Chapter 12
The red cards were finding us faster. One swirled down on us from the roof of the Delaford house in Sense and Sensibility, slicing the back of my neck as I stood in the front drive with a series of ladies in Regency frocks twirling their parasols and waiting for the footmen to bring out picnic hampers.
“Ow—” I managed, barely, not to swear, slapping my neck as though a wasp had stung it.
“Are you quite well, Miss Watson?” asked a kindly looking girl I was pretty sure was Elinor Dashwood. “Perhaps the air is too cold—”
“Elinor is always believing everyone too cold.” Her sister Marianne laughed, looking so incredibly young and flyaway with her lively little face and sunburned nose that I couldn’t believe she’d be getting married at the end of this book.
She didn’t look mature enough to lead the revolution in a YA dystopian novel, much less get married.
“Take care, or she will be fitting you with a flannel waistcoat like some old graybeard, and dosing you for every species of ailment that can afflict the old and feeble!”
“Miss Watson is hardly old and feeble, Marianne,” her sister chided. “She is six-and-twenty—”
Marianne’s blink clearly said that anyone of six-and-twenty had one foot in the glue factory and the other in the grave, but I headed her off before she could deal my ego any blows by saying so.
“I’m quite all right, Miss Dashwood, Miss Marianne,” I said, tucking the red card behind my back, and though I’d been hoping to angle a private word with Elinor Dashwood and tell her it was really a little early to start writing herself off as a hopeless old maid at nineteen, I extricated myself and beelined for the Librarian, who was busy with a middle-aged Patron who’d been inserted into the Austen party as one of the Jennings’ cousins.
I’d barely handed the red card over before another spun through on the wake of a messenger arriving on horseback (I was pretty sure we’d arrived at the part of the book where Colonel Brandon gets bad news and the Delaford picnic is canceled) and this card managed to nick the Librarian across one temple, opening another paper cut.
“Was that one aiming for your eye?” I hissed as all the Regency ladies (who had of course missed the card) fluttered around the messenger in a sea of muslins and fringed shawls, Colonel Brandon looked grim, and the plot went on unfolding right behind us.
“It’s just a warning card, Miss Watson. It’s not sentient.” But her brows were drawn tight as we pulled our newest Patron between us around the side of the house and prepared for another margin jump.
“My poor nerves just can’t take this,” the woman in peach voile and straw bonnet moaned, sagging against me. “If either of you has any smelling salts—”
“Oh, buck up,” I snapped, batting her lace parasol out of my eye. “You weren’t actually born in the Regency period, so don’t expect a goddamn fainting couch.”
“Bitch,” she said, sounding suddenly a lot more modern.
“Call me all the names you want, just pick up your feet!”
Three more red cards found us on the seafront promenade in Sanditon, where the Librarian collected an elegant fortyish Black woman in jonquil-yellow muslin taking the air in a fashionable barouche, and I picked up three more serious paper cuts and a flutter of foreboding in my gut that would not be stamped out.
The damn woman from Sense and Sensibility wouldn’t stop whining, those cards wouldn’t stop coming, and the pretty seaside expanse that was Sanditon looked thin around the edges as if the book world was starting to fray.
“Nothing’s fraying,” the Librarian said when I ventured as much.
“If it looks less fleshed out, that’s because Sanditon is an incomplete book.
Austen died before she wrote more than a fragment, so don’t go getting our Patrons in a panic thinking that their book worlds are breaking down. ”
That only soothed my disquiet a little, because the Librarian looked so weary—by the time we took our newest pair back to the Library, my unease had racheted clear up past my stomach and into my throat.
The Gallerist took the whiner and led her off with soothing pats and a lot of talk about taking a country weekend in a Leighton painting; the Sanditon woman took one look at the Programmer and drawled, “Honey, I’ll go wherever you want.
” Leaving me the only one on scene to observe the way the Librarian gripped the oak counter for balance, and the way the long emerald-green windows seemed to have darkened like the circles under her eyes.
If the Library was attacked now, I didn’t lay good odds on her being able to withstand it. Whatever it turned out to be.
“You need to rest,” I said, and got a bracing look.
