Page 18 of The Library at Hellebore

Sullivan nodded, the matter concluded as far as he was concerned, his attention beginning to swing away. Except Rowan then reached overto grab his shoulderwith a gloved hand.

“But I really, really,” said Rowan, his grin continuing to extend, a caricature of itself at this point, “reallywant those answers, though. Pretty please?”

Rowan’s impropriety shocked all the languor from Sullivan’s expression. For the second time that day, that look of dreamy resignation closed over his face. His eyes unfocused, softening. I heard the buzz of cicada wings, their droning song; saw again the boy and his despairing gaze as they bit down and broke skin. Looking back, I wonder if I might have intervened had I not been standing so close to ground zero. There wasn’t anything about Rowan I liked except how he’d winked at me.

Whatever the truth was, I justified it then as not wanting to leave it to chance. No telling just how much fine control Sullivan had over his gods and if they had an indiscriminate appetite. I’d just seen what they could do. I wasn’t going to let that happen to me. And there was Portia too, staring at me, a smile spreading her mouth like a fang, waiting for an answer I wasn’t sure I wanted to give.

“Let’s not turn more people into a slushy,” I said.

“He’sthe one insisting on overstepping my boundaries.” Sullivan let out an aggrieved sigh. “I’m tired. All I want is to be done with the day and to spend the evening reading with Delilah—”

“Reading! Is that what the kids call it these days?” said Rowan.

“—if that’s all the same to you,” said Sullivan. “Just let me kill him and we can all go our separate ways.”

“No,” I said.

“The Raw Grail stands with Alessa,” said Portia very softly.

“This doesn’t have to escalate,” said Sullivan, sounding truly appalled.

“It doesn’t,” I said. “So back down.”

“Are you serious?”

“Serious as cancer,” I said. I kept my eyes on him, on his impassive face, his cheekbones like cornices: he had an architectural quality to his good looks, like someone had plotted even the shadow under the overhang of his lower lip, the faint panes of stubble across a jaw so cut, you could have used it as a measuring tool. “What’s it going to be? Fight or fuck off?”

Predictable as a clock, Rowan began to say: “You know—”

Sullivan mashed his face with a hand.

“Fine. You lot win,” he said with great finality, swearing up a bilingual storm, the wordfuckand its variations delivered with unsavory gusto, interspaced with some rather liberal use ofmerdeandputain.“Let’s just fucking go to lunch.”

And that was that.

BEFORE

We went to lunch.

That’s not a euphemism for violence. We did actually go off to find ourselves food. With his casual pomposity, Sullivan—after shrugging loose of Rowan’s grip—led our mismatched group to the dining hall, lightly stepping over the spongy remnants of his opponent. The crowd withered from him like flesh from a flame. If he cared at all about the impression he made, if he noticed their terror and their nervous appraisal, Sullivan evidenced no indication of it, his face as expressive as the mostly eaten one spread over the floor.

Portia stepped daintily around the mess without comment, remote again, almost secretarial in her poise. Rowan was the only one of us to pay any mind to the sad heap of remains: he went down to a squat beside a white curve of rib, and touched conciliatory fingers to the damp bone. His usual effrontery was nowhere to be seen. In its place, an intense thoughtfulness that vanished when he realized he was being watched.

“Why the gloves?” I said in lieu of what I wanted to say instead, which was,What are you hiding under all that vulgarity?

Rowan looked down at his hands, turning them slowly in the light. He was, for the most part, dressed in the uniform ofevery emo-grunge kid I’d ever met: washed-out flannel, graphic tee, skinny jeans, black Converse. The gloves, however, were straight out of a falconer’s or welder’s tool cabinet: they were thick and utilitarian, meant to protect the wearer. The fingers were hachured with creases, wrinkled in every angle and direction. Rowan had gone out of his way to force some dexterity into them.No,I adjusted the initial thought.He wasn’t wearing those gloves to protecthimself.

On cue, with perfect and practiced dickishness, he said, “Gloves are a kink of mine.”

I left it at that.

As with everything else in Hellebore, the dining hall was unnecessarily grand with its frescoed ceiling—another clever trompe l’oeil (the school was lousy with them), this one depicting a blue sky fleecy with clouds and wasps the size of airplanes, false sunlight coruscating through their massive wings—and overdecorated windows, the latter briared with flowing traceries and inlaid with lead-light. Every student in the hall, and there were surprisingly many, was sheened with the rainbow light streaming through the stained glass.

Even the hot food station was a vision of excess. Instead of being set on steel steam tables, the troughs of entrees—these were ordinary enough, comprising of sausages, orange chicken, steamed broccoli, and all the other victuals familiar to anyone in college—were set in carved camphor structures, and the salad bar rose above a sculpture of a forest in which skinless deer hunted frightened knights.

“Gross,” said Rowan, sidling up beside me as I ladled a generous portion of kung pao chicken onto my plate. My mother wasgenerically Asian,as she liked to put it. Whenever someone prescribed an ethnicity to her, she acknowledged it as what she was, though whenever I’d seen her do so, it was withthe same bored expression. My stepfather had joked about her being inscrutable and exactly how he liked his women: difficult enough to read that he could justify not giving a shit. After all, it wasn’t his fault she hadn’t tried harder. She never laughed. When we were alone, she’d tell me our work in the world was to endure.

Fuck that.

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