Chapter 12
Twelve
Avery
After her mortifying outburst in class, Avery wanted to hide in her dorm and recover from the morning. Bed was always the answer.
But no, Felix demanded, very rudely she might add, that she take him to see the book she had used to summon him, and to see whether there was an undo to her unfortunate doing of summoning the rude familiar.
They walked through the arched doors of the library.
She relaxed, and Felix looked at her inquisitively.
The walls of books upon books gave way to the grand vaulted ceilings that had become her second home, to study, yes, but also to hide, because there weren’t any problems a library of books couldn’t solve.
Avery knew that if anyone ever used the line, “I want to build you a library,” she would instantly fall in love.
They kept walking until they came across the dusty corner where she had found the forbidden book.
Before her eyes, the little black cat in front of her gave way to a towering shifter, his ears flattening against his head as he stretched his annoyingly defined biceps above his head, the collar nowhere in sight. It took everything in her not to say, “Biggggg stretch.”
She tried to look away, she really did. But her eyes were as glued to him as a horse straight from the factory.
Swirling tattoos disappeared under his black shirt, one that gripped the planes of his muscles far too well.
It was almost distracting enough to forget the fact that he had shifted in front of her, in a public place.
“What are you doing?” Avery hissed under her breath.
“It’s fine, witch, I can hear anyone coming from a mile away.”
It most definitely was not fine. What if they got caught? Her hindbrain told her it didn’t matter because he was just so lovely to look at. Stupid prehistoric brain.
“Why can’t you just stay a cat?” she pressed.
He gave the same look as a pissed-off cat. “Try shoving yourself in a tiny glass box all day and see how you feel. It becomes uncomfortable after a while.”
She huffed and crossed her arms. “Fine. Just promise me you’ll shift back as soon as you hear someone coming.”
He held out his pinky to her. Hesitantly, she took it with her own. In a split second, he yanked on it until their faces were mere inches apart, enough that she could feel his hot breath fanning her face and her heart rattling around like a cracked-out bird in a cage.
“Pinky swear,” he said in a fake-cute voice before letting her go abruptly enough that she stumbled back into her chair, her ass hitting the wood harder than she would have liked.
Oh, so he can touch her whenever he wants, but she wasn’t allowed to touch him. Bastard cat.
“Why did you put it back in the library?” he said, changing the subject, while Avery’s heart was still lodged in her throat.
“What?”
“Why did you put—” he recited in the old language.
“Stop with the old language! It’s sacred to us!” She also hated the way it sounded delicious sliding off his tongue.
He smirked. “Shame, it’s a beautiful language.”
“I didn’t want to get fees,” she admitted, somewhat painfully. Her book return success rate was immaculate, not even a forbidden book could mess that up.
“How would you have gotten fees on a book you stole?”
She sighed. “You don’t understand—the librarian’s owl sees everything; it was the one that helped me find it.”
Felix raised a brow. “The owl pointed it out to you?”
She furrowed her own. “Yes, why?”
“Interesting,” he said. “Who does the owl belong to?”
“The librarian.”
“Hmm.” Her eyes flicked to his neck, a flutter forming in her stomach at the way his throat bobbed up and down. “Where’s the book then?” he asked.
Narrowing her eyes at him, she walked past and started climbing the ladder to the top, where the book should have been. Instead, she found an empty shelf and a dust-free rectangle. Even the dust bunnies had moved out. She looked around at him, confused, then glared.
“It’s not—Are you staring at my ass?” She looked down at him from the ladder, folding her skirt against her skin to obscure his view.
“What if I were?”
“Well…” She wasn’t sure what she would do; she hated even more to admit that she kind of liked it. “Stop it.”
He looked her in the eye with a lazy smirk plastered on his face. Asshole.
“The book isn’t there.”
His smirk fell away. “Well, it didn’t just fucking grow legs and walk away, did it?”
Avery searched the rows of books high and low, searching for any sign of the giant forbidden text that, honestly, should stick out like a cat among mice. There was no sign of it. Her memory wasn’t fantastic, but she knew she had placed it right back where she found it.
