Chapter 22 #2
“Alix,” Elizabeth snapped, “call off the books.”
“I don’t know how,” I said with complete honesty.
The rustling at my back, it was only growing louder.
Angrier. “What makes you think anyone can control stories, Elizabeth? They take on a life of their own, once the author sets down the pen. Stories are not obedient. Even old well-loved favorites sometimes grow teeth.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said in a clipped voice.
“It’s a magic library, you fucking idiot,” I said, and she rocked back as though I’d slapped her.
“Yes, you’re an idiot,” I repeated. “Call yourself a librarian. You don’t know a thing about books.
You don’t even know what Jane Austen wrote other than Pride and Prejudice.
You come here to a magic library thinking you can control it with your bylaws and committees? ”
I’d thought I had to be the one to fight for this place—me, or the Librarian, or someone. I hadn’t quite realized until this moment that it could fight for itself. That maybe all it needed was a general.
“The thing you seem to have forgotten about sanctuaries,” I told the Library Board, “is that they are allowed to defend themselves when they are violated. Defend themselves, and the people they shield. Did you think you got to waltz in here and make threats, maim my boss, blithely lay out your plans to ruin all these lives, and we somehow weren’t allowed to fight back? ”
I could tell from the look on their faces that this was exactly what they thought. Of course it was. Consequences, damage, harm—those were things they had the privilege of dealing out, not ever dealing with.
“Alix,” Elizabeth said in that oh-so-reasonable voice, “no one here is looking to harm—”
“Yes, you are,” I cut her off. “Just because you people are dressing it up in bureaucracy around a board table doesn’t mean you aren’t looking to inflict damage, you goose-stepping hypocrites.
But here’s what you don’t understand.” I smiled at her again, the smile she didn’t like.
“When you crossed this threshold, you came into uncharted waters. Haven’t you ever seen the warning on old maps, when the waters grow deep? Here There Be Dragons.”
“Absolutely not.” Elizabeth slapped her clipboard down on the table. “This place needs order, and it needs modernization, and it needs monetization—”
“Good luck with that,” I remarked.
“You have outstayed your welcome, Alix.” Elizabeth started around the table toward me, bright red patches of anger flaring high on her cheeks. “You have been a very disruptive presence to the annual Board meeting, and I am going to have you removed from the premises.”
Beau moved to intercept her but stopped at the quick shake of my head.
I let her come past him to me—let her give me the short, sharp shove I’d gotten from so many people in my foster-care childhood.
The mean little shove of a real bully; the shove that had sent me scurrying over and over, since the age of eight, back to my dream life in the pages of Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
But this time that shove didn’t budge me an inch.
I stood there rooted in my book dress, a column holding this barrel-vaulted roof up, and she rebounded off me like a swell of the parchment sea outside.
I lifted my hands on either side of me, palms up, and behind me I felt the books—every book in this library—rise in a dark, furious wave.
“Leave this place,” I said softly. “Leave now.”
“I am the president of the Library Board,” she seethed, and shoved me again.
Wrong decision.
Like I’d seen the Librarian do when this place was under attack, I inhaled all the way down through my entire body to my toes and brought my finger to my lips.
Even before the word roared from my throat, the books behind me had sprung.
They lunged like a great shadowy whip, curling down around Elizabeth and wrapping her up, hiding her from sight.
The storm of book-bound violence hurled into the air as the Board shrieked and the Patrons gaped and Beau gripped his paper-cutter sword, and the entire Library seemed to shriek too.
Every green window flashed dark; the clock gave a tremendous clang; the globe spun madly on its axis; and with a howl I felt in my marrow rather than heard with my ears, the Astral Library flung the president of the Board through the dark glass of the nearest window and out into the void.
I thought I’d hear a scream, but there was nothing. Not a sound as the parchment sea of stories below swallowed her whole.
My heart thudded and my mouth burned, as if I’d shouted a word made of fire. Part of me wanted to be sick, to say, I didn’t want that to happen. But the books didn’t care what I wanted. They simply defended themselves when threatened. This was the Astral Library, and here there be dragons.
So I looked back at the rest of the Library Board, standing frozen and horrified around the long table. Light was slowly returning to the room, the dark windows shading from ebony to emerald to peridot. The glass from the window where Elizabeth had been flung headlong twinkled unbroken again.
“Well, we can’t have this,” Darla shrilled, shattering the silence so suddenly everyone in the room flinched.
“We simply cannot have this kind of thing, not in a space where children could be exposed to—” She flapped her hands, not even finishing that sentence.
“All these books will have to be discarded, and as for you—”
She came straight at me with her stamp raised like a dagger, and I wasn’t for one moment afraid. Not with the books clustering ferociously over my head like a cloud of furious birds. But before the books could strike, Elaine did.
She moved in a blur of otherworldly speed, an arrow of garnet-red taffeta.
The abused woman who had fled into Bram Stoker’s England and remade herself as a Bride of Dracula flashed down on Darla like a swooping bat, battening down right above the collar of that baby-blue sweater with its curly lettered Support Your Local Library!
And the DISCARD stamp clattered to the floor as the vampire drank the book burner dry.
Then she stepped back from the husk on the floor, patting her lips, and the little girl in the pinafore who had escaped to Anne of Green Gables composedly handed her a lace-edged hankie. “Thank you,” Elaine murmured.
I felt even more dry-mouthed and just a little sick.
But I hadn’t picked this fight with the Board; they’d started it themselves, and now they were staring ashen-faced at the consequences.
I moved around the long table to its head, taking my time, marshaling myself.
Overhead the storm of books was dissipating, most floating serenely back to their shelves, others congregating in satisfied little groups under the ceiling, some coming back to check on me.
An ancient leather-bound First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays nudged under my hand like a playful pony and I gave it a stroke, sending it back to its shelf with a whisper.
The Board flinched, watching it soar away from my hand.
Beau righted my fallen chair, and I took my seat in an enormous rustle of skirt, looking around the table from face to face—Pickle Mouth, Pink Cardigan, Wet Wipe, the Bobblehead, the secretary.
“You are all free to leave,” I said at last, quietly.
“But if you keep gunning for the Library or its Patrons, you have seen that we will fight back.”
Not one person met my eyes.
“Right.” I drew a deep breath. “The motion to monetize and modernize the Astral Library is hereby voted down by unanimous count. And I declare the annual Board meeting at an end.”