Page 14 of The Library at Hellebore

“Orwhat?”

“This,” I said.

My response, I’ll admit, was disproportionate to the situation. I raised a finger-gun at Adam, lifting my hand so the tip of my index finger bumped against his perfect nose. As his smile widened, I traced a path across his chest, down the long path to his wrist. I tapped it thrice, bent my thumb, and mouthed the wordbang.

His right wrist exploded into a bloom of red sinew and bone shrapnel, little gore-stained chips of scaphoid going everywhere. His hand, bereft of support save for one rapidly fraying tatter of skin, plopped onto the ground a second later. Where most people might have screamed, Adam only addressed me with a pissy little stare. Not with any subtlety, Rowan crowded in to attempt a fist-bump.

“Nice,” he said, pronouncing the word as an exaggeratednoice.

“You’re kidding me,” said Adam, his voice thinning with rage. “You’re fucking kidding me.”

I adjusted my stance. You could call the thing on Adam’s face a smile if you wanted to: it had the right curvature, an appropriate number of teeth on display. It even reached his eyes. But I wouldn’t. It had that certain je ne sais quoi I’d come to associate with people about to lose their fucking shit. If I had any reserves of self-preservation, I’d have tried to diffuse the situation, but I was still mottled with gore from the deaths of the graduating class, and to be honest, at that point, I was justsick of marinating in other people’s company. I didn’t care that Adam was mad. I didn’twantto care. I wanted a fight down to the wet bones of me. I bared him a grin as I backed up to curtsy dramatically at him.

Adam wagged his still-suppurating stump at me, something like joy in his expression, jets of arterial blood fountaining through the air. He began to incandesce, the nuclear brilliance growing until he was an effigy of himself, a column of eye-watering light, fatal as a star in its death throes. The air smelled of broiling keratin and charred polyester, and it took me a second longer than Rowan—his arm touched my clavicles, nudging me back—to understand we were beginning to burn from proximity to Adam.

“I know you think that was incredibly brave,” said Adam. What gore I had spilled was gone, immolated, a sacrifice to himself. It was with the cadences of my voice that he spoke, his tone playful, even eager, “But you’re going to regret it.”

“I don’t know what you think you are, but I know you’re still meat under that fire,” I said, reckless with trauma, feral with grief. I wasn’t mourning our eaten peers per se but my god, was I done with being so afraid. I resented the tension. I resented his smug manners and the future waiting for us. I could not stand the idea of Sullivan’s slow death, of dying under a blanket of geriatric horrors. The fucking ignominy of it all. To die like that, to have the capstone of my life be feeding our former professors.

Or worse, to die so Adam could be the last one standing.

They say burning alive was one of the worst ways to go but the metaphoricaltheyweren’t trapped in this library.

I ducked under Rowan’s arm before he could object, jolting forward and unflinchingly toward Adam. Like I said, evenunder that cocoon of white fire, there was still meat, a chorus of synaptic instructions propelling him onward, keeping him upright. I could feel the ladder of his spine; I could sense every contraction of his ventricular chambers. It’d have been a question of who was quicker on the draw, of course, but I’d never gone wrong betting for myself.

“All this for a boy who can’t even fuck you?” asked Adam.

“Sex,” said Rowan from behind me, “isn’t just about penis in—”

“No, all this because I’m tired of your face. I can end what I started. Don’t fucking try me.”

To my surprise, Adam laughed.

A single luminous finger rose—the line from his shoulder to elbow as exquisite as the one from elbow to wrist—and drew a circle in the air. Almost instantly, I felt a matching pressure tighten around my right wrist: a truth spell. The physics of it was simple. Upon submission to one, the afflicted had to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, or the spell would shear clean through bone and muscle. I tipped my chin up, defiant, refusing Adam any show of emotion outside of boredom.

“Tell me this,” said Adam, still a human flare. “If it came down to it, if you had to choose between Rowan and getting out, if the condition of your escape from the awful vaulted halls of Hellebore was that you had to feed Rowan to the faculty, would you?”

I didn’t hesitate.

“In a heartbeat.”

The light wicked from Adam’s frame, taking with it any vestige of modesty he might have possessed, the cinderous remains of his clothes staining him with ash: he stood naked as his namesake, grinning like the devil, hand restored because the Great Adversary doesn’t shortchange his broodapparently. Ignore them, sure, but not leave them destitute of limbs; I stared at that fresh limb, filled with a sudden furious despair even as he waggled fingers at me, nails growing over their beds.

“You’refun,Alessa. Let me know if you ever want to partner up with someone who isn’t a walking corpse.”

And before either of us could fire off a retort, he began strolling away, the light especially kind to the shape of his ass. “By the way, the Librarian’s awake. Might want to move quietly.”

BEFORE

The rest of the Hellebore welcome assembly was rather standard compared to its hypnotic beginning. Once the headmaster had us deep in our feels, she then turned to administrative banalities: her expectations in regards to our behavior (Yes, your frontal lobes are still in development, but for all that is holy and otherwise, don’t embarrass the school, please andthank you); Hellebore’s code of conduct (be exemplary in all matters always; understand that if you are not of use, you are of no value); an introduction to the faculty (mostly geriatrics or those on the verge of being such). Tittering, she suggested that we might be sorted intohouses,a prospect so repellent the crowd spontaneously lost all fear of her and began groaning objections.

“I am just kidding,” she simpered amid the thunderous murmurs. “Although the way you’re all complaining, I might have to make it happen.”

Though she retained her mask throughout, what mystique she possessed was lost in the wake of that awful joke. Now, she was indistinguishable from any elderly relative: an inescapable embarrassment to be tolerated until we could emancipate ourselves. In hindsight, I wonder if that had been strategic, a wolf putting on its lambskin and capering for effect.

After the last professor (Fleur, Botany, recognizable by thefungal-shaped bouffant that was her hair) finished with her own tedious version of a welcome, we were permitted to leave, ushered out by Hellebore’s meat stewards. Some of them had begun to ooze, and they smelled overpoweringly of rich fat.

“I’d have hoped some of them would behot,” I told Portia halfheartedly, less because I cared and more out of courtesy: I had an allergy to authority figures who didn’t practice good boundaries.

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