The Library of Shadows
: Chapter 26

“Uh, eight?”

It must have been the wrong answer because Aoife huffed. “You don’t look like an eight. Are you positive?”

“I-I don’t know,” Este muttered, gliding a hand beneath her running nose and drying her cheeks with the pads of her fingertips. She peered over the book tops, but Ives had vanished beyond the trove of Old English stories. “I need to see the rubric, I think.”

Aoife was flanked by Daveed. Este couldn’t help but try to peek over their shoulders for a familiar lock of black hair, for a mischievous glint in sapphire eyes.

“Can you feel the temperature of the air?” Aoife asked as they walked. “Have you lost your sense of taste? Can you do a cartwheel?”

“What does that have to do with being dead?” Este asked as they nudged through the senior lounge’s green threshold. She sighed as she landed on the soft curves of the velvet chaise, her waist throbbing and legs aching.

“Your center of gravity shifts, and centrifugal force doesn’t work the same,” Daveed said, lighting a few candles so they could actually see. “I found out the hard way.”

Este rubbed soothing circles into the skin above her eyebrow. “Duly noted.”

The door slipped open, and Este lurched upright, but it wasn’t Mateo. Luca slipped inside with a debutante smile on her red lips. “You look worse than the Fades.”

Este didn’t have time to be offended—frankly, she couldn’t even argue—before a weighted blanket landed firmly on her belly, knocking the air out of her, and then another. Aoife dove into the lower cabinets for spare comforters and knitted throws, piling each of them onto Este in a colossal heap.

Luca perched on the cushion next to her. “We used to have all-night study sessions up here. That should keep you warm.”

“I’m sure I can find something to dull the pain.” Aoife turned another page in her book, skimming her fingertips over the lettering as Este succumbed to the gravitational pull of the chaise and all nine thousand of its new blankets.

And on top, the ghosts splayed across her chair like a patchwork quilt of bygone eras. Their presence warmed some long-dormant creature inside Este that now raised its head for the first time after a cold winter.

She cleared her throat, suddenly choked up. “I made a mistake, and I need to apologize to Mateo. Where is he?”

“He went out looking for you,” Luca said. “He said you were leaving, but he also said he’d never met someone as magnificently stubborn as you.”

Este’s voice snagged on the way out. “He lied to me. And I . . .”

Technically, Mateo had said he couldn’t tell her that he wasn’t the Heir of Fades. She’d misread it as self-preservation, used his diversion to convince herself of his guilt, but the truth was that he’d only been trying to save her like he saved her dad. If she’d left earlier, if she’d run and not looked back, she might have been safe. He’d only been trying to do what was right.

Weeks ago, Mateo had said he didn’t want to get the ghosts’ hopes up when he believed there was a way to bring them back to life in case he let them down again. Without Mateo’s death first feeding the Fades, Ives never could have wreaked havoc on Radcliffe’s students, wielding immortality like a blade. He must have blamed himself for their deaths. The burden fit him like well-worn denim.

Except he wasn’t the one who was going to disappoint them—Este had willingly handed The Book of Fades over to Ives. He’d given it to her, trusted her with it, told her to take the book with her when she left. And she’d betrayed him, all of them. They deserved to know the truth.

“I turned The Book of Fades in. I didn’t know it was her.” With each word, some part of her cracked open. She didn’t know when she started crying, only that tears dribbled off her chin. “I thought I was helping, I thought I—”

“Ives?” Aoife asked. “Ives is the Heir?”

Este nodded. “Ives is Lilith.”

Luca tucked a blanket tighter around Este. “Este, Este, Este. It’s going to be alright.”

It was the kind of white lie you told little kids when they messed up—everything was decidedly not alright, and the jury was still out on all future alright-ness.

Somewhere downstairs, there was a crash and a subsequent scream. The shrill note shot through the floorboards, jerking Este to attention. The sudden movement made her side stitch.

Daveed jumped to his feet, but he smoothed a cool mask over his face when he looked at Este. Apparently, she looked fragile enough that he needed to tiptoe. “Luca and I can go take a look.”

Luca mimed a fake yawn as if shrieking was common practice within the Lilith. “Me? Haven’t I done enough today?”

Daveed hauled her up by the hand. “Bro, I am not going alone. Are you serious?”

“Bro. I hate when you call me that. So unseemly,” Luca whined but followed Daveed through the doorway.

Which left Este under Aoife’s care. She shuddered beneath the iron gaze of the gray-eyed ghost. Stretching for levity, for anything to break the silence, she asked, “So, how bad is it, doc?”

“Honestly, I thought you’d already be dead,” Aoife said, gesturing vaguely at Este’s body, the way it shimmered in the candlelight.

