CHAPTER 39
The group found the Library unlocked. They forged into the deep-sea silence, the bookcases dark alleyways around them. Nat forced them on the darkest route of all, where the firework-stained light from outside barely reached. Hugo took out his phone, but its anemic glow only lit a few steps ahead.
“I hear her again. That way, through the theology rooms.” Nat veered off through an archway.
“Can you tell me why, exactly, we’re following a sound that none of the rest of us can hear?” Venetia hissed.
“We can’t let him go alone,” whispered Julia. “I don’t think it’s safe here.”
Venetia glanced at the darkness around them, then gave a laugh that almost succeeded in sounding careless. “What? There are four of us and one of Richard,” she said, at a normal volume. Julia flapped her hands frantically, miming silence.
Venetia ignored her and spun on her toes through the archway, pale hair floating behind her. “Scared of the dark, Julia? It’s just a library. What is there to be afraid of?”
Hugo lifted his phone. Its glare glinted off two murderously sharp tusks. More emerged from the darkness. Poleaxes gleamed. Heavily booted feet stepped into the light.
Julia did not wait for her mind to catch up with her eyes. She ran, tugging Hugo and Venetia along the corridor with her.
“Take the mortals. Block the way here. But find the fox.” The voice behind them was a guttural rasp. Gold bandoliers stretched across broad shoulders.
The poleaxes lowered. The boots pounded forward in file.
Julia saw Hugo risk a glance over his shoulder, then snap his gaze forward. His face was a study in horror.
Behind them, thudding footsteps broke into the artillery fusillade of an all-out run.
But sound must, indeed, have traveled strangely in the Library. Because only three reading rooms away, Emma was creeping through a dense, moth’s-wing silence. She peered around each bank of desks before plunging for the safety of the next, the fox a welcome melody in her mind.
we run from the hunt
they shall not catch us
for we are quick we are clever
Together, thought Emma.
together, the fox agreed.
Somehow, once Richard’s hands no longer held her, her panic had started to dissolve.
She was still too shaken to manage a full transformation.
But she had been able to reshape her eyes, her ears, her nose, until her fox senses came flooding back.
The dark Library was no longer a mystery.
The fox’s song hummed in her blood. She felt a comforting brush against her thoughts, like warm fur.
Then a ribbon of scent hit her nose and held her rigid.
Known smell. Boy smell. But it was not Richard’s acrid sweat or Jasper’s cologne.
Trusting her fox instincts to keep her from hitting sharp corners, she pelted ahead blindly.
Her breath came in pants, in gasps, in great chest-heaving sobs, and then he was there.
She flung herself at him, letting the fox parts of her melt away until she was Emma, only Emma.
“Emma!” Nat held her tight. His owlish face was wet with tears.
She pulled back, shaking. “You can see me.”
She had once spent hours talking to a boy who could not hear her, because missing her friend had pierced a hole in her soul.
She had gritted her teeth against the pain when he walked away, because pretending had been the best part of her day.
And now here he was, looking at her. Actually seeing her.
It felt like sunlight. It felt, just for a moment, like she was warm again. Mortal again.
“Of course I can see you. And I’m never letting you out of my sight again.” Nat seized her in a crushing hug.
“Me either.”
“There you are, Oluwole. Look what we’ve found!” A jubilant Hugo burst into the room, dragging Richard by the collar. Richard was smudged with dust and bruises. He slumped in Hugo’s grip, looking utterly defeated. Julia and Venetia followed, panting.
“My God.” Hugo stopped short. “Emma! It really is you. Alive and… well?”
He looked uncertainly at Emma’s strange, sharp beauty: clear and cold and terribly inhuman.
“Er, alive and here, at least. Now, not to worry, we gave those piggy fellas the slip a ways back. I’ll be damned, they’re fast buggers.
Still, not up to our tricks. They ran right by our hiding place and never a twitch. ”
“More likely they lost interest in us. I would have, if it meant traipsing into that bug-infested cupboard you shoved us in,” said Venetia. “They found some nice glass cases of priceless manuscripts to smash up instead.”
“This one”—Hugo gave Richard a shake—“we found pelting out of the printing room as if the hounds of hell were on his tail. Thought he might have something to say about where you were, Emma. Didn’t we, Jules?”
Julia stepped around Hugo as though she had not heard him. Her eyes were huge. Tears trembled on her lashes. She slid her arms straight around Emma, and her voice cracked. “You’re alive.”
