Page 50 of The Library at Hellebore

“What happens if he is wrong about this?”

“You run. Fast as you can,” I said.

Gracelynn stopped dead. “And?”

“I run with you.” I watched as Rowan’s long, frayed shadow chased him through the doors of the library, and then looked back to Gracelynn’s blanched face. “What?”

“You’d just let him die?”

“You really don’t know me, do you?”

Whether it was my tone, the horrendous reality of the situation, Gracelynn’s own wretched fears for their partner, I’d never know. Their throat bobbed a few times. They said nothing after that, only nodded once, a small terse motion, before they gathered their skirts and bounded up the stairs. I followed after, and we entered in time to hear a sonorous voice, a voice that went through the bones to the very marrow, a voice you’d think would sound unkind or vexed, but instead was girlishly elated, booming:

“You were notexpected.”

The vestibule of the library was as imposing as the rest of the structure: camphor floorboards, polished until they seemed a light source unto themselves and redolent of incense; a vaultedceiling, with wooden ribs from which girandoles dangled, filled with wax candles the color of fresh bone; tapestries on each wall. Opposite the entrance: a brass counter of monstrous size, gilded, volutes on every corner, its main body dominated by elaborate marquetry depicting the death and consumption of a knight by several stags. Behind it stood a wall of keys and iron-ringed drawers and on each side of the counter, two doorways permitting entry to the rest of the library.

And there was the Librarian undulating down from the ceiling.

Picture a woman. Actually, picture one of those supermodels from the nineties, who embodied the fashion world’s belief that the body was just a hanger to drape fabric from. Picture the way their skin canyons where bone meets their socket, their exaggerated clavicles, the long ropes of their spines. Their faces, ghostly with malnutrition.

But lovely, nonetheless, in that way a near-death experience can be, everything human starved away.

From neck up, the Librarian resembled such a person: deep-set eyes haloed by a treasure of black lashes, cheekbones high and queenly, a mathematically perfect jaw, a mouth like someone’s last wish. Neck down, however—well, the problem began with the neck. The Librarian’s neck was as etiolated as a dying succulent, made of too many bones and too many things that could almost be called bones.

Emaciated shoulders yielded to the body of a monstrous centipede and honestly, that alone would have been upsetting, but its segments weren’t just lacquered white chitin but tessellations of itsface,its eyes closed and mouths serene, meticulously fitted together so there weren’t any gaps, and its arms. God help us, its arms. Already utterly repellent, the fact it had literallyhundreds of arms—colorless and elegant, long-fingered with scintillant golden nails, beautiful if not for the context of its existence—seemed like rank overkill.

Fearless, Rowan stood looking up at the Librarian as it turned its head a good three hundred and sixty degrees in its examination of him.

“No, but you have the love of Gracelynn’s life in there, and I want them out.”

“Mine,” sang the librarian. “Calls-to-shadows, the dark-born, dark-loved, they’re mine, from now until the day their heart stops its song. Mine, mine, mine. Thrice I was promised, twice denied. This one was the third and so they are mine.”

Gracelynn whimpered.

“Keep behind me.” I pressed my fingertips to their right shoulder and pushed, gently as I could. “When I say go, you run for one door. I’ll take the other.”

They nodded, trembling as they did just that.

“Yeah,” said Rowan to the Librarian. “No.”

“Who are you to say no to our covenant? Whelp, youngling, embryo.” It poured itself into coils behind the counter, towering over Rowan.

Rowan shed his gloves with less fanfare than he’d done before, a lifetime ago, it felt, in the gardens behind the school. Setting them delicately onto the counter, he held his palms out to the Librarian, as though pleading for a boon.

“Someone who can and will kill you with a touch—”

“Deathworker,” said the librarian, awed, an almost sexual excitement kindling in its voice. “A deathworker stands in my library. After all these years of waiting, and waiting, and waiting, death comes in the shape of aboy.”

The hair prickled along the back of my neck. Something waswrong.Neither Rowan nor Gracelynn seemed to havenoticed as of yet, one busy committing rudeness, the other cowering behind me. Eagerness filled the Librarian’s saintly face, which seemed much less ascetic now, more lascivious.

Hungry.

“—so we can do this the easy way or the hard way. I just want this Kevin person out, that’s—”

I could run. We could run. I could do as I had told Gracelynn. I could thrust them forward, trust the Librarian to be too ecstatic with having an appetizer and a main course to give a fuck about needing a palate cleanser as I bolted out the door. I owed neither of them my death. I tensed as the Librarian spiraled up, up, creating a knot of itself, still grinning down on Rowan like a white and alien sun.

“What’s it going to be?” said Rowan like he was the one holding the aces.

---