Page 28 of House of Lilith

He shoots me an amused smile. “This is where I spent most of last night.” And he keeps walking.

I frown, but I welcome this little distraction. “You mean to tell me, the very night before the First Game, you chose to stay up so you could wander around a library you’ll have a whole year to explore?”

He stops and clicks his tongue at me. I stop as well, smiling even before he playfully snaps, “Not ‘a library’.TheLibrary.”

“What’s so great about it?” I ask as we keep walking.

“Do you know what the Lexarcanum is?”

I think for a second. “Isn’t that, like, a library where books choose people, not the other way around?”

“A librarysection, to be more exact,” Ricky says as he turns his head to the side to throw me a grin. “But yes. And guess which Library it’s part of.”

I nod as it hits me. “I see.”

“Soisit surprising, really, that I had to start checking this place out as soon as we got here?” Ricky asks.

I let out a laugh as I clap him on the back, loudly. “So? What book did you get picked by? ‘One Hundred Ways to Be Even Nerdier’?”

“Quiet,” I hear someone’s soft, slow voice sound from hidden speakers around us.

Ricky shoots me a frown. I raise my hands in defense and it turns into a stifled chuckle as he whispers, “Sadly, no. That part is restricted. But it just goes to show how cool this Library is.”

And he waves for me to follow him into a row between two bookshelves marked History E-G and History G-H.

There, he grabs an incredibly large, dusty book off a shelf and keeps walking in the direction of the glass wall.

It’s only once we step out from between the shelves that I realize there are students sitting all along the wall. They’re sprawled in soft couches and armchairs placed around low coffee tables, some of them immersed in their work, others blatantly procrastinating.

It makes me want to linger, when I see one of the guys, fae-blooded by the looks of him, lying on the couch and using his Air Magic to keep his book floating before his eyes, turning pages as slowly and deftly as if he were using his fingers.

Ricky grabs us a spot at a table all the way to the left, carefully placing the dusty volume on its polished wooden surface as he lowers himself into the couch. I take the armchair opposite him, leaning forward to check out the book.

“History of Grimm Academy?” I ask with a frown. I catch his eyes. “Ricky, we’ve got seven brothers and sisters in that hospital wing, O’Malley Junior’s fucking arms blown off. That book doesn’t seem to be the ideal choice for what I’m interested in.”

Ricky clicks his tongue and cracks the book open, its heavy cover falling to the table with a soft thud. “You’d be wrong in thinking that.”

I let out a tired albeit slightly amused scoff. “Alright then. First things first, ask the book if the Games could really be rigged?”

He just blinks at me for a moment. “You’re seriously telling me you don’t know what history says about that?”

I just shrug my shoulders, knowing exactly where I stand. “I know whatpeoplesay about it, but no. No, I don’t.”

But Ricky seems genuinely puzzled. “We’re still suffering the consequences of the Umbrage and you were never in the least interested to find out how it came to it?”

I throw him a smile but there’s a bitter taste in my mouth as images flash through my mind, images of life around our Academy as I’ve always known it. Dying a slow, painful death.

And what am I supposed to do? Obsess over how it came to be, or try to fix it for everyone by getting a position at the Academy?

I lock eyes with my little friend and I tell him, “Sometimes, Ricky, the best thing a man can do about a thing like that is to refuse to give it power.”

“Past is there to be learned from,” he snaps.

“Andnowis here to be lived,” I insist, leaning a little forward and not letting him look away, “not poisoned by what can never be changed.”

For a second, he just looks at me. Then he gives me a funny little smile and says, “Alright then.”

He turns his attention to the book and starts quickly leafing through it.

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