She straightened up, leaving behind the hunch she had worn every day of the past year and a half. “It’s time we leave. We need to get Emma somewhere safe, and those monsters are still between us and the door. And we have to deal with—”
Her glance rested uneasily on her ex-boyfriend. Richard drooped from Hugo’s hold on his collar. His encounter with the Boars seemed to have shaken him beyond words.
But before anyone could move, a marble bust fell from above. It shattered a breath away from Nat’s head. They craned their necks up to the gallery of the reading room.
It was filling with boar-men. They ran.
“They’re behind us,” Nat panted in the corridor. “We can’t get out through the south wing now.”
“Try the other way, then.” Hugo tugged Richard along grimly.
Emma’s fox instincts screamed a warning. She managed to pull Nat and Julia back from the door in time. “No, can I hear them there,” she gasped. “They’re in the north corridor too.”
“At both of the ways out. So we’re trapped,” Venetia said acidly.
Richard croaked something.
“What?” Emma waved at Hugo to loosen his grip on Richard’s collar.
Richard rubbed his throat and coughed. “The military history room. I have—the key. Round my neck.”
“A room that locks…” Emma hated to consider anything he said. But he had dropped his knife by the fountain, whereas the Boars were closing in with pikes and swords intact. “We’d be safe there from the Boars, at least.”
“Stellar thinking,” said Venetia. “Let’s trust the deranged kidnapper.”
“This can’t be a good idea,” Nat muttered.
Emma looked round at them all. “Our best plan is to hide until the Boars pass, then make a run for the exit. I hate to say it, but the military history room is the only place we’d have a chance of barricading ourselves in that long. Nowhere else locks.”
“How would we get there?”
“We’d have to cut through the Greater Reading Room.” Emma had spent enough time in the Library to know its layout. So she crept ahead with Venetia to scout out the way.
Close to the door of the Greater Reading Room, Emma tripped over something curly and shivering. It whimpered and tried to shrink back under the book trolley it had chosen for a hiding place, golden curls askew.
“Don’t hurt me, please. My family—they’re important, rich—my father can pay you, anything you want.”
“Dear God, how pathetic.” Venetia’s voice dripped disdain. “Come out, Balfour. It’s us.”
“Venetia? Emma?” he scrambled out. “Are the monsters gone?”
A year and a half of hatred was hard to shake. Emma found she had to force the words through her teeth. “No, but we’ve found somewhere to hide. Through the Greater Reading Room.”
Jasper paled. “But they’re there too, the monsters.”
Hugo, Julia, and Nat arrived in a clatter of footsteps, Richard in tow.
“We have to move,” Nat said. “Now. They’re right behind us.”
Emma calculated quickly. They were out in the open here. But in the Greater Reading Room, they could use bookcases as cover. There, they had at least a chance of creeping past the Boars.
Emma steeled herself to be brave, to shake off the last of her shock and fear from Richard’s attack.
He, at least, was no longer a threat. He slumped behind Hugo, a broken man.
But she still had to be strong. To keep her mortals alive.
Even if the darkness of the Library pressed around her, feeling thicker than ever.
“Stay off the central walkway,” she warned the group. “Stick to the shadows between bookcases.”
“We’re with you.” Nat took Jasper in a firm but kind grip, like the owner of a cowardly puppy, and tugged him from under the trolley.
“N-no,” panted Jasper. “Stop pulling me—the monsters—”
They slid through the doors.
The Greater Reading Room was a cathedral to books. The one room could have fitted whole libraries. Emma squinted in the dim light. She just made out a cluster of shadows moving at the far end, gathered around something. Smoke spiraled up to the magnificent vaulted ceiling.
But their end of the room was deserted. There was only one guard ahead, ambling along the central aisle.
Emma signaled to the mortals to creep forward.
They slipped around the bookcases in ones and twos.
The darkness seemed thicker than ever. Emma began to hold out hope they would make it through unseen.
They had already covered a quarter of the reading room without drawing the Boars’ attention.
And now Emma made out the origin of the smoke.
The Boars had built a bonfire of broken desks and bookcases.
Now they were piling ancient tomes in stacks by the fireside.
So close to the flames. An invisible hand closed around Emma’s throat.
The Boars had to have gone mad, or rabid.
They were going to destroy the Night City’s own hoard of books: its most precious treasure, the knowledge it had taken centuries to build.
Beloved, irreplaceable. That they dared such a thing filled her with dread.