.

“You don’t see Trust Fund around, do you?” I asked.

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