A Hackwith - The Library of the Unwritten

But they wouldn’t budge. The best she’d been able to do was convince some pointless footnotes to spread to the heading of the first page. The rest of the replacement pages remained infuriatingly blank, their text lost forever. Which was going to leave the hero in a predicament. Stories needed a beginning to make sense. Claire had to restore the book if he was going to go back to where he belonged. Something was missing. She turned to the scrap they’d procured from the Watcher.

With tweezers she withdrew it delicately from the plastic bag, turning it over under the lamp. The paper was yellowed and fibrous. Lichen green ink glimmered when the light hit it, and a delicate scent of anise and ash was detectable when it drifted under her nose. There was neither green ink nor such a scent in the rest of the book before her. She shook her head, setting aside the strangeness to try to puzzle out where it fit.

It didn’t. It took no time at all to come to the conclusion. No matter where Claire positioned it, no matter which way she twisted the scrap, the book rejected it. Even if it had belonged to one of the missing, burned pages, the book would have recognized it as its own. Instead, it took all of Claire’s strength to keep the tome from skittering off the table to flee the tiny piece of parchment.

The book jerked again. Claire lost her grip on the tweezers, sending the scrap drifting off the table for the hundredth time. The book fled to the far shelf in a froth of paper and leather. The librarian hissed a dark curse and bent to snatch the stubborn scrap between two fingers.

And the blood sang in her veins.

The shadows tilted, and her vision swam as a chill shuddered from the paper, up one arm, and down to her toes. A flash. The edge of a shadow, the fault in a rock, the supple joint in the pulse of the world. Tender hollows designed to break. And time, time, so much time, howled underneath. A wildfire of images hit her, burning up all thought, breathing ash in its wake. Undoing. Unending. Unyielding. She came back to herself bent over her chair, gagging for air while the scrap of paper drifted toward her toes.

That was, most definitely, not an unwritten book, nor anything imagined or written by man.

Claire clenched her hands, clamping down on the shiver that threatened. Her pulse was still stuttering in her head, but she retrieved the tweezers and carefully lifted the scrap. She could see the age of the otherworldly parchment now, the fineness of the fibers. Not paper, not parchment. There was no way it belonged to the hero’s book, belonged to any of her books. Impossible that she’d missed it before.

“What are you…?” Claire turned it under the light. Whatever it was, it was old. Powerful. The fallen angel wasn’t after the hero’s book after all—this was something different. A fallen angel working for Heaven sought it. Thought the Library had it.

But it wasn’t of Heaven; of that much Claire was certain. Nothing that sang that song could be. It was a song of destruction and endless hunger.

That was Hell’s song. But Hell had no literature of its own.

A muffled groan escaped through the closed door. That would be the hero. Claire carefully set the scrap down with a sigh, pushing it away in favor of more immediate concerns. Vague murmurs drifted in through the door, summoning her. The hero would need her attention next; then she could focus on the mystery of the scrap in front of her.

Claire worked the kinks out of her aching hands before opening the door and, likely, answering yet more of Leto’s unending questions. The human-demon had an inexhaustible supply, it seemed.

Her gaze flicked again to the whispering page. Questions.

She had a few.

BY THE TIME CLAIRE joined the group in the main section of the Library, the hero was sitting up. He draped a lanky muscled arm over the back of the couch while Brevity clucked instructions at him over her teapot. Leto perched at the far edge of the sitting area, wound tight as a spring.

Leto was returned to his demon features, but Brevity had taken the opportunity of his soggy condition to replace his ill-fitting suit with a more comfortable pair of slacks, suspenders, and a buttoned shirt, arms rolled up, in a vivid blue that matched the muse’s tattoos. He looked slightly less cadaverous and more like a high school kid on an internship. Claire smiled. Brevity was in the middle of interrogating him, her hands animated over the caddy of saucers and cream.

Leto caught sight of Claire first and coughed on his tea. Brevity’s head whipped around, and she stomped toward Claire. “You were attacked by a Watcher ?”

Claire cast a sharp glance at Leto. “I see someone’s been catching you up.”

“Attacked,” Brevity insisted. “By a Watcher. An angel from before the world was made.”

“Technically, a fallen angel. If I remember Enoch right, Ramiel was one of the human sympathizers.” Claire paused. “Though he seems distinctly less sympathetic now.”

“Attacked.”

“Threatened,” Claire corrected, shrugging her off to let the repaired book hit the desk with a thud. “Leto here staged quite a heroic intervention before anyone was attacked.”

Leto colored as he looked to the floor. “Well, I just… really…”

“Why would he be after a character?”

“One emergency at a time, Brev.” Claire turned her attention to the hero.

He raised his cup. “Back to the brig already, warden? I was still working on my tea.”

Claire narrowed her eyes. The hero was still pale, pale as the maddeningly blank parchments in his book. But his eyes were bright, and his hand was steady enough to mock her with a salute. Stable enough, for now.

“Your story still exists. That means it’s time for you to go home.” Claire tapped the book. “But you’ve managed to do far more damage to yourself than I thought possible for any story. At least any sane one.”

“Characters can go insane?” Leto blinked.

Claire waved a hand. “Anything long-lived will deal with bouts of questionable sanity from time to time. Unwritten characters included.”

“Perhaps if you spent half the energy working with us that you do keeping us contained here, such drastic measures wouldn’t be needed,” the hero said.

“A hero with a crusade. How unoriginal,” Claire said. “How are you feeling?”

The hero gave a sour smile. “Trapped. And famous, by the sounds of it. Perhaps you should let me stick around if I’ve got Heaven and Hell fighting over me.”

“You cause any more trouble, maybe I’ll let Heaven have you,” Claire said, though it was an empty threat. Even if Heaven wanted him, she had no intention of giving up any of the books in her care. “You’ll be perfectly safe back in your story, however. The pages are repaired, but the words won’t take.” Brevity made a small distressed noise, but Claire kept her eyes leveled on the hero. “I was hoping it might listen to you and repair itself. It’s a long shot.”

“Long shots are a… hero’s specialty,” Hero said with an uncertain lilt as he stood. He was smooth but not quite as graceful as he’d been hours before. He approached his book and laid a proprietary hand on the cover. “What do I need to do?”

“First, open the book.” Claire swatted his hand away to open it to the fresh, blank pages. “Now, talk to your kin, get them settled. Remind them how the story starts. ‘Once upon a time,’ all that.”

“I was thinking ‘In the beginning…’ had a nice ring to it,” the hero sulked. He pressed his hand to the page and fell silent. They all did, librarian, muse, and demon alike. Claire felt the book stop its frantic, minute vibrations, and listened. The remaining words on the pages slowed their skittish mutations, twitching quietly as some private conversation went on. An invisible line pulled tight.