Page 47 of The Library at Hellebore
I stared at him. Rowan stared at his cigarette, very plainly evaluating the cost-benefits of retrieving it from cold graveyard muck.
“Sure,” I said when it became apparent he wouldn’t be useful until his bloodstream was replenished with more nicotine, another cigarette removed from its packet. He hunkered against a nearby memorial: a very traditional-looking angel that had long gray arms stretched out to nothing, like it was imploring a soul to come home, its bow-shaped mouth solovingly sculpted you’d think it was modeled on the memory of a first kiss. The air soon smelled of cloves and tobacco. It was under its half-furled wing that he stood, face in silhouette. Feeling generous, I added, “I’ll help you.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” I said, cursing inwardly a second later when a finger-gun was cocked in my direction. Irreverence was contagious. “Just try not to make it weird.”
“I don’t know if I can promise that,” said Rowan. Still in shadow, he waved his cigarette as he spoke, marking punctuation, the cherry a tangerine wisp bobbing in the dark.
The chill had begun to pool in my joints, less an interpretable temperature than an ache, like a haunting. I rubbed my fingers, blew on them, and that did nothing except spread the cold around. Rowan was smoking his cigarette like it could save him, and I wondered when was the last time he slept.
Then, he added: “Thanks.”
Rowan spoke the words with uncharacteristic passion, with the libidinousness of a flagellant opened up for his god, his desperate heart offered on the platter of that single syllable. I took a step back. I was many things, but I wasn’t stone and I certainly wasn’t impervious to being the recipient of his focus, his feverish want. My cheeks warmed as the clouds shifted, the moon laying its light over an eternity of tombstones, and I thought about how lonely someone needed to be to worry so much about those already beyond saving.
“Now, let’s get some knowledge!” he declared, tossing his head like a prize stallion. No stain of his earlier vulnerability, however faint, lingered. The Rowan I knew was restored: crass, swaggering, eminently punchable. It was nearly perfect, this facade of his, but having seen it set down, I realized now how friable it was and how thin.
But I was absolutely relieved to see it, anyway.
“Yeah, let’s do it!” I said with more gusto than I’d mustered my entire life.
Rowan having sincere emotions was one thing. Rowan having sincere emotions about mespecificallywas another. Especially right then in the dark of the graveyard and after an indeterminable amount of time since my confrontation with the headmaster. I needed at least eight hours of sleep before I could conceivably process even the idea of a romantic confession, particularly given his association with Johanna. I didn’t have an issue with nonmonogamy. I just didn’t want to be in a toxic throuple with those two.
I noticed then that he was staring at me. “I guess it could be worth it.”
“What are you talking about?” There was that look again, that intense attention.
“Ford said you’d be worth dying for,” said Rowan, lighting another cigarette.
“Ford said what?”
His reply was swallowed by a scream that shredded the air.
It said a little about Rowan and a lot more about me that we simultaneously boltedtowardthe source of the howling, all without consulting the other or pausing to debate whether forward was actually preferable to escape. The scream was the baying of a cornered animal, it was the scream of someone who’d stared death in the eye and was now jonesing to break its neck. That guttural defiance, more than any subcutaneous sense of nobility, was what had me running for the source: I understood too well to turn away.
The screaming led us toward the back of the school library,an imposing monument of gray-brown brick and gorgeous Palladian windows inlaid with church glass, traceried frames rampant with wasps and stucco deer skulls, becauseof course.A cyclopean rose window stared from above the double doors of the main entrance. On a plinth outside the front steps, the statue of a teenager resplendent in one of Hellebore’s very twee uniforms, a gladstone bag in one hand, gazed admiringly back.
“Give them back!Give them back to me! You willlisten.” The voice we’d heard was now screaming demands. “You’ll give back my spouse.Give them back to me.”
“You feel that?” said Rowan as we slowed.
I nodded. Each time the voice roared, an answering twinge shivered through me. On some mechanical level, I wanted to please the voice. I wanted to return said spouse, do whatever it took to salve its anguished rage. It wasn’t mind control, per se, but close enough to be discomfiting.
Rowan shouldered past a broad-leafed fern and there, banging their fists bloody against a service door, was a soft-figured femme in a confection of silks and crinoline, some of which I recognized as scavenged from the school’s upholstery. Whoever they were, their skills as a couturier really were quite good.
“Hey,” I said. “What the fuck?”
They whirled around to face us, expression feral and panicked. In repose, they might have been beautiful, cherubic with a kind mouth and heavy-lashed eyes, the irises a lightless velvet, but the whites were lacy with broken capillaries and their skin was a black ruin of makeup. Gore matted the wet tangles of their hair, which was the pink of bloodied spit.
“She took them,” they panted, glancing miserably behindthem. “She took Kevin. We hadpermission.We hadn’t gone over time. She had no right to take them.”
“Who took Kevin?” I said.
“The Librarian.” They pressed the heels of their hands into their eyes, their shoulders fluttering like trapped birds, like they would cry if they hadn’t forgotten how.
“Oh,” said Rowan. “Well, that’s actually kinda convenient.”
DAY TWO
