A Hackwith - The Library of the Unwritten

“Gregor had just taught me those words, warned I might need them someday when I was librarian.” Claire spoke through bile rising in her throat. “ Someday, he said. And the words just… came out. I hadn’t even thought they would work. I mean, he was the librarian. Why would —”

She stopped herself. Her gaze dragged up, against her will. Leto’s mouth hung open in abject dismay, while Hero’s face was blank. Andras, bloody Andras, actually smiled. It was a soft thing, a proud thing. The next howl of the Hellhounds she felt in her bones.

“I saw his face when I did it. He’d been calm, so calm, up to that point. Gregor was always so infuriatingly at peace with his work. But then I invoked the words. There was surprise. Pain, confusion. Then there was an unquenchable terror. And he was gone.”

There was a silence that was difficult not to fill with a scream. Claire had screamed, quite a bit, in the horror-torn hours afterward.

“Why don’t I know these words?” Andras said.

Hero made a disgusted noise. “Really, Arcanist? That’s what you’re getting from this?”

“Maybe Hell doesn’t trust you as much as you thought.” Claire plowed ahead, barreling toward the end of the story now. Not as if it had ever really ended, for her. It just echoed on and on. Beatrice’s presence proved that. “I couldn’t leave after that—too much chaos to clean up. I removed any record of Beatrice, of my book, from our inventory. I buried the rest of my books in the stacks so it would never happen again. I let everyone assume I’d been promoted. That Gregor’s soul had gone to rest. There were rumors, of course, but Hell prefers rumors to investigation. I… became librarian. Andras helped with that.” She tilted her head, considering his reaction. “Did you suspect?”

“That you banished your own mentor in a pique of infatuation? No.” That unpleasant smile formed on Andras’s lips again. “I suspected something tragic had occurred. You were… you were not as you are now, my girl. I wish you’d told me.”

“Wait.” Hero held up a hand and shot a look at Beatrice as if he’d just tasted something sour. “She did all that for you, killed for you, sentenced herself to Hell, and you still just… left?”

Beatrice’s gaze didn’t waver. “Yes, I left.”

“Such valor, such heroism .” Hero’s lip curled, something akin to real anger sharpening his gaze. “You obviously cared for her a great deal.”

Beatrice’s demeanor chilled. “Don’t presume to speak about things you don’t understand.”

“I understand perfectly a coward who—”

“Enough. It’s past.” The last thing Claire needed was two snarling heroes giving her a headache.

“You’re a murderer.” The pure venom in Leto’s whisper jolted the air in the room. Claire turned to find him staring at her with an alien look of disgust. “You killed someone who trusted you. For what… for a crush… for her ?”

Claire’s mouth fell open. She expected judgment—deserved it, even—but not from quiet, thoughtful Leto. “It’s not like—” She reached out a hand, but the boy jerked back.

“Liar.” He said it with a cutting softness. His lips trembled, opening and closing around his disappointment. Leto turned and stalked out of the room. A moment later, there was the sound of the front door snapping shut.

“He’s… upset.” Hero stated the obvious, though it seemed to perplex him. “Shall I go after him?”

Claire shook her head. “No. He’s not wrong.” And, she thought bitterly, they had nowhere to go anyway.

She raised her face, looking at each of the remaining men in turn. She saw herself reflected in their eyes, changed. Respect, disgust—it didn’t matter. It was a grotesque kind of mirror. But when no one else stormed from the room, Claire straightened her shoulders and turned to Beatrice. “You became a book collector.”

Beatrice took a breath, a smile warming her serious features. “I did. Antiquities dealer, technically. Turns out, my previous experience as a protagonist didn’t leave me with many marketable skills besides tenacity.”

Claire made no effort to return the smile. “A book collector with pages of the Codex Gigas in a magically shielded city.”

“That does seem to be quite the coincidence,” Andras said.

Beatrice’s smile faded. “I found Mdina shortly after I escaped. If you’d come wi—” She stopped herself. Started again. “The codex find was a recent turn of events. I’d become a book collector, yes. I found a partner, Avery, with an interest in the obscure and arcane. I had gleaned just enough understanding from the Library to feed him bits of trivia to seem useful. I’d been chasing the rumors of the missing pages for years, only found them in the possession of an unaware French farmer’s family a few months ago. Avery got a lead out of nowhere. Tried to steal from me, before he passed. I should have seen it coming. Cancer riddled, at the end. Obsessed with gods and demons, immortality. I’d thought they would probably end up to be fakes, or copies, but I—I admit, I’d held out hope that if they turned out to be authentic—”

“You kept them here,” Andras interjected, eyes glittering and keen. “Did you read them? Do they really contain…?”

“Not the issue at hand, Andras,” Claire said.

Beatrice risked a penitent look. Her hand hovered, as if her mind had a thought to reach out to Claire, but the rest of her knew better. “I knew if they were authentic, there was a chance… I knew someone from the Library would be after them. As I said, I had a man watch the gates.”

“For what purpose? To trap us here?”

“You’re not trapped. Just… shielded.” Beatrice faltered. Her hands were calloused from use, but just as slender as Claire remembered. They raked helplessly through her hair, once, and her curls came away softly mussed. “You are free to leave if you wish, but in the meantime, nothing can get in without an invitation. And I doubt the Hellhounds have the social graces to communicate with anyone.”

“As grateful as I am for invisible monsters, I—” A terrible thought struck her. Claire took a step forward. “Does the ward guard against angels?”

The unwritten woman frowned. “Like, from… Heaven? Yes, I suppose it would.”

“And if they got a mortal to invite them in?” Hellhounds were mindless, but angels had every social grace, when properly motivated.

“That would… grant them entry.”

Angels. If the angels found them here, they would be cornered without an escape. The codex would be lost and, likely, so would they. It was ridiculous, but focusing on a danger she could address helped her ignore the Hellhounds thrumming doom into her skull. “How many gates are there into the city?”

“Four main gates, not counting the catacombs, but those haven’t been used in—”

“Andras.” Claire turned.

“I needed to stretch my legs anyway.” Andras stood and cracked his neck. He furrowed his brow at Claire. “If you’re certain.”

“Watch for them and secure an exit. We’ll need to figure out a way out of here, Hellhounds or not.”

Andras nodded and sauntered through the hall. Beatrice waited until the door shut again. “Not necessarily, you know.”

Claire had turned to confer with Hero, but she narrowed her eyes. “I beg your pardon?”

Beatrice gripped her arms, as if anchoring herself. Her voice was quiet again. “You don’t have to find a way out. You could stay. As long as you wanted.”

You could stay . The words Beatrice said struck Claire in the chest. And then what she hadn’t said: with her .

And what they meant together: to leave Hell behind.