The Witch of Fading Echoes A Fading Witch. Four Fallen Gods. One Deadly Bargain. #6
Lucien drew a thin silver pick from his sleeve and knelt before the lock. “Would you prefer a public reading room? Tea? Little cakes you cannot taste?”
She bared her teeth at him.
His smile softened. “There she is again.”
The lock clicked before the pick touched it.
Lucien’s brows lifted. “That is either very welcoming or very bad.”
The doors opened inward.
The library breathed.
Selene felt it more than heard it: a vast exhale of ancient air moving through halls too large to fit beneath the city.
Black marble floors gleamed underfoot. Bone pillars rose into darkness, each one made from hundreds of fused finger bones, rib bones, jawbones, all polished smooth as ivory.
Shelves stretched in impossible rows, climbing higher than church towers.
Books hung from chains. Scrolls twitched in iron cages.
Portraits lined the walls, their painted eyes tracking every movement.
The air should have smelled of dust, vellum, old blood, wax, and rotting leather.
Selene inhaled.
Nothing.
The absence struck harder here.
It was one thing to lose scent in an attic she knew by heart. It was another to stand in a place built from death and knowledge and have it arrive inside her as blank air.
She gripped the edge of her coat.
Ronan noticed.
Of course he did.
“You can still leave,” he said.
Selene laughed under her breath. “Can I?”
“No.”
“Then don’t insult me with the offer.”
Something like approval moved across his face. It was gone too quickly to be useful.
They entered.
The doors shut behind them with the sound of a tomb sealing.
Immediately, the shelves shifted.
A row of books on the left slid backward into darkness. Another row unfolded ahead, stretching like a spine. A ladder rolled past them on its own, then climbed a shelf and vanished into the black ceiling. Ink crawled across the floor in tiny insect legs before retreating beneath a locked cabinet.
A portrait of a saint with stitched lips whispered, “Witch.”
Selene turned.
The portrait smiled.
“Ignore them,” Elias said.
“I usually do not take advice from men who accidentally let portraits insult me.”
“They are not insulting you,” Lucien said, picking another lock on a chained gate. “They are deciding whether you scream prettily.”
Dorian grabbed the frame from the wall and turned it face-first against the marble.
Lucien looked delighted. “Subtle.”
Dorian said nothing.
They moved deeper.
Ronan walked behind Selene like a shield given human shape. Every time the library shifted, his coat brushed hers. Once, a shelf slid toward her with a hungry wooden creak, and his hand came down on its edge. The shelf stopped.
Selene felt the heat of him at her back.
Too close.
Too steady.
Too much.
“You think needing someone makes you weak,” Ronan said.
She did not look at him. “No. I think needing someone gives them a knife and teaches them where to put it.”
He did not flinch.
“Then give me the knife.”
She turned despite herself.
His eyes held hers, dark and severe, no softness offered, no pity. “I will turn it on anything that reaches for you.”
For one breath, the library faded behind him.
Selene felt the reckless impulse to believe him rise in her like hunger.
She killed it immediately.
“Lovely,” Lucien called from the gate. “Terrifying devotion before breakfast. Shall we all confess our wounds now, or wait until the books start eating us?”
The gate sprang open.
Beyond it lay a reading chamber beneath a ceiling of hanging bones. Tables of black wood formed a circle around a dry fountain filled with ash. At the center of the fountain lay a stone plinth.
Empty.
Elias’s expression tightened. “The Index should be here.”
The floor shifted.
A voice spoke from everywhere and nowhere.
PAYMENT.
Selene stiffened.
Lucien sighed. “Archives. Always dramatic.”
“What payment?” Ronan asked.
The chained books around the chamber began to breathe.
A page fluttered on the empty plinth. Words wrote themselves in black ink.
A MEMORY OF PHYSICAL COMFORT.
Selene’s stomach dropped.
The words blurred, then sharpened.
BEING HELD. BEING SAFE. BEING LOVED WITHOUT BARGAIN.
“No,” Selene said.
The library whispered around her.
YES.
She stepped back.
Ronan reached slightly toward her, then stopped himself.
Good. Let him stop.
Let all of them stop.
Selene could handle pain. Blood. Hunger. Fear. Debt collectors pounding at the door. Magistrates threatening prison. Ghosts begging for impossible favors. She had learned to live with all of it.
But the memory the library wanted was Niall.
Not the cellar. Not his scream. Not the night he died.
Before.
A winter morning when she was thirteen and he was seven, both of them hiding beneath a quilt in their mother’s room while sleet struck the window.
Niall had been feverish and afraid of the shadows moving on the wall.
Selene had wrapped both arms around him and told him the shadows were only foxes looking for breakfast.
He had believed her.
He had fallen asleep against her chest, small and warm and safe.
It was one of the last memories of him untouched by blood.
The library wanted to eat it.
