Page 53 of The Library at Hellebore

“Go.”

And it was strange he was so at ease with his death, but maybe he’d spent months acclimatizing to the thought and maybe he had been waiting for this: tenderness without condition, affection without restriction; lips against his, hands around his face. If you’d never had a choice about your life, maybe there was a comfort in knowing your death, especially if you knew it’d be the softest thing you ever experienced. Gracelynn screamed again, an animal noise cut short by the shatter of bone, and I didn’t think I had enough of a heart left for anything else to be broken but you learn something new every day. I didn’t turn to see Gracelynn’s death.

Instead, I bit down.

His lower lip began to shear from his jaw, blood gushingover both our chins. I would never get used to thebounceof human lips, not their texture, the slight gelatinous nature of it all. When I tried chewing, it resisted my molars. So I swallowed Rowan’s lip whole, even as his eyes rolled up in his head. I kissed him on the brow for good measure, breathing his scent in—cigarettes and old books—and mouthinggoodbyeagainst his skin.

He pushed me. With more strength than I’d ever imagined his thin frame would conjure, he pushed me, just as the Librarian crashed down like a comet, carrying him into a wall, its laughter filling the world. For a moment, I could see through the fire, looking like a biblical lithograph, and my magic found the small bones of Rowan’s neck, and I broke them, every last vertebrae, even as white swallowed my vision, my last sight of him his eyes as the light winked out of them and the Librarian’s jaws closed around him like a secret to take to the grave.

Then it was over—for whatever value ofovercould exist with the Librarian shuddering over what remained of Rowan, gasping in the agony of its pleasure, short-breathed by its dying; if I’d ever wondered if it would regret its suicidality, those doubts were gone.

But the Librarian had not been joking. In all my years, I had never heard anything die with so much pleasure.

BEFORE

“Shit,” said Rowan rather eloquently as the Librarian surged toward us, all of its eyes open and bulging, each and every one of them wet and blinking and gold, weeping runnels of red slime down its carapace. Its many mouths kept up their shrieking chorus, passing a triumphantI will finally diebetween themselves with increasing volume, until all I could make out in the happy cacophony was the worddie.

“I can’t fucking believe this is how I’m supposed to die—”

“Stop,” came Gracelynn’s voice. “Please.”

And the Librarian did.

We all did.

Their voice itched inside my skull: it felt like Gracelynn had unstoppered my skull and reached in to dig their fingers into the folds of my brain, work them deep enough that I could feel their nails scrape over the hot fat.Stop,Gracelynn said, and the word felt like a vise, a pincer: it squeezed like a choke collar. I gagged on the sensation. I was nauseous from it. My vision doubled and swam. The light in the library went liquid and slippery, and it hurt to look at the world, hurt to do anything save obey. Even my breathing shallowed, eager to accede.Stop,Gracelynn said, and for a single dizzying moment, I wondered whether her word was enough to break my heart’s promise to my continued health.

The Librarian hung slack from the ceiling, a puppet degloved from its owner’s hand. Staring up into that galaxy of arms, no longer outstretched but heavy along the sides of the creature’s blood-slimed centipede body, a part of me wondered if it’d have been better if the Librarian had stared at us with hate in its multitudinous collection of eyes. But instead of vitriol, there was a childlike petulance, a pout echoed by every mouth it possessed.

“You,” it said to Gracelynn with a shiver, the motion bringing with it a wave of noise not unlike a hundred castanets being clacked in unison. “You don’t understand what it is like to be alive for so long, to be alive when even your books have forgotten your name and there isn’t a page in the world to hold a memory of the syllable, to be alive now during the death of wonder.”

Slowly, impossibly, its head creaked to where Gracelynn stood trembling on the side. A fine sheet of sweat glowed along their skin. Blue veins stood against the white of their throat. I could see their pulse quavering in the pale meat, like a bird struggling to loosen itself from a net.

“I want to die. I want to die.I want to die.Let me eat him and it will be done.”

Another shiver, the air crackling like small bones broken.

“No.”

“I will give you the tithe.”

Gracelynn froze.

“Oh, that’s not fair,” said Rowan, still cocooned in my arms. It was pure fucking luck that none of my flesh was making contact with his exposed skin, not his hands, the nape of his neck, his scalp. He laid pillowed awkwardly on my chest. For all that I’d come to associate with him with necrosis and violentdeath, Rowan smelled of neither: only shampoo, a faint whiff of smoke, and something like old books and sandalwood.

He wasn’t wrong. At the offer, Gracelynn went rigid, what light there was in their expression draining.

Seeing its advantage, the Librarian continued hungrily.

“We will give them back. Calls-to-shadow, your dark-born, dark-loved. The tithe for something so much better.” Its voice smoothed to a creamy purr. “Because they are mine now, they are mine to give back, mine to do with as I please. Hellebore itself cannot stop me. Take your spouse. Give me the deathworker to eat. Give him to me as they gave her to the Raw Mother. Give himnow.”

“I am entirely bones and probably taste bad.”

“Then I will choke on you,” trilled the Librarian, much too happily. “Your spine will needle my throat. Your skull will suffocate me. Your scapulae will catch and I will stop breathing, and I will at last die.”

“You can’t,” said Gracelynn, proving that some people did indeed have integrity. It was clear how tempted they were to say the reverse, however, each syllable spoken like it had to be dug out from concrete. In their tremors wracking their soft frame, I saw how they wanted to say yes instead to the Librarian, how the word ate through their tongue, the bowl of their jaw. “They’re my friends.”

“We just met!” said Rowan, unhelpfully.

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