Page 51 of The Library at Hellebore

“I have wanted to die for over a millennium now. They bound us here. She and I and them and all those who are now dead, dead, dead and gone, those of us whose names they fed into the machines, who they ground up and fed to themselves. They took my library and my books and they said—” It shuddered. “They said to choose. To serve or to see my books burn. So I served and I have served for a very, very long time.”

“She?” said Rowan. “They? Who are you talking about?”

“But now that you are here, now that you have come, my beautiful death, my darling boy, my blessed final demise.” It giggled as every one of its eyes opened and every one of its mouths began to shriek ecstatically.

I was lunging forward before my brain was informed of the decision my feet had made, running so fast, I could feel my heart rabbiting in my mouth. I leapt for Rowan, throwing both arms around his ribs, torquing him back. He tumbled, yelping; I didn’t have time to think if his hands had grazedme, if I was beginning to fester. There was only the weight of him in my grasp, the Librarian’s chalk-pale regard, its arms feathering upward in praise, its smile as it arrowed downward, reaching for Rowan, for us.

“And when I have eaten you, I will finallydie.”

DAY TWO

Rowan’s scream pierced the air—and my heart—like a knife.

I chased his wailing back to the main hall, every thought of Gracelynn beaten down by the screaming. His wailing pummeled the air in the library, filled every corner: I could hear him beg, in sobbing gasps that then lengthened into an animal keening, nearly too high-pitched to be something to claw out from a human mouth.

When I reentered, the air was swimming with embers. If I didn’t think too hard about it, I could admit to its eerie loveliness, the fluorescing cinders like fireflies, and I did not want to think too hard about it because why the fuck did I come back? I owed Rowan nothing.

“You’re back!” said Adam, meeting my arrival with a genial smile. “It’d be nice to get some help around here.”

The screaming tapered again to sobbing: it was lower this time, more guttural. Rowan was a splayed mess of limbs on the floor, panting. A rill of blood traced the corner of his mouth as his head lolled in my direction, eyes wide at the sight of me. His hands were broken, fingers snapped, all bent the wrong ways. Adam looked fondly down at him and then he gave Rowan such a kick. A gasp tore itself out of Rowan’s lips and the sound wasn’t loud enough to hide the crack of bone,the noise of his breastbone caving onto itself. Rowan spasmed into a protective ball.

“Some people really don’t know when to just die,” said Adam lovingly.

“You can’t,” I whispered. “I need him.”

“I can, actually,” said Adam.

Whatever color Rowan’s face had had before, it was gone now. Rowan’s breathing had texture. I could hear him wheezing, his lungs bloodier by the moment, filling with liquid. He was dying, I could tell. I couldn’t do much about that but I inched over to him nonetheless, careful to keep as far away from Adam as I could. I reached out a hand, grazed my fingers over his chest, and disconnected the part of his brain that could register any tactile sensation. If I was better at what I did, I might have been able to unhook him completely from his pain receptors, but my magic amounted to blunt trauma. His breathing smoothed. It was something, at least.

“Besides, you deserve better than him,” purred Adam.

He smelled of incense, clean; he smelled like a temple, like something holy. I stared into those blue eyes of his as he crouched beside me, wishing they weren’t so bright and that I wasn’t so human. This close to Adam, I couldn’t help but burn for him like any fool. I wanted him. Gods above and below help me, I craved him. Rumors used to abound about how Adam had a carousel of lovers who survived only as long as his interest and after he was done with them, no one ever saw them again. Yet like Bluebeard from fable, he continued accumulating paramours. I hadn’t understood how. Now, skewered by his attention, I was reminded the brain only thinks itself in control.

I wet my lips with my tongue and Adam grinned, the bastardfully conscious of his effect on anything with a functioning endocrine system.

“We would be good together.”

“Go fuck yourself,” I said.

“Isee,” said Adam, the smile melting from his expression, the warmth from his words.This is his real voice then,I remember thinking. It’d been my stepfather’s voice too and the voice of so many men I’d met before, all of them charming until privilege crashed into reality, then out came this aggression, this meanness. He reached into one of Rowan’s pockets, procuring a cigarette, which he lit with a flame from the tip of his right thumb.

To my shock, he then lowered the cigarette to Rowan’s lips.

“You’re lucky I’m a generous man,” said Adam. “I’m not going to take offense at what you said. I’m not even going to ask you to be grateful when I save all our asses. You can have that for free. It’s called courtesy. My mother taught me that.”

“I thought Miss Kingsley died when you were a baby,” wheezed Rowan, smiling unrepentantly up at us. “You never talk about her. Is she hot, by any chance? I want to know if she’s Mrs. Robinson hot or—”

Adam’s smile collapsed. It wasn’t a secret that he, like every good Patrick Bateman wannabe, hated his mother. He thought of her as weak. The story was she died giving birth to him and he had held the fragility of her humanity against her ever since. Now it seemed like that was just apocrypha, fiction Adam fed the world for reasons unknown. Despite myself, I was interested in seeing if he’d biopsy that mystery for us.

“The Ministry is all about making deals with the right people,” said Adam in conversational tones, not turning,his eyes for me and only me, and if I had been anyone else, I might have been lost, a moth eaten alive by the fire. “And they made a deal with the Abrahamic Devil, who I’m told is very different from some of the other devils that exist in our blighted universe. Better because he prefers presenting as a beautiful white man. They promised my father they’d help him impregnate any woman he wanted on one condition: they get to own the leftover children, the ones who don’t become the Antichrist.”

“Why?” said Rowan, preternaturally calm.

“What doesanyonedo with test subjects that can’t die?” said Adam. “They experiment.”

We’d been right then. This was a holding pen, a processing center, a laboratory all efficiently rolled into one. The only question left now was why.

But maybe it didn’t matter.

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