Page 36 of The Library at Hellebore

Minji nuzzled even closer. “Because no one would notice if she was missing.”

It wasn’t the question I asked but maybe it should have been. History ran red after all with missing girls, forgotten girls. Sluts and martyrs and everyone in between. Of course, Minji’s vessel had been one of them. I squirmed until I could look her full in the face. Her eyes were very nearly black even in that rich peacock light.

“Why didyouchoose her?”

“Because she was alone,” said Minji in someone and something else’s voice, each word laid down like it was glass,like we’d both shatter if she spoke too loud. “Because she asked.”

Then her face hardened, locking like a door.

“Because of all these things, we’re going to protect her, you understand. With luck, we’ll figure out something before we have to kill each other. But if it comes to it: no hard feelings, Alessa. We can promise it will be quick, at least.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

Minji smiled thinly and we sat then in a new silence, aware we had, very companionably and without a shred of animosity in our hearts, declared, in fewer words than perhaps were merited, that we would eventually be at each other’s throats. Whether such a time would come to pass was irrelevant. The words couldn’t be taken back and a sliver of me would always regret our honesty in that moment. Minji parted her lips, was beginning to speak when I saw a face crane around a corner.

Ford.

“Get fucked,” I told him.

He had a court once, a smaller one than what Adam or Sullivan had kept, but there were people who’d whored themselves for his guidance. I wondered what he told them about graduation. If he’d lied, if he read them false futures, if he gilded those lies with their biggest wants. Or if all this had come out of left field for him as well, a possibility I didn’t like entertaining as it opened the door to other worries, like how many others of his prognostications were false, and I was full up on anxieties and heartache at the time.

“I seek the love of my days, my promised one, she who will live in my heart and she who will survive in your flesh,” said Ford, eyes only for Minji.

I knew that look. There wasn’t a woman anywhere who hadn’t, at one point or another, seen a man drape his arm overa sister’s shoulder and thought,If I let you out of my sight, this is the last time anyone will see her alive.Looking at Ford then, Iknew.I knew what was coming. I was almost part of that statistic before.

“Out,” I said.

“My beloved, my light.” He half moaned those words. They were an offering, a sacrifice he made of himself. “You said you had use of me.”

Minji unstrung from my arms to stride toward him, her expression flat as polished tone. Her hair, previously orderly, writhed and shuddered, rising from its coiffure to float through the air like she was moving underwater. I thought,There you are. It was so obvious. I didn’t understand how I could have mistaken her for human.Going on tiptoes, she gently tucked his damp curls behind his ears, a gesture that would have almost been tender if not for how opaque her face was: she might as well have been an engraving, or the flat of a sharpened blade.

“I do,” she said soothingly, tone ritualistic. “And you will give me all of you?”

“All of me for all of you.”

It wasn’t ever Minji who’d been the one at risk. She bent her head to him, pressing her mouth to his glistening cheek, and there was such a lost look in his eyes, the surrender of a calf in a killing chute. To my surprise, I pitied him. Kissing my fingers to the pair in salute, I left my armchair and the alcove and Ford to whatever justice waited for him in the blaze of that strangely quiet afternoon.

BEFORE

I could smell the garden dying as I raced away, a sweet vegetal rot that clogged the nose and coated the insides of my mouth. Flowers bloomed with sudden frantic energy and died with equal zeal, lining my escape with a crisp carpet of graying petals. Alarms blared. I couldn’t tell if it was because of Rowan’s antics or because Hellebore had been alerted to my attempted escape, but the bells were tolling and the best-case scenario would still likely involve someone looking around and going, “Where the fuck is Alessa?”

I increased my pace.

No one stopped me as I hit the roses’ broad-leafed shadows; no one came to intervene as I wormed into the foliage, pressing into the thorns with abandon, hoping they’d take their pound of flesh andlet me go.I was nearly sodden with my blood when the ozonic scent of open air overtook the roses’ stench. A second later, my vision flooded with a white glare.

I was free.

Free enough, at any rate. Free to travail down the bluff and whatever other obstacles would surface along the massif, to die in the process: to get my head smashed open, have the splinters of my bones bake in the sun once the birds had their way with my guts. Most people might balk at callingthat freedom, I guess, but at that moment, it was to me. When you have had your every freedom pared from you, you learn to hoard the manner and time and method of your death: it becomes the only thing that is really yours.

I blinked until my sight welled back: everything still a little too bright, limned in phosphorus. Birds wheeled through the air, unperturbed by how I clung to the roses, half of me flung outward like a ship’s prow, my weight balanced on the ball of my right foot. A childish part of me half expected an applause of heroic music. What I received instead was an echoing scream as somewhere a rabbit was dragged out of its burrow and eaten.

Welp,I remember thinking.

Gingerly, I repositioned myself for the downward crawl, going to my belly and heaving my legs over the edge. I dug my toes into the cliff face, levered myself lower, lower, and—

There was the weight of a hand settling on my left shoulder, and then, polished floor under my feet. Before I could sufficiently process either of these sensations, the pressure on my collarbone increased. The air stuttered; a sharp taste of tin, like bloodying my tongue along the lid of a can. I was being pushed down into the deep cradle of an emerald armchair, sinking into its cushions, but also I was falling, hands losing purchase; my grip slackened, the mountain howling up, hungry.

“Miss Li.”

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