Page 55 of The Library at Hellebore

Rowan lost his footing, slipped, pinwheeling backward with a flail of his arms. I heard the wet snap of an ankle torquing out of alignment as he snarled in pain and without looking back, I reached out with a thread of magic, felt the frayed tendon, andpulled,glueing it to the mortise: it was a slipshod job but it kept him lurching forward, cursing but in limping motion.

“Kevin’s area is penumbral anthropology—”

Rowan, irreverent until death: “Has anyone told you how weird it is that Hellebore has someone named Kevin walking—”

“Did we pass thePs yet?”

“Oh,” came the librarian’s voice from above. “A long time ago.”

It descended on us like judgment, an alabaster delusion of grasping arms, its hands socketing around our faces, our shoulders, catching us; they positioned us to look up at it, like it was a solar god and us petitioners come to seek its favor. If I had had any doubts whether it was truly immune to death, that it needed what it claimed to need, I lost them then as the Librarian stroked Rowan’s cheek with the ceramic back of one pale hand. The lamps lit the creature’s profile in gold, plunging Rowan’s terrified face into darkness. And briefly: silence.

Briefly: time to consider our repellent predicament. Briefly: an opportunity to study our environment in invasive detail because there was nothing else to do, no immediate hope for recourse. I glanced at Gracelynn, considering the morals of turning someone we’d agreed—tacitly, I suppose—to help into raw material for an escape plan, but even my rather minimalist sense of ethics balked at that level of villainy. There was cold pragmatism and then there was being an asshole.

“I promise it will not hurt. I don’t hunger for your pain. I don’t lust for it,” said the Librarian, practically in a stage whisper, as it spiraled down like some nightmare serpent, curling around Rowan, coils tightening. In a second, surely, that would be that. “I only want to die. We will go into thedark together. We will be nothing together. We will die together. Just you and I, you and I, you and I.”

I saw Rowan close his eyes and I recall thinking with a diamond clarity that this was, in fact,it.What surprised me was the utter absence of terror, every thought of self-preservation forgotten: it was with relief that I looked on the Librarian distending its jaw; relief as I watched each and every one of its blazing eyes open in excited witness; relief and maybe a tinge of apology as I looked over to Gracelynn, who was arguably the most unfortunate of our pathetic lot. They were pink from their exertions, their hair so soaked with sweat that it clung to their shoulders in a damp web, and they were staring for some reason at a point on the carved frieze wrapping around the balcony above us.

I followed their gaze to the lintel and to my surprise I saw, among the skull-headed stags and disemboweled knights, a very ordinary human face gazing right back at us.

“Sorry,” said the face in a soft tenor, the vowels honeyed with a Dixieland twang. “This is probably going to feel very weird.”

Then the ground opened up beneath us and something pulled us through.

We landedelsewhere,in a narrow corridor barely wide enough for one of us to stretch out in full, legs akimbo, arms flung everywhere, piled on one another in a jigsaw of elbows, cursing, and some panic about whose exposed skin was in contact with whose. It took us a minute to separate, longer to orient. The space we were in was pitch-black, and the air was silted with dust. I palmed the walls: on one side, I felt rough, unhewn stone and on the other, cold polished wood.

“Kevin?” Gracelynn’s voice, raised up like a banner, a searchlight.

In answer came the click of a lighter and a small flamewhooshed up to illuminate the face I’d seen earlier. Gracelynn’s spouse was softly built in that way academics often were: kind-looking, their hair disheveled and their expression tottering between relief and for some reason, indignity. They had great nails.

“I said I’d be all right.” Most of their weight seemed to be supported by a wolf-headed cane that looked like it’d been carved from the same block of polished birch. “Why did you come back? You could have gotten yourself killed.”

Gracelynn didn’t answer at first, rushing to embrace their spouse, and as palpable as the latter’s ire was, it wasn’t enough; it didn’t seem to keep them from returning the ferocious embrace, albeit one-armed with a lighter still in hand. Kevin buried their face into the flower-colored wealth of Gracelynn’s hair, the two clutching at each other like it’d been a year, a lifetime since they’d been together.

“I thought it was going tokillyou,” wailed Gracelynn into Kevin’s shoulder, crying without remorse or care for the fact the lovely paisley shirt that the latter wore was getting soaked black from the tears.

“I think it just wanted to watch some shadow puppetry. The headmaster said I wouldn’t have to—”

“The Librarian said you were its—wait, the headmaster?”

“I was going to tell you but I didn’t have time. Everything was suddenly happening all at once. Regardless, I swear it was going to be fine. The Librarian’s actually quite sweet once you get it to stop showing off,” Kevin mumbled. “I’m pretty sure we could have worked something out. Admittedly, it was very abrupt, what happened, but—”

“Ahem,” I said.

The two separated immediately, Kevin rather subtly crowding their beleaguered, still-snuffling partner behind them, the cane re-angled into a light warning. They inclined their head.

“Who are you?” they said, their tone warm but somehow also affectless.

“Your rescue team, I suppose.” I flicked my eyes over to Gracelynn. “Although it looks like you didn’t need rescuing.”

“In my defense,” Gracelynn began, then stopped; they let out a breathless, giddy laugh that had as much to do with humor as their partner’s voice had to do with friendliness. Their shoulders dropped, and they wrung a handful of their skirts in their hands. “In my defense, I was worried. The Librarian, it’s…”

“A lot,” finished Kevin. “Thank you for coming to help.”

“I like getting undeserved credit for things,” said Rowan amiably, striding forward, shooting out a gloved hand for Kevin to take.

Kevin, still holding on to their cane and lighter both, studied Rowan’s hand for a minute before nodding, curt. “Glad to be of service.”

“Thankyoufor saving us, by the way. We’d have been dead without you,” I said and some of Kevin’s reserve grudgingly thawed into real warmth.

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