I bet those dust bunnies ate it just to spite me.
Did someone take it? She raked her mind for answers.
If they knew, then why hadn’t they turned her in yet?
None of it made sense. All of it made her brain hurt.
She loved a good mystery, that was why she loved riddles so much.
But there was nothing to go off, no definitive logical answer to this puzzle that was forming.
“Do you think the librarian could have taken it?” Felix questioned.
Avery shook her head. In all her years here, she had only ever seen the librarian move once from her chair.
The librarian was ancient. Her wrinkles had wrinkles.
She didn’t want the witch beauty treatments they sold to the rich humans.
The only time that she had seen her moving was only a few feet away from her chair, and it took her almost a full day to get back.
She had always been on death’s doorstep, but out of pure spite, she survived day after day.
She wasn’t ruling it out. It could be a farce. Maybe it was just some horrid skin suit she wore around the students while she astro-projected her spirit around the library. Shivers skittered over her spine at the thought of it. The librarian hadn’t been crossed off the list.
She pondered who else it could be. “I think someone planted the book for me to find.”
“You’re only now catching on? I expected better,” he said, trailing the books with a finger.
Avery’s hands balled into fists at her side, nails digging into her palms. “Fine, shifter, who do you think it is?”
“Shouldn’t you be consulting your crystal ball?”
She rolled her eyes. “Shouldn’t you be eating children?”
“Really?” he deadpanned. “What stories have you been reading about shifters?”
Definitely not shifter porn. Not at all. She crossed her arms, trying to hide the blush creeping along her face. “We don’t use crystal balls.”
“And we don’t eat children. Seems like we have both been told porkies.” Felix’s tail thumped the edge of the bookshelf.
It was annoying how good he was at getting under her skin, and it was annoying how good he looked while he did it.
She hadn’t had the attention of, well, anyone, in over a year—apart from fictional men.
And she had never been in the presence of someone so frustratingly handsome.
He was defying everything shifters were supposed to be.
Witches talked about them as if they were ugly, bloodsucking beasts.
Humans didn’t seem to mind them; in fact, they didn’t mind them at all, given the things she had read about them.
They had far more respect than witches ever did, and quite frankly, they had done nothing to deserve it.
Why were witches confined to their islands unless they had a visa, while shifters got to roam free?
When she asked her mother about it, she’d said humans and shifters unjustly hated witches.
That the shifters had conned the humans into making them glorified prisoners for their own agendas.
She envied the shifters for their freedom.
She yearned to see the world for herself, to see something different from the metaphorical four walls of the island.
A healer was a start to leave, but the one thing she took away from the professor’s lecture today, which she’d half-slept through from exhaustion, was that she would be ‘deployed.’ The word stuck with her.
She wouldn’t have a say in where she wanted to go; she’d be told.
Still, it would have to be better than her current culinary and tourist limitations.
She wanted to try something different from the cafeteria food or the meager restaurants that littered the island.
She didn’t care that they supposedly hired the best witch chefs; she wanted to make up her own mind about what was good and what was bad.
She wanted to stand in the shadow of Stonehenge and smell the oil paint at the Louvre, not just scroll past them on a screen.
Her days were a monotonous blur of the same.
It was pretentious motivation, and she should be grateful for what she had. But gratefulness didn’t get her closer to chicken nuggets, so fuck it.
Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted movement.
An army of dust bunnies appeared from under a bookshelf, carrying a tome like servants carrying a royal carriage.
Somehow, their little bodies made of light fluff could carry the thick leather-bound pages with surprising ease.
Felix shot her a look to make sure he was seeing the same thing she was and hadn’t started randomly hallucinating.
Avery kneeled to meet the small creature’s height, which was minuscule. Had they been the ones to hide the tomes? Little bastards.
But when she got a closer look, the book was unique.
This leather was worn smooth, the crimson coloring faded to a lifeless brown.
The gold embroidered markings looked similar at first glance, but the old language was different, older somehow, the symbols more intricate and harder to parse.
But she still recognized it for what it was: a book of riddles.