Page 37 of The Library at Hellebore

My head ricocheted back into the cool velvet. I blinked twice, mouth still syrupy with magic.

The room I was now in was bedecked in cold jewel shadows: furniture in onyx and night-dark emerald, crushed satin curtains the color of old blood in a back alley. Portraits filled the walls in serried columns, the subjects in school colors.They regarded me with the same phobic wonder as the woman standing before me.

“Headmaster,” I said, flashing her the sunniestwho, me?grin.

Divested of her mask, she looked even less human than she usually did. There was something of a coyote to her features, an elongated quality to her limbs and jaw, like there’d been a muzzle there before it had been hammered flat: the bones cracked and configured to simulate personhood. Between her and Professor Fleur I was beginning to wonder if the entire faculty were even human.

A plait of ivory hair draped over the headmaster’s right shoulder. She wore a cassock—absinthe green where the light shone on the fabric, the material patterned with the school crest, padded at the shoulders—like the people in the paintings behind her, who I could only assume were headmasters past. Incense wafted through the room—heroffice,I corrected myself, as I took in the plinth of a desk squatting in the middle of the space, the folders stacked high on the surface. Beside it stood one of the masked servitors, trembling.

“Your complete attention when you’re speaking with me, Miss Li.” She took my chin very lightly in a gloved hand and angled my face, dropping to a knee so her eyes were on the same level. Her touch was cool.

“Just taking in the sights.”

“Focus,” she said, both hands on my cheeks. “When you are spoken to, you focus. Do we understand?”

“Sure.”

The headmaster could fuck herself with her pointy, buttercup-buckled boots.

“Hellebores,” said the headmaster. “Like the school.”

“What?”

“They’re hellebores,” she clarified, the ghost of a smile wafting over her predator face. This close, she smelled animalic, carnal. “Not buttercups. You should know better. Your father was a man who loved nature, wasn’t he?”

My blood went to ice. “Can you read my thoughts?”

“No,” said the headmaster, winking. “But I can see where your eyes are looking.”

She rose then, letting go of my face. Despite her platitudes, I remained suspicious and watched as best I could as she circled around to the back of my chair, until she coiled both arms around my shoulders.

“That wasn’t very wise,” she chided.

I had too much dignity to feign innocence. We both knew what I’d done and I wasn’t going to give her the pleasure of seeing me cower from punishment. So I tipped my chin up at a rebellious angle, earning a low chuckle.

“Nor is touching me without consent.”

“You lost all rights to consent when you enrolled—”

“Enrolled?”

I started to rise only to feel her nails puncture my skin, feel her push down, holding me in place. The headmaster might have looked like a length of bone swaddled in jacquard, but she was strong. Monstrously so. I couldnotmove no matter how I writhed; the mountains around Hellebore would have yielded before her grip did. Unable to glare at her, I settled for glaring at a portrait of a wizened man who leered at me from across space and time and pigment, his mouth crumpled in a way that made me think he wore fedoras whenever he could. Something about the consistency of his skin, an odd shiny glutinousness, that made me think he was related to the current headmaster.

“I waskidnapped—”

“Is that how you see our charity?” asked the headmaster in a tone of false horror, erupting into a guffaw. The alligator snap of her laughter had the servitor flinching so hard, it went down to its knees, arms clasped around its legs. “As a kidnapping? As an act of violence? Goodness me, that will never do.”

At thenever do,the headmaster released me, allowing me to spring to my feet and move a comfortable distance away from her reach, aware that the foot of space stretching between us would mean nothing if she decided she would be a bitch about it, but as with a lot of things, it was the thought that counted.

“It was an act of grace, my dear,” said the headmaster. “A stay of execution, you could say.”

A downy chill settled over me, sinking through skin into marrow.

“What are you talking about?”

“My girl,” she said, flowing to her desk. Her fingers ran over the manila folders—each of them unmarked and a lightless indigo—until they arrived at one in particular. She pinched one corner and pulled, freeing it, before extracting a sheaf of papers from its mouth. I caught a glimpse of a face in the documents, and another frisson of cold worked down my spine: it was a photo of me; a younger me, a mugshot from when I was found with my stepfather’s corpse, thirteen with bad hair and acne-pocked skin and the thousand-yard stare of a child who hadn’t quite come to terms with the fact that not only was she a murderer, she didn’t dislike being one. “You have been under our observation since the day you tore your father in half.”

“I was cleared of all charges.”

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