“Not with four more Patrons to find and protect.” The Librarian glanced at her next card, then at my little spencer jacket and bonnet. “It’s cold where we’re going; do you want a cloak from Wardrobe?”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, really wanting to say Stop.
Because the Library globe was spinning faster on its axis and the paper cutter’s lethally long arm was still rising and falling with a guillotine-like chop chop chop, but my uneasily thrumming fear wasn’t any match for steely, centuries-long determination, and before I could blink we had fallen onto a crossroads under a lowering gray sky.
A stone pillar loomed where the dusty road branched, and the way my nerves were twanging I half expected to see a dead body splayed under it, but there was only a series of worn, carved letters on each rough-hewn side.
“That way,” the Librarian said, taking off down the road indicated simply WH.
The tablet had done its work again; her green cardigan had become a fur-lined green traveling cloak over a Regency walking dress and sturdy boots.
“Pick up the pace. It’s a fair walk to Wuthering Heights from here. ”
Wonderful, a gothic novel. Just the thing when you’re already feeling edgy.
Don’t you start reaching for your smelling salts, Alix Watson, I scolded myself, heading after the Librarian and wishing I’d grabbed a cloak after all.
I had no idea what time of day it might be here; the clouds rolled overhead low and charcoal colored without so much as a stray beam of sun; the moors unfolded all around us in a patchwork of distant crags, sullen brooks, tangled bracken, and stunted trees that seemed to cringe from the cold, biting wind.
I’d read Wuthering Heights as a teenager and never thought it was particularly romantic—not the ambience, not the house, not Heathcliff, who let’s be honest was a stack of red flags in a frock coat rather than any kind of worthy book boyfriend—and now that I was in the book, the general atmosphere was not improving my teenage opinion.
Shivering in my spencer, I wondered what Beau would make of all this.
Give me Almack’s, I could almost hear him say, Almack’s and a quadrille and some Regent’s punch.
Right now I agreed with him—especially when I saw another red card sailing out of the sky.
I halted right where I was in the middle of the road, watching it arc downward. “This is wrong. This is all wrong. We are in the middle of nowhere”—batting the card to the ground before it could slice down the Librarian’s arm—“with these things spitting at us like darts, and—”
She picked up the card and kept going. “We are not in the middle of nowhere, we are in the middle of Emily Bronte’s nowhere, which means Wuthering Heights is just that way.”
“This cannot feel right to you!” I cried.
“Miss Watson—”
Another card came down, only this one didn’t drift or even arc—it sliced, coming sideways in a vicious whistle, straight at my face.
I threw up my arm but it dodged, that goddamn thing dodged, and as I dazedly raised my fingers to my cheek, I felt the long cut down the side of my face from temple to chin.
The Librarian broke off, staring at me. Still numb, I picked the card up in trembling fingertips and flipped it over, showing her. It was blank, no Patron’s name, no book details. Just a razor-edged warning with my blood on it.
And suddenly I heard a thrum like a thousand papery wings, just as I whispered, “I think this is a trap.”
The red storm whirled out of the dark sky like a cloud of blood-colored card-stock birds.
Thousands of them. I had time for one shout before they were on me, slicing, darting, pecking.
They’re just cards, I couldn’t help thinking stupidly, cards from a card catalog—but these were swirling around me like hungry shrikes.
Dots of blood welled on the backs of my hands as I swatted and batted; sharp edges slashed my legs through my thin muslin skirts.
Beau’s beautiful hand-embroidered hems, slashed to ribbons in a matter of seconds; my plumed bonnet pushed back off my head and then the exquisite agony of my scalp being pricked by a thousand needle-sharp points.
I tried to run, but my foot caught in a tangle of bracken and I fell to my knees.
I tried to crawl but there was nowhere to crawl to—we were trapped out here on this vast menacing moor, not a soul in sight, nowhere to shelter, no one to help.
I batted about me wildly, opening my mouth to shout again, and a card flew straight between my teeth.
It sliced the corners of my mouth and then the inside of my cheek with a taste like iron and ink, and I just snapped.
