Chapter Seven #2
like a waterfall to the floor, where they raced around her feet. Or at least, some of them did. Others went up, instead of down, and oh god, they were in her hair. They were tangled there, too frantic to
easily swipe way. She swiped and swiped and batted, and still they skittered over her scalp.
It was unbearable. It was infuriating.
“You fucking demon,” she spat, as she flung the last one away. She watched it melt into the shadows between books. But he
didn’t seem furious that she had managed. Or that she had spoken to him that way. His expression was flat, featureless. She
couldn’t figure it out at all.
“Yes, I am,” he said, cold as the heart of a glacier. “Now do you understand what you’re facing here? It’s nothing that books will help you against. And even if they could, you shouldn’t
be trying to learn at seven minutes to closing, in a library that turns into a nightmare the moment those doors are locked.”
“It’s not seven minutes to closing. I only just got here.”
“Another thing you clearly don’t understand,” he said in a voice that almost sounded exasperated—like a teacher with a particularly difficult student.
And he carried on in that way, too. “Time moves differently here, bookworm. You have to keep careful track of it. You need a watch on your wrist, an analog watch, preferably one that you wind. And you must keep it wound, and then pay attention to what it says, even if your mind tells you it’s only been ten seconds. ”
She couldn’t take his words at face value, however.
She had to brush them off. “The guidebook didn’t say anything like that.”
“The guidebook tells you whatever it feels like telling you.”
“That’s a completely deranged system. It doesn’t even make sense.”
“Now you’re getting it. Now you’re seeing that this isn’t a fun wonderland, where all your dreams come true. It’s hell,” he said, that last word so overemphasized it sounded like it had two syllables. “And you’re down to three minutes, by the
way.”
“That’s not possible. It’s been thirty seconds.”
“Yes, and I told you what thirty seconds can be here.”
“I don’t believe it. You’re just trying to stop me from unearthing your weakness.”
“And what weakness is it that you think there is to find, little bookworm?”
He stepped toward her the moment the question was out. Just a little, but a little felt like a lot from someone so enormous.
His shadow slid over her before he was even that close. And she could feel that cold. That burning cold. It made her want
to beg him to step back. Or burst out with a none of your business.
But before she could do either, the lights went out.
All at once, directly to darkness.
And it was followed by a thunk that she knew was a lock sliding home.
“Well,” she heard him say, through the dark and hovering silence that followed. “Time’s up.”
But she didn’t wait for whatever he had planned next.
She simply shoved the table between them, hard enough that she felt it hit him. Then before he could recover, she ran. Right
into the deep velvety darkness, as fast as she could go. Faster than that even. She thought of him cutting her off in the
hall of headmasters, even as she went flat out. And she went harder. She flung herself, at full tilt.
But it made little difference.
She heard him loud and clear, a second later—despite the fact that he didn’t seem to speak loudly. His voice was almost hushed,
yet still it found her. As if he was barely an inch away. “Don’t be a fool, bookworm,” he said, as she pressed her back against
a bookshelf. “The deeper you go into this place, the deadlier it gets.”
And even though it seemed like a bad idea to give away her position, she couldn’t help it. She let words burst out of her,
thick with venom. “The only deadly thing in here is you, you horrible fuck.”
“You’re wrong. I’m the last shot you have now of getting out of here alive.”
“Oh? And what exactly do I have to do to receive this sudden generosity?”
“Leave Harrowhall the moment we escape. Leave and never return.”
She laughed mirthlessly into the darkness. “So the low, low price of giving up everything I’ve ever longed for.”
“Somehow, I don’t think you longed for being ripped apart by wraiths.”
Liar, she thought the second he said it. Mainly because the books hadn’t said a thing about creatures like that, haunting the
library after closing. He was just trying to strong-arm her, to scare her until she took his deal. It was obvious, absolutely
obvious. A fool wouldn’t have fallen for that.
Yet somehow, she held her breath anyway.
She listened, just to see if she could hear anything moving around in the darkness. Wraiths were the tattered remnants of
souls that had made terrible mistakes with magic, she knew, and they were meant to make a sound like sobbing. Like grief,
if it was turned into a noise.
But she couldn’t hear anything like it.
