Page 10 of The Library at Hellebore
“Nah, I don’t wanna.”
I looked over to the owner of the voice. I nodded at him; Rowan nodded back. There was a lot we’d probably have to talk about when there was an opening. We hadn’t exactly resolved the whole bit where I’d been standing above his dead maybe-but-not-official girlfriend, Johanna, utterly sodden from the kill.
“Rowan,” I said.
“You’ll be relieved to know that Stefania didn’t make it out,” he said, patting himself down for a cigarette. “Or maybe mad? I don’t know. You seem like a likes-to-get-her-hands-dirty kind of girl. I used to like to think that you two were getting it on while me and Johanna were doing the deed.”
“Nice to see you’re still alive,” said Adam with sincere cheer, raking his eyes over Rowan. “Ironic, though, isn’t it? A deathworker still kicking it while everyone else is dead.”
The temperature in the already frigid library dropped several more points.
“I’d argue it’s fucking perfect, actually,” said Rowan, lighting a cigarette, sucking hard on it before blowing smoke into Adam’s face. “When all of you die, I’ll have an undead army.”
“You won’t.” It was a pale, soft-faced, utterly terrified-looking Scottish boy who spoke the words. He had a doleful voice and a dense brogue and beautiful, long-fingered hands. Eyes a washed-out, indeterminable shade of something maritime. “This lot doesn’t leave anythin’ behind when they’re done. Bones, skin, sinew, everything. They just absorb the lot. Can’t raise an army out of nothing.”
“How doyouknow so much?” I said.
“I accept your challenge, Eoan.” Rowan stabbed his cigarette in his direction, interrupting whatever response he might have had for me. “But first, Alessa—”
“Half live if Rowan dies,” said a deep male voice, one that made us all turn.
Ford, who had kept from the door throughout the faculty’s onslaught, was sitting with his legs splayed and his back to a bookshelf. He lifted a loop of his own intestine and waggled it at us. His other hand held a bloody athame. The act of clutching his own viscera was clearly soporific for him: he looked drowsy, content, utterly at peace with how his guts pooled between his thighs.
“Half live if Rowan dies.”
There was a drawn-out, uncertain silence.
“Are you sure?” said Adam.
“The entrails cannot lie.” He fished out and weighed his liver in the hand his intestines had previously occupied, the latter tossed onto the marble tiles with a greasyschlorp.Once satisfied with its poundage, he lifted the organ to the blade of ashen light knifing from one of the library’s many narrow windows and frowned at its underside. “Half live if Rowan dies.”
The wordhirsutedidn’t begin to describe Ford’s abundance of beard and curls and overgrown brow, dark and sleek; he was a bear of a man, a figure cut straight from the annals of Viking history, a fact he recognized and celebrated, I think. No one else on campus swanned through the winters swaddled in a bearskin coat with the poor animal’s head for a matching, still-attached-to-the-body-by-a-strip-of-neck-fur toque, and if Ford wasn’t quite so massive, so oppressively jacked, he’d have looked like any white trust-fund kid with a costume budget.
Mostly, what he looked like was a particularly unsavory kind of dangerous.
“Well, in that case,” said Adam brightly, “come here,Rowan.”
“Fuck. You.”
“Everyonestop,” sobbed a quiet voice, and we did.
A short, wide-set, very doll-like person stood huddled against the library doors, their brow still pressed to the wood. They’d been crying. The knuckles of their clenched hands were crusted with blood.
“Gracelynn, I can’t believe it. You used thevoiceon me,” said Adam, with unsettling pleasure.
“Eight of us,” said Gracelynn brokenly. “There are only eight of us left. Kevin, they, they—” They let out a tea-kettle shriek of despair, unable to help themselves, hands balled, a fist shoved into their teeth. They screamed until they were wrung of breath and it was just an airless keening, almost too high-pitched to hear, their expression so mangled by their agony, they were made into a stranger in the ruin. When Gracelynn had exhausted their capacity for that, they said, pantingly, “We can’t fucking fight with each other.We’re all that’s left.”
“Eight?” floated in Rowan’s voice. “Who’s—oh, there’s Minji. What are you doingonthe bookshelf?”
“So?” said Portia quietly to Gracelynn, her mouth working like she was trying to exorcise a lump of taffy from between her teeth. I knew better though. We all did. “What does that matter?”
“We need to take care of each other,” wept Gracelynn. “People sacrificed themselves for us.”
“Sacrificed?” said Adam. “I don’t know about that. I’m pretty sure Kevin would prefer to be alive right now in your stead. They probably were just coy about it.”
“Jesus Christ,” I snarled. “Lay off.”
Countless poets and philosophers have made a career out of asserting that love is the strongest force in the universe. Before that moment, I’d have disagreed. Entropy seemed a better contender for the title. But I found myself revising that opinion at the sight of Gracelynn staring up at Adam with a naked pity.