Este couldn’t wash away the bitter tang of rising panic. She would become as dead as them. “Will it hurt? When the Fades finally . . .”

Aoife shook her head. “At first. Then, it’s like floating or falling. A weightless plunge. It’s not a bad way to go.”

A laugh forced its way between Este’s lips. She spread her hands as if painting a headline. “An Eternity of Purgatory Earns Rave Reviews from the Critics.”

The light dimmed behind Aoife’s eyes. “I suppose it could’ve been better. Not having to watch everyone you love leave, knowing they’d grow old without you, would’ve been nice, I imagine.”

Este muttered quiet condolences, the same kind she hated receiving after her dad passed. Looking at Aoife like this, snug in the shape of a sixteen-year-old hippie, it was all too easy to forget she should have been nearing eighty, drinking lukewarm bourbon and watching golf championships at max volume in a retirement home somewhere sunny. Instead, she was still here, still smooth-skinned after all those years.

“You know how I said I’d traded shifts that night?” Aoife said. “I had a friend who had been assigned the late shift originally, but he was exhausted that night. He’d been running himself dry for weeks, doing too much for too long, and I . . . well, I would have done anything for him.”

Este couldn’t close her mouth, stuck in an open cavern. “Did you know what would happen to you?”

“No, but I saw what was happening to him. I never told him, but I loved him, and he was miserable—always tired, failing classes. It was him or me, and if one of us had to suffer, I was going to choose me every time.”

“So, Ives crossed his name out, and the Fades took you instead?” Este asked. Even speaking their name in the library felt like a death sentence. She could practically feel their Charonic hands tightening around her throat.

“Yes,” Aoife said. Her voice didn’t waver, and her shoulders didn’t bow, but something shifted in her posture, and for the first time, Este knew its name.

Love was the dreamy, offset look Aoife wore and the heartbreak written on her face without a hint of regret. It was the same way Posy edged into Shepherd’s body in the corner of the booth when there was plenty of room to stretch out. It was her mom on the road to anywhere, every eighty-miles-per-hour twist down a turnpike, every cold-salami deli sandwich, every middle-of-nowhere pit stop in a desperate hope to find a sliver of the man she couldn’t keep. And it was Este, searching for Mateo in the stacks, whispering to him in the back of class, closing her eyes as his lips brushed the soft skin of her hand like it might last.

It was love, and it always had been.

The moment passed when, outside, a gale screeched. The sound struck the Lilith and pierced Este’s chest, between rib and tendon. The longer the storm raged, the wilder the winds.

Este stood too suddenly and black rushed to her head. Her pile of blankets streamed lazily onto the floor. “I have to find a way to fix this.”

“There’s no glory in trying to do everything on your own.” Aoife reached for the pendant at her neck, a smooth onyx oval encircled with silver. Maybe it was a gift from her lost love. Her face fell back into its comfortable steel trap—cold and indifferent, protective—but her words were spoken in a delicate timbre that made Este think she still had one hand dipped in her well of memories, that maybe she wasn’t speaking only to Este but also to herself.

Aoife’s gray eyes zipped toward Este, who was suddenly more interested in her cuticles and the rough edges of her fingernails. The ghost said, “If you feel the way I felt, don’t wait to tell Mateo. You don’t want to lose something you never had the chance to have. Trust me.”

Este considered pretending she didn’t understand what she meant, gaping at Aoife wide-mouthed and confused. That option flashed for a millisecond in her mind—an easy scapegoat, an excuse for the emotion bubbling inside her like water in the kettle on the stove, slow and then sudden.

Then, she thought about denying it. She could write everything off as a misunderstanding, an incorrect assumption. Obviously, Aoife had meant she should tell Mateo about Ives’s knuckles tightening around The Book of Fades, dooming them all to failure, and not the way she wanted him, all of him, for all eternity.

But instead, Este matched Aoife’s challenge. She nodded once, curt and final. That was that. She would face love—its canyon cliff side, this suspension bridge between here and the point of no return—head on or not at all, and not at all wasn’t an option anymore. Her body was quickly decaying. Ives had The Book of Fades. She would either find a way to save them all, or she’d join the ghosts, and then there would be nowhere to hide from how she felt.

Este swiveled, favoring her good side as she marched toward the exit.

Okay. Okay. No turning back, not even when the storm let loose another sharp exhale and rattled the latched windowpanes. Not even when the marks beneath her bloodstained bandages begged her to stop fighting. Not even when she pried open the lounge’s door and Mateo stood on the other side.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “There’s a woman downstairs who thinks the drainpipes are possessed.”

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