Just the flutter of a wing. A rustle of one of those birds she had heard earlier, a little louder than before, but still normal
sounding. It definitely wasn’t the movement of a spectral cloak around the graying bones of a lost body. There was no way,
she told herself. No way they just waited up there, until darkness descended.
Then floated down to brush against your cheek.
That was just a cobweb, she thought frantically.
But she crouched down anyway. She skittered along the floor to a safer feeling spot, hand constantly brushing at her face
where something had definitely touched her. And was that a sound she could hear now? It was low and more like the moan of
the wind than anything else.
Yet it was there.
It was the reason he laughed, she thought.
“Oh yes, you can hear them now, can’t you?” he said, voice as hollow and horrible as he actually was inside. Masks off now.
“So what’s it going to be, bookworm? Leave or let them ravage you?”
Stay quiet, she told herself.
But she was too full of rage to listen. “I’d sooner be reduced to bloody ribbons than go back to that hell I was living,” she spat, surprised and horrified to hear a broken sound in her voice. And maybe he was surprised too, because
he didn’t say a thing for what felt like eons.
Continents shifted and oceans shrunk in the time it took him to reply.
“It can’t have been that bad. It can’t be as bad as this.”
“This is only bad because you are making it be. Because you are trying to take it from me. All my life I’ve waited for wonders,
and all you want to do is rip them up in front of my face. I can’t even have the books, not even them,” she said, intending
at every step to be furious, but knowing her voice was starting to collapse even harder than it already had. She got to the
word books, and suddenly there was a real break there. A fracture that sounded so thin and high and desperate.
And now her face felt wet. She swiped at it angrily with her sleeve. Knew that he had to know she was crying. He had to, and
yet for some reason he didn’t say anything. The silence spun out again.
Although it wasn’t exactly silence anymore.
That moaning was getting louder and more unsettling. And in between she could hear a strange rattling sound. Like bones, like
skeleton bodies brushing against one another, as they flew around above her head. Wraiths use their half-corporeal bodies to slice their victims into pieces, she remembered reading.
But it wasn’t this that made her panic.
It was the creak of the floor somewhere close to her. Like a heavy foot, trying to creep up to her while she was crouched
here, crying and vulnerable. Him, she thought, and just couldn’t help it. She broke for the door, thinking completely impossible things, like Maybe I can force it; maybe I can escape.
Though in fairness, she could actually see it the second she got out from between the shelves. Moonlight streaked down from somewhere, some high-up window, and it
illuminated that blue wood, the brass plate where you pushed. It was barely the length of a football pitch away, and there
were no obstacles to make it difficult.
All she had to do was run.
Go, go, go, she ordered herself, and she did.
She just didn’t get farther than a single footstep. Something hit her from the side the moment she started moving. Something
skeletal, she half hoped. Something that would end this fast, shred her to pieces, and leave her to speedily bleed out. But
of course she knew it wasn’t immediately.
This thing had heft. It had weight.
It was like being shoved by a great blundering beast. She practically careened through the air on contact, and when she hit
the ground, she didn’t just land in a great heap. She had enough momentum to actually slide. She skimmed along that tiled
floor—like a hockey puck over ice.
It stunned her.
For a second, she couldn’t breathe or get her bearings. She lashed out at what she thought must be him over her. But she didn’t
do it well. Her arm struck something too hard to be his body—a shelf, she thought. And sure enough, books rained down on her.
She smelled leather, felt their fluttering pages. Gasped and tried to fling them away from her.
Then there was nothing.
She couldn’t feel him, couldn’t see him; he didn’t try to grab her or shove her again.
And she could no longer hear the wraiths.
It certainly seemed like silence and stillness, and something close to safety.
She even sagged against the bookcase behind her.
Body still trembling, breathing still shaky, arm hurting like a motherfucker.
But she was okay.
She didn’t even think much of it, when she heard the sound.
It just seemed like her own breathing—or maybe some far-off stirrings of one of the wraiths, settling down now their food
had gone still. There was a rattling quality to it that reminded her of them.
Only after a second, she realized:
The rattling wasn’t random.
It was rhythmic.
It followed a pattern.
Up, down. Up, down.
And there was another note to it, too. A thick, clotted sort of note underneath that rattle. Wet, it sounded like, to her.