Half choking and half screaming, trying to bite down on the fluttering thing, trying to wrap my arms around my head, trying to run—
And then I felt the Librarian’s hands swatting them off me, felt the softness of fur-lined wool as she pushed me down, crouched over me, and swirled her cloak over us both.
The drum of papery wings receded and my ears roared; I spat out the crumpled remnants of the card still squirming half alive between my teeth like a paper rat, and gasped in the sudden darkness.
The Librarian’s body blocked out the light; her cloak shielded us both.
But that horrific paper storm was still roiling; I could feel the winces go through her as the cards flew at her, slicing and tearing at her cloak.
I don’t want this, something in me wailed, I didn’t sign up for this—but hadn’t I?
I’d wanted an adventure, and adventures had teeth.
I’d gone off the edges of the map to where the warning said, Here There Be Monsters, and like any stupid girl in a book I’d paid no heed.
No one ever does, because we all think the book is about us and the monsters will eat someone else.
A card found its way under the edge of the Librarian’s cloak and zipped across my ankle, drawing blood, and I couldn’t hold back a helpless, snarling sob of pain.
Pressed above me, the Librarian exhaled. “Well, shit,” she said, surprisingly calm considering the circumstances. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do this.”
She drew a long breath in as though bracing for a gale, and then she rose so quickly I tumbled onto my back in the moorland grass.
The Librarian threw her arms wide as she straightened, scattering the red cards, her cloak rippling out like wings on either side—and I stopped trying to shield my face and just stared.
Her cloak flared upward, and just kept flaring.
Up, up, and the green woolen folds suddenly had a jeweled glitter as they extended and lengthened, as her short plump figure lengthened with it and her tablet fell to the ground.
The edge of her skirt narrowed and whipped like a tail—because it was a tail, I observed stupidly, and that wasn’t a cloak flapping anymore, it was wings.
Her long inhale became a deafening, bone-rattling roar, and the cyclone of scarlet cards bunched together in the air like frightened birds.
A mistake, because she launched herself straight for them.
In the split second it took for her wings to propel her off the ground, I saw the final vestiges of the Librarian fade away—her matronly brogues splitting into gleaming claws, the soft wrinkles of her neck undulating into glittering emerald scales—and a great green dragon took to the sky.
She tore through the cloud of red cards like an unholy maelstrom, jaws snapping, claws flying. Scarlet shreds of card stock winnowed down like blood rain, and I forgot I was bleeding from a hundred paper cuts as I watched her wheel and shriek and roar in the sky overhead.
But those little red bastards re-formed and swirled, what was left of them, and they dive-bombed her in all directions.
Too many of them, too many and too small—the dragon’s head slewed to one side as a storm of cards arrowed straight for her eyes, and then all the grass in a hundred-foot radius flattened as she buffeted higher in a couple of wingbeats and let out a shriek that echoed across the entire moor.
My hair blew back from my face, my hands clapped to my deafened ears, and the cards scattered this time instead of bunching.
The dragon wheeled and dove, straight for me, and I couldn’t help it—I screamed.
Trust me, it’s what you do when a dragon dives right at you like a missile.
A sudden hush. My ears ringing. My eyes watering as I forced them open. The green dragon crouched on the flattened grass, one wing lowered in my direction like a ladder, golden eyes fixed on me . . . still framed, I saw with a jolt, by prim rectangular glasses.
“Grab my tablet, will you?” said the Librarian.
So many thoughts jumbling in my mind, so many words fighting to get free, and somehow the ones that spilled out first were “How on earth are you still wearing glasses?”
“Because I’m nearsighted in any form, Miss Watson.” You idiot, her tone implied. “Hop on, will you? We haven’t got all day.”
I was bleeding, I was terrified, my heart was hammering as I ran to scoop up her fallen tablet and heard the papery hiss of the cards gathering in the air overhead.
But terrified or not, it was with the fierce smile of a long dream wakened that I gathered my shredded skirts and scrambled (a little girl scrambled, a little girl whose mother had left her behind with a crumpled bumper sticker and a paperback book and a dream of all-capital-letters ESCAPE) onto the dragon’s back.
I hung on for dear life as those wings beat on either side and the Librarian launched into the air, endless moors falling away beneath us as I shouted, “Fly, fly, FLY!”