A Hackwith - The Library of the Unwritten

“So you didn’t kill her.” The relief was evident in Leto’s sigh. Claire looked up and wished she hadn’t. Color had drained from Leto’s face. He was trembling, given away by the twitch of the coils of hair shadowing his eyes. He had the unsteady look of someone desperate to believe the best of people.

Claire wished she wasn’t going to disappoint him.

“How’d you know she was a character?” Hero asked, mercifully drawing her attention away. “Not that I don’t respect a display of gratuitous violence.”

Claire straightened. “Why wouldn’t I? I’m a librarian.”

“And I’m a character and a book. I know how these things work.”

Andras made a noise of agreement. Claire didn’t dare look at him. She could take anything but pity from Andras. Instead, she picked up the key and worried at it. The teeth were dull, but made a pleasant sting as she rasped the pad of her thumb against them. There had to be a way out of the story she didn’t want to tell, a twist that would send them on to a happier story. She came up empty.

“Because she’s mine.” Her voice came out a whisper. She grimaced and cleared her throat. “She’s—she’s a hero from one of my books.”

The book in Leto’s hands slipped to the floor with a thud and a likely crack of the spine. Claire didn’t chide him to be careful.

“I wasn’t aware there was an outstanding book missing from the Library, present company excluded.” Andras gave a nod at Hero.

Claire felt it when the careful, bleak part inside her unlocked and the familiar guilt tumbled out. She studied the key in her hand. It was tarnished, impossibly dull. Claire rubbed at it with her thumb, but it didn’t come clean. “There isn’t. I removed her from the Library inventory. After I helped her escape.”

The words fell on the ensuing silence like lead.

“Well. Finally, the warden gets interesting,” Hero muttered.

“You helped a character, but when would you…” Understanding glanced into Andras’s voice like a spark of fire. “Gregor.”

A single word that Claire had avoided for three decades. It called up Claire’s best memory of her mentor, tinged by fondness and guilt. He’d been somewhat young when he’d died the first time—much older when he died the second, but then, years in the Library never showed. Not on the outside. A paunchy, scholarly man, American, and, god, had Claire resented him at first. Acid slaked her throat. “It wasn’t planned.”

“But it did occur.”

The accusation in Andras’s tone was obvious. Claire squeezed her eyes closed. “Gregor was—”

The world tilted and swallowed Claire’s words. She nearly fell over the desk as the floorboards bucked beneath her feet. A long, echoing groan shuddered through the air, as if the earth had torn itself open, followed quickly by a distant, deep howl.

Claire’s eyes flew wide, all explanations forgotten. It wasn’t the howl of a dog, or even a wolf, of wild things and forests. No, it was a howl of deeper places. Dark pits and tears that tasted of anise. “No—”

“What was that sound?” Leto was the only other one to sway as the room bucked again. He dug into his pocket at the same time Claire fished out her lighter. She muttered a useless prayer before opening her palm.

The lighter sat cold and dark. No flame bobbed in the liquid; no glow warmed her skin. An unnatural cold settled over the little lighter. A quick glance said Leto’s lighter was the same. Claire’s voice was weak as all the air seemed to have left the room. “Not— I thought we had more time.”

“Warden?” Something about Claire’s expression must have made Hero’s hand stray to the gun in his coat pocket. He and Andras showed no sign of feeling the shuddering of the floor, though Claire and Leto could barely stay on their feet.

Claire wheeled in place once before deciding on what to do and snatching Leto by the shoulder. He made a startled sound as she forced him into the gap between the bookcases in a corner and backed up in front of it. It was pointless. It was doomed. She did it anyway. Leto’s breath wheezed past her ear as he caught on to her panic.

“Claire, what’s going on?”

It took a moment to realize Hero had been repeating her name. Not “warden,” but her actual name. She closed her eyes and tried to shove her drumming heartbeat back into her chest. It took another try to wet her mouth enough to speak. “Andras… I don’t suppose you brought anything that—”

“Nothing that would stop them, pup.” Andras’s face was not made for compassion. The pitying look was disturbing on his sharp features. Her ears thundered again with howls.

“I know that,” Claire snapped. Her eyes flickered over the room. The door led down the stairs to the street. But what good would descending them do? “Doesn’t mean I have to make it easy for them.”

“For who ?” Hero raised his voice, nearly drowned out.

The floorboards shuddered beneath her feet, as if something impossibly large had slammed into the building. Claire braced herself against the wall for support. She squeezed her eyes shut, swallowing down the bile that rose in her before answering.

“Hellhounds.”

Hero’s frown froze, and their collective gaze turned toward the door.

Creatures had to be terrible to escape Hell, and the hunters sent after them had to be even more terrible. Hellhounds were not made to retrieve, for Hell gave no second chances; they were made to destroy. Hellhounds didn’t stop to listen to reason or defenses. Their jaws tore through not just flesh and bone, but soul and spirit. They could rage through the world unseen, and neither time nor space nor reason would placate them. Once they’d been loosed, they’d stop only once they had you in their jaws. They were made to eliminate, they were made to be tireless, and they were made to be ruthless.

When their ghostlights expired, Claire and Leto had officially become lost souls. And lost souls were within the Hellhounds’ purview. They would hunt their prey to the ends of the Earth.

The room rocked again, but though the howling had become nearly incessant, it didn’t sound any closer. Her pulse pounded in her throat once, twice, three times. But nothing came through the door. Hellhounds could ghost through wood, stone, steel. When on the trail of an escaped soul to destroy, they were relentless. Nothing stopped them—nothing should have stopped them.

Andras was the first to move to the window and he stilled as if transfixed. “Claire, you might want to see this.”

Claire glanced at Leto, wide-eyed and panicked behind her. She was unsteady as she pushed away from the bookcase and joined Andras at the window. “What—”

“There.”

The apartment they were in was built into one of the tiered walls of the city, which gave the window a clear view of the grassy moat and sunbaked fields beyond. She took in the massive walls, the bridge with a thinning stream of travelers flowing through, the way the afternoon sun’s light was syrup and honey across the fields dappled with old buildings beyond.

She looked down.

Directly beneath the wall, darkness moved. Creatures, large as lorries and composed entirely of smoke and jagged shadow, prowled the thick city wall. Howls like cudgels and bodies like secrets. There was a handful of them, and they swarmed like airborne sharks, drifting over the empty moat that surrounded the city. Each took a turn throwing its massive body against the walls, and each time one did, the floor shuddered, and Leto and Claire flinched.

“It appears they’re stopped,” Andras said.

“Nothing stops Hellhounds. What in the world is holding them?” Claire wondered.

“The Treaty of Mdina.”