Chapter 14
I was trying to find something to say that wasn’t a complete cliché, still thumbing my way mentally past How did you get here? and What are you doing here? when Beau began to laugh in short, hiccupping bursts.
“Jesus,” he said, looking from me to the clock with its complete lack of time-telling numbers to the books hovering against the ceiling like frightened birds.
“I’m either hallucinating from lack of sleep, or I’m prematurely starting that nervous breakdown I’ve been promising myself once the Belle premiere is over. ”
I sighed. “Afraid it’s a little more complicated than that.”
He let out a whoop, startling both me and the books.
“I beg your pardon,” he said to us both, bowing with an elaborate swoop of silk top hat, and then he hopped onto the curving mahogany banister and slid down it all the way to the bottom of the stairs with another whoop.
The whoop turned into a “Whoops!” as he tumbled off the banister and hit the carpet flat on his back, where he elected to stay, eyes and boot tops pointing at the ceiling.
“Floating books,” he mumbled. “Floating books and Czarina Alix. Did you just fly through that window on a dragon, czarina? Or did I imagine that part?”
“Hold that thought,” I said, and turned back to the Librarian.
In the sixty seconds my attention had been distracted by a Regency fashion plate walking through the door, the Library had somehow conjured up a deep leather chaise lounge and formed it up underneath her so she was resting more comfortably.
I went to my knees, heart knocking, and felt for a pulse in the side of her throat.
Slow, very slow, but steady. “Ma’am?” I whispered, but not so much as a flicker of an eyelash.
I looked at the slash across her eye, but it had already clotted.
So had my own various paper cuts and slices, I realized—they still hurt but they were scabbed over.
If the Astral Library took care of your appetite while you were inside its walls, maybe it helped with your injuries too?
Just let me rest, the Librarian had said. The Library will take care of me. It’ll just—take—a while . . .
Jesus, how long was a while in a place where time didn’t actually pass? Was I about to be stuck here for the next hundred figurative years, watching her snooze like Sleeping Beauty?
Get it together, I told myself, unfolding the lambswool blanket the Library had thoughtfully provided along with the chaise lounge and tucking it in around the Librarian’s still form. At least she’s not dead. She’s alive, she’s stable, and those goddamn cards can’t get in.
At least I didn’t think they could. But what about when the Library Board made its next move? If it really was the Library Board behind all this . . .
“Czarina?” Beau’s voice floated over, still dreamily bemused. “Why is that terrifying paper cutter chopping up and down all by itself like a guillotine?”
“Beau . . .”
He propped himself up on one elbow, looking at me. “And what did you do to my dress?”
I winced, not daring to look down at the shredded muslin hanging in ragged strips around my legs. “Dragon ride plus murderous card catalog?”
He nodded slowly, scrubbing a hand through his hair.
Being Beau, it gave him sexy bed head. I’d been wearing a bonnet so long, I just had hat head—and I’d lost the bonnet.
I tried to pat my hair back behind my ears as Beau’s dark eyes traveled from the clock to the crashed globe to the books plastered up against the broken window.
“This is a much more elaborate breakdown than I was anticipating,” he said at last. “The detail work is just amazing here. I’m walking around in the Guo Pei of embroidered fantasy worlds . . .”
“What’s the last thing you remember?” I asked.
“I was at a party at the Boston Public Library.” He sat up on the floor, propping his elbows on his doeskin-clad knees.
“You know they rent out the gardens and fancier rooms for weddings and fundraisers and stuff like that? It was this big influencer birthday bash I swore I’d go to six months ago.
I didn’t want to go—Jesus, I can’t even afford to go, I need to finish the lining on the bodice of the Belle dress, I’m so behind.
But I need something for Insta that isn’t just me frothing at the mouth at the idea of stitching one more goddamn channel, so I suited up and went to put in a fifteen-minute appearance.
It was awful. Fairy lights all through that gorgeous Italianate courtyard filled with people getting drunk on Cristal and taking selfies .
. .” He trailed off for a moment, looking so exhausted he might drop off right here.
He had just a touch of silvery eyeliner along his lashes, echoing the small silver ring in one ear, and that flick of silver gave his blink a sleepy dragonfly glimmer.
“You sure I’m not dreaming?” he mumbled.