“No,” she said again.
Elias lowered his gaze. “Selene—”
“No.”
Lucien’s expression had lost its teasing edge. “There may be another price.”
The library answered by making every book in the room snap open at once.
NO.
Ronan stepped closer. “The bond can share the cost.”
Selene looked at him. “What bond?”
“The beginning of one.” His voice was rougher now. “A thread only. My protection in exchange for letting me stand between the library and what it takes.”
“You mean letting you inside the curse.”
“Yes.”
“You expect me to trust that?”
“No.”
“At least you’re honest.”
“I expect you to choose.”
That was worse.
Orders she could fight. Threats she could hate. Choice laid the blade in her own hand.
Selene looked at the empty plinth. Then at Elias, who watched her with careful sorrow. Lucien, who had stopped pretending not to care. Dorian, whose silence felt like a vow waiting for blood. Ronan, who stood before her like a storm given discipline.
She thought of Niall asleep beneath the quilt.
She thought of losing the memory.
She thought of losing herself.
“One thread,” she said.
Ronan nodded once.
Then he offered his hand.
Selene stared at it.
His hand was broad, scarred across the knuckles, marked faintly with black lines like roads drawn beneath the skin.
She placed her palm against his.
The moment they touched, the library vanished.
Cold swept through her.
Not winter cold. Crossroads cold. Midnight cold. The cold of standing where four roads meet and knowing every direction will cost you something.
Black flame curled around her wrist. Winter light threaded through it. Ronan’s power entered her carefully, not a flood, not an invasion, but a blade turned sideways so it would not cut.
Still, she gasped.
His fingers tightened.
The sound that left him was almost too low to hear.
All four men reacted.
Lucien’s breath caught sharply behind her.
Dorian went utterly still.
Elias turned his face away as if witnessing something sacred and private.
Ronan’s eyes burned black at the edges. For one dangerous second, his control trembled. Selene felt it through the thread: not lust alone, not hunger alone, but recognition so fierce it bordered on pain.
Then the library took its payment.
Not the memory.
A shadow of it.
Warmth beneath a quilt. A child’s breathing. The shape of safety.
Selene swayed, but the memory remained hers.
On the plinth, a book appeared.
Its cover was made of pale skin.
The title rose across it in red ink.
THE INDEX OF DEVOURED SENSES.
Elias moved first. He opened the book with reverent dread.
Pages turned by themselves.
Names flashed past. Witches. Seers. Saints. False prophets. Children born under eclipses. Each entry ended with a list.
Taste.
Smell.
Touch.
Hearing.
Sight.
Selene’s mouth went dry.
Elias’s finger stopped on a fresh page.
Selene Ashwick.
The room tilted.
Beneath her name, the ink was still wet.
Elias read silently at first. His expression darkened with every line.
“Say it,” Selene demanded.
Ronan did not release her hand.
Elias looked up. “Your curse did not begin with overuse.”
“I know that.”
“No,” he said. “You don’t.”
The book’s ink shifted, forming an image.
A cellar door.
A little boy’s hand.
A scream.
Selene stopped breathing.
Niall.
His final scream rose soundlessly from the page, a black thread twisting into the air. It slipped toward Selene like it knew her.
Ronan’s grip tightened.
Elias’s voice softened. “The night your brother died, his final echo lodged inside your magic. The Choir found it. They turned it into a beacon.”
Selene shook her head. “No.”
“They have been waiting for you to weaken.”
“No.”
Lucien stepped closer. “Selene.”
She hated how careful he sounded.
The book wrote faster.
THE SUBJECT WILL HOLLOW IN STAGES.
Taste.
Smell.
Touch.
Hearing.
Sight.
WHEN THE FIFTH SENSE IS DEVOURED, THE BODY REMAINS VIABLE. THE WILL IS SILENCED. THE GATE MAY OPEN.
Elias continued, voice tight. “When all five senses are gone, you become a living doorway. Blind, silent, numb, empty, but powerful enough to open what is chained beneath Bellgrave.”
“Their divinity,” Ronan said.
Selene looked at him.
He did not soften the truth.
“Yes,” he said. “Ours.”
The library lights flickered.
Elias turned another page. “The cure requires true names.”
Lucien went still.
Dorian’s hand closed around the hilt of his blade.
Selene looked from one to another. “Your true names?”
Ronan’s face had gone unreadable.
Elias nodded. “Spoken through your magic, they could restore what was taken.”
“Then tell me.”
“No,” Ronan said.
The refusal came too fast.
Selene’s anger flared. “You want my years but won’t give me names?”
“A true name is not a pet name whispered in the dark,” Lucien said. For once, there was no flirtation in him. “It is the root of what we are.”
“Speaking one could restore a sense,” Elias said. “Or burn a year from your life in a breath. Maybe more.”
Dorian’s voice was low. “It could kill you.”