Chapter 2
Chapter
Two
CLAUDIA
The librarian’s footclaws click against the stone steps like a rich woman’s high heels.
She carries herself like one—proud, confident, more than a little uptight.
In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a merchant’s daughter swish her hair the exact way Minerva swishes her tail. I hide a smile behind her back.
Women like this are my weakness. I’ve had plenty of enjoyable liaisons with rugged fighters, covered in scars and muscles, but my sweetest dreams are about the bossy ones with soft skin (or…feathers) and a sharp tongue. I love driving them wild. In more ways than one.
“What section are you hoping to browse today?” Minerva asks, turning her head so she can look straight at me with one of her jewel-green eyes.
“Art presentation records for the township of Rume.” I don’t know if my ancestors have any great inspiration waiting for me, but it’s somewhere to start.
“There are two different archives for that,” says Minerva. “One is the scroll library, which records a written description of every art piece presented in Rume year by year. The other archive holds original art pieces donated by patrons.”
My eyebrows shoot up. “You mean I don’t have to wade through dusty old scrolls? Yes, please!”
“I thought you might be interested.” Minerva’s tone is dry. She thinks she’s figured me out already: all muscles, no book-smarts. I’m going to enjoy proving her wrong.
She leads me to a subterranean level of the library, pitch-dark until she opens a cage mounted on the wall and tosses in a handful of worms from a pouch she carries on her chatelaine.
The outline of a creature takes shape, glowing ever brighter as it snares the worms with its tentacles and stuffs them into its central mouth.
It looks something like the squishy, many-armed anemones I’ve found in coastal tidepools.
“Natural light source,” Minerva explains, watching me run an awed finger across the cage’s metal bars.
“Less harmful than fire and doesn’t give off smoke to damage the scrolls.
It’s called a cave coral. Watch your fingers—it’s quite venomous.
” When I whip my hand away, she chuckles deep in her throat.
“Don’t worry. They move very slowly, if at all.
Just take care not to touch their excretions. ”
She moves along the wall, dropping worms to a line of cave corals in wall sconces until the whole room is lit almost as well as the ones aboveground.
The pinkish glow illuminates a room crammed with shelves.
They’re labeled by year and township, the closest one dating back almost a hundred years ago.
“Rume’s archives are this way.” Minerva removes one of the coral sconces, holding her short feather-frilled arm aloft to cast the light on the shelves in front of us.
As we retreat deeper into the stacks, I give the receding glow of the cave corals a longing backward glance. “Quick question. How long does the glow last?”
“An hour or so. You can feed them again if it becomes dim.” Minerva tilts her head to the side. “Don’t tell me a brave explorer like you is afraid of the dark?”
“Of course not,” I scoff. It’s more the stuffy enclosed space. I’m not used to being underground. Having got accustomed to sleeping with the night sky as my ceiling, it’s hard to imagine ever going back to a life indoors.
Minerva raises the cave coral lantern and points at a painted label hooked on the lip of the shelf. “Here we are. Year 28 of the reign of Cyrus the Third—that’s what 28C3 stands for—and the name of the artist, Ovidia of Rume.”
I peer at the art piece from more than a hundred years ago. It’s a strange and slightly unsettling mask, shaped from clay to resemble a crying face. “She must have been going through something,” I joke.
Minerva nods. “Sometimes the scroll archives include the artist’s justification for why they chose to make what they did. If you’ll be here for a few days, perhaps you can find the corresponding scroll.”
She hands me the sconce. It’s heavier than I was expecting. “If you need further assistance, come upstairs and find the library runners. I’ll leave you to it.”
“Wait,” I blurt. “You’re just going to leave me alone down here?”
Minerva says, “I told you I was busy. I must get back to my copying work. You’re more than capable of reading labels for yourself, are you not?”
“I…” Don’t want to be left in the dark. “You didn’t give me any extra worms, in case the cave corals go dim.”
“Oh. Yes.” Minerva rummages in the belt pouch, but comes up with only two more shriveled grubs. “I’ll get more from the storage cupboard.”
She bustles back down the aisle and heads for the stairs. I follow, sconce in hand, noticing the mesmerizing sashay of her tail and the impressive speed at which she moves. If this were the forest, no stone floor for her claws to click against, she would be a silent, deadly foe.
Except her prey would probably be some plant she wants to study. I smirk, imagining her pouncing on a specimen. Maybe she’d employ an eyeglass to observe it up close. Never mind that velociraptors almost never suffer vision impairment.
She stops by the supply closet door. When she turns, she catches the tail-end of my amused expression and lifts her chin in a regal display of annoyance. “I meant for you to wait there.”
“I wanted to see where the coral food is,” I say innocently. “In case I run out.”
She chuffs through her nostrils, but lets me into the supply closet.
Most of the storage space is filled with a stack of crates labeled with “DONATION.” Minerva gestures to a shelf bearing a large pile of cloth pouches.
“Dried bugs of all sorts. The corals prefer fresh ones, but they’ll accept a few rounds of the dried stuff.
You probably won’t want to stay down here longer than an hour or two, just in case. ”
I raise an eyebrow. “In case what?”
“In case they get overfull and go to sleep. They won’t light up for several more hours after that.”
“Maybe I should just use an oil lamp instead,” I say.
“Absolutely not.” Minerva whirls on me, her tail lashing. It catches the edge of the door and swings it softly shut behind us, leaving us alone in the cramped space with the coral sconce between us.
I meet her eyes square-on, and she softens a little. “Fire of any kind is forbidden in the Great Library. You could be lifetime banned for endangering our collection.”