“I’m betting you found a door?” I prompted.
“Right.” Giving himself a little shake. “The Abbey Room and the Sargent Gallery were all done up with crystals and chrysanthemums—the only room no one was in was the Reading Room. Well, there was a guy doing a line of coke off what looked like a first-edition Yeats, but he went weaving out and I just sat down at one of those long tables—they had them all done up with white cloths and candles—and I just couldn’t move.
It’s been so long since I got to sit and do nothing.
I knew I needed to snap a few pics and head back to the shop and get to work, but I just sat there blinking at all those shelves of books and thinking about the very first historical costume book I was able to find when I was a kid.
Just some sort of basic fashion retrospective, but if you’re a kid from Texas who’s already getting beat up because your jeans are a little too skinny, well, you get your hands on that book and you imagine walking through those rows and rows of brocade and satin.
Like centuries are going by, but in fabric.
Chalked Roman togas and lacquered samurai armor giving way to Indian sari silk and medieval furs and those fabulous multidimensional Tudor velvets . . .”
I could see we were going to get lost for a while in all those historical fabrics if we weren’t careful. “Focus, Beau. What happened then?”
“I went through an open door.” He shrugged.
“I thought it was the door back to the Abbey Room, you know the one with the wall paintings of Galahad and the Round Table? But I ended up in here—and there were books flying everywhere and a dragon crashing through the window, and I thought, Wow, I definitely fell asleep at the party, and then everything sealed up with this huge crash, and . . .” He rubbed a hand through his hair again. “Yeah. Here we are.”
I chewed my lip a moment, wondering. I hadn’t exactly pegged Beau as the kind of reader desperate enough to flee into a novel. But maybe desperate mattered more than the novel part. Mattered enough for the Library to give him a door—and a hand.
Or maybe the Library knew the one who needed a hand here was me.
Or maybe, a little bit of both.
“Wait a minute.” Looking suddenly alarmed, Beau pointed over my shoulder at the chaise lounge with the Librarian under her lambswool blanket. “Who’s that and how did I miss that she was lying there and is she dead?”
“No. She—”
“And where did the dragon go?”
“Try to relax. And listen up.” I patted his shoulder. “It’s monologue time.”
I very quickly had a lot more sympathy for the Librarian’s constant state of irritation. Having to explain the rules of a magical world to people over and over, every day of her job? No wonder she bit my head off when I asked so many questions. I was already out of gas trying to do this once.
As soon as I got through to Beau that this was a real place, not a dream or a hallucination, he very nearly went ahead and had that nervous breakdown he’d been talking about: “What do you mean I can’t get out?!”
“I think you slid through right before the Library sealed everything shut,” I said, following him up the stairs as he wrenched at the handle of the door he’d walked through.
“We’re sort of, um, in emergency lockdown.
” Thanks to one really epic SHUSH. I cast a glance at the Librarian but she was still as motionless as Snow White in her glass casket.
If Snow White were old, Iranian, and battle wounded rather than young, white, and epically dumb.
“Alix, Jesus, I’ve got to get out of here. That lining on the Belle dress, if I don’t get it done tonight I’m fucked. I’m so behind—”
“Beau.”
“It’s all down to the next few days. Final fitting’s in a week; if I screw this up, I’m finished.” He was pacing up and down in front of the door now in long agitated strides. “I swore to my dad I’d—”
“Beau.”
“—pay him back and if I don’t, my brothers, Jesus, they’ll never let me hear the end of—”
“BEAU.” I grabbed him by his immaculate claret sleeve and yanked him to a halt. “Calm down.”
“When in the history of saying Calm down does anybody ever calm the fuck down?” he yelled.
“Alix, it may not sound like much to you, but this premiere commission is going to sink me if I don’t get it done, and I can’t afford to lose even half a night’s work, and how long have I been here already? How long?”
“Time stands still here, Beau. You go back out that door—whenever you go back out—it’ll be the same moment you left.”
That kicked off an entirely different overreaction as he stared at me one long wild-eyed moment, then yanked me into a hug, kissed me on each cheek, let out another whoop, and went back to striding up and down again, mumbling, “I get a break, I can actually get a goddamn break? Jesus, I need a break . . .”