“Fine, fine!” I hold up my hands in surrender. “No fire. And no overfeeding the corals.” I reach across her, deliberately leaning a little closer than socially polite, and snag one of the pouches of coral food. “I’d better get started on my research then.”
“Yes. I think that’s best.” Minerva reaches for the door handle.
Then rattles it. Then pushes on the door with all her considerable strength.
“Oh no,” I murmur. “Tell me you have the key.”
“Of course I have the key.” Minerva lifts her chatelaine. “The problem is, this room only locks from the outside.”
MINERVA
I push on the door again, my heart starting to race. The air feels suddenly thick in this tiny closet. These old doors stick in the frames sometimes—maybe one more good shove—
“Whoa. Hold on. Let’s just think for a minute.” Claudia’s voice breaks through the fog of terror clouding my brain. “You’re going to hurt yourself if you keep throwing yourself at the door like that.”
She’s right. My feathers are already smarting from being crushed, and I’ve probably bruised my shoulder. With a whimper, I sink into a roosting ball, tucking my limbs under me and coiling my tail as tight as I possibly can.
Claudia folds into a cross-legged posture next to me, placing the coral sconce between us.
“That’s right,” she murmurs. “No need to panic. We’re fine.
The room’s not airtight, so we’ll be able to breathe.
We’ve got plenty of coral food, so we won’t lose the light.
Now. Let’s think this through. Will someone notice we’re missing soon? ”
I pull in a long breath through my nose, tamping down the panic. “When they close the library and you haven’t signed out, they’ll come looking. We never leave patrons lost in the stacks.”
“And maybe before that, someone will need coral food,” Claudia points out.
“So, a couple of hours at most.” She bites her lip, looking up to the ceiling as she thinks.
“There’s a tiny crack under the door. What if we slide something under there, to tip people off that we’re trapped?
Can we write a note? Do you have any parchment? ”
“No.” Then, after thinking for a moment, “We could dump out one of the bags of coral food.”
“Good idea!” Claudia says brightly. “We don’t have any ink either, but maybe blood…?”
I shake my head quickly. “Not a good idea.” I may have strong control over my ancestral hunting instincts, but in a small space like this, even the scent of my own blood mixed with my overactive fear response could trigger something dangerous.
Claudia thinks for a few more moments. “Oooh. Let’s see if there’s anything interesting in the donation boxes. Charcoal or paint or—”
I growl my outrage. “You want to damage a piece of art?”
“I want out of this closet,” Claudia says. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to destroy anything if I don’t have to. Help me pry the lids off?”
Reluctantly, I detach a long, flat key from my chatelaine and wiggle it under the nailed-down lid of the top crate. It loosens without too much effort, allowing Claudia to fit her small fingers into the gap and wrench the lid off.
She’s so strong. My nostrils flare; her light sheen of sweat fills this enclosed space with her scent.
A sudden, unbidden fantasy plays in my mind’s eye: Claudia slamming me against the wall, sinking her blunt human teeth into the downy-feathered skin at the base of my neck.
My footclaws flex, and heat builds in my core.
No. Stop it. That is hardly professional.
I snap back to the present moment, where Claudia has wasted no time rummaging through the crate to unearth its contents. These items are part of a bulk shipment from a township called Valeria, so each crate is packed with a variety of discrete items bundled in rags.
There’s a delicate glass vase, which Claudia holds close to the coral-light to admire. Then a lovely ceramic tea set, glazed emerald green. “It matches your eyes,” Claudia murmurs, almost absentmindedly, raising one of the teacups next to my face. My heartbeat trips over itself.
The second crate is crammed with protective reed tubes that contain rolled-up paintings, poetry collections, and biographical stories. Claudia searches the bottom of that crate but finds not a single charcoal pencil.
Then Claudia opens the third crate, and pulls out…a sculpture.
It’s about the size of her forearm, carved and lovingly polished from what appears to be some kind of gemstone.
The shape is cylindrical and gently curved.
Both ends are rounded smooth, with one end rather wider than the other.
In the coral’s glow, it has a crystalline glimmer, although its surface is smooth to the touch.
Claudia runs her palm up and down it thoughtfully, and my heart nearly stops.
“What do you suppose this is?” she murmurs. “Rather abstract, isn’t it?”
My throat constricts. All I can utter is a faint growl that sounds more like a squeak. I know exactly what that is. I have a few just like it, hidden in a box under my bed.
Seeing Claudia run her hands over it like that is doing things to me. Things I am not accustomed to have happen around other people, whether human or dinosaur.
As she smooths her fingers over the bulbous end, it suddenly seems to click. She bursts out laughing. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me. They donated this to a library?”
“We get all kinds of donations,” I choke out. “Not all of them end up on display.”
Claudia smirks at me. “I’m surprised they didn’t want to keep it for private use.”
“Most likely, they did.” My feathers prickle with embarrassment. “Donations like this are usually left to the library when the original artist passes away and their family chooses not to keep their creations as family heirlooms.”
Claudia drops the crystal phallus back into the crate as if it’s bitten her. But then she laughs again. “There are some things we don’t need to know about our dear departed grandparents. Oh, here! I found something!”
The crate has yielded a stray charcoal stub, probably broken off from the pencil they were using to scratch DONATION on the outside. It’s only about the size of Claudia’s thumbnail.
She empties one of the pouches of coral food, pinches the charcoal between her fingers, and bends close to shape her letters onto the cloth.
After a moment, she holds it up for my inspection. HELP. OPEN DOOR, it reads in blocky, smudgy print.
I nod. “That’ll do.”
She stuffs the cloth under the crack in the door, then dusts off her hands. “And now, I suppose, we wait.”