A Hackwith - The Library of the Unwritten

“Peace, Librarian.” Rami lowered his sword.

“Oh, no. No peace, ” Claire spit out the words over what sounded like an increasing mass of birds in the distance. “I told you I would make you pay for—”

“Claire?”

Leto poked his head around Rami’s shoulder. Rami watched the fury fall from her face, replaced with shock. Leto stepped out from behind Rami, and the librarian’s eyes broke with a kind of hopeful light. The words that fell from her lips were so vulnerable they pulled in his chest.

“Leto… that can’t— You were— You’re here, oh god…”

And then she was running toward them. Rami realized she was hobbling, favoring one knee with a twitch of pain on her face every time she stepped. Her skirts were stiff with blood, and she wore multiple amulets slung around her neck and bound around her wrists. She was also barefoot, which struck him as perhaps the most odd.

Rami remembered himself and took two steps to lift a broad arm to bar the librarian’s path.

Claire skidded to a stop, and the murderous look was quick to return as she snarled at him. “Get out of my way, or I’ll remove your arm for you. I have a bauble for just that.”

“Apologies. You can’t, Librarian. Do you notice anything different about our young friend?”

Leto held still with a sheepish blush for the inspection. Claire’s brow furrowed. “He looks fine. More than fine, he’s whole. He’s here , he’s…” She stopped. “He’s human. Not a demon. Oh, Leto . You’re human.”

“He is. And his soul is bound for Heaven as long as nothing here corrupts him. Nothing touches him.”

“Including me.” Bitterness and fresh loss flickered across Claire’s face and then were gone. “Did you remember, then?”

“I remembered.” Leto flushed with embarrassment, voice a little shy. “I was… Matthew. Matthew Hadley.”

The smile froze, half-formed across Claire’s face. Her voice dropped to a strangled whisper. “Hadley?”

“Yeah…” Leto rubbed his arm. “Uh, but please, I’m still Leto.”

A complicated pain struggled across Claire’s face, and it took Rami a moment to put it together. He’d read the brief on the librarian before all this started.

Claire Juniper Hadley.

Born 1944, Surrey, England. Married in London, 1965. Died 1986. Survived by a husband and one daughter.

A daughter who hadn’t married but had moved to America to raise a child of her own.

Rami risked a glance between the two. The wiry, coiled hair, the dark eyes, the stubborn jut of the chin. Claire was a darker brown, Leto’s eyes more amber, but it was there, yes. If you squinted and allowed for two generations of genetic muddling, which humans were good at. But the way Claire was looking at Leto, like a mirage in the desert, made Rami’s heart clench in sympathy. He knew what it meant to see the familiarity of a home you thought you’d lost.

And he knew what it was for that home to be just out of reach. Which made what he said even harder.

“Leto… has been through quite a lot of shock today. His soul is fragile,” Rami murmured to Claire. With considerable effort, she shook herself, and only Rami noticed the mist trembling at the corners of her eyes.

She dropped her gaze to her feet a moment before drawing a hard breath. “Right. Right. It just explains… Never mind.” She looked to Rami. “You saved him?”

Rami inclined his chin. Rather than expressing gratitude, Claire nodded, jaw clenching into a hard line. “Nothing is going to lay a hand on him.”

“Are you okay?” Leto approached as Rami dropped his arm, but they kept a wide gap between them that spoke much. “You look…”

“It’s been a… rough day since you left.” Claire’s lips twitched. “Turns out, I’m shit without my assistants.”

“The blood…”

“Not mine.”

“The knee?”

“Mine,” Claire said with a wince. “But it’s fine now that I’m back in Hell. Phantom pain.”

Leto and Claire looked at each other, and it seemed to Rami that Leto had to read the tension welling in the space between. Finally, Leto coughed and pointed. “Something’s wrong with the gargoyle, I think.”

“Right.” Claire embraced the diversion. She approached the gargoyle and ran a motherly hand over one flank as she murmured, “Oh, my friend. What did those bullies do to you…?”

It was the first opportunity that Rami had to watch her work. Claire circled the giant stone statue once. She stopped and ran a hand up and down one shoulder, as if working her fingers along a seam. Then she nodded to herself and began sorting through the beads bound to her wrist. When she found what she was looking for, she hauled herself up one side of the creature, bare feet braced on the gargoyle’s haunch, and twisted a large colorless bauble and rapped it along the stone.

On the third rap, the creature shuddered to life.

Rami and Leto had to dodge as the gargoyle’s wings swept around. The creature released an infuriated howl that had been caught in its throat, and its dimensional flickering increased. Claire had to hang on to the curve of its shoulder to keep from being displaced. “Easy, old friend.”

The gargoyle seemed to calm with a few more murmured words from the librarian, though Rami could not look directly at its face to see what specific effect they had. After a moment, it crouched to gently allow Claire to clamber off. She patted its haunch and straightened her muddled skirts.

Rami eyed the collection of jewels that hung around Claire’s neck. When he looked at them just so, the air filled with whispers. “Are those what I think they are?”

Claire turned to him with a sour smile. “I made a supply run before coming here. Picked up a couple things, made a few friends. The Arcane Wing is shockingly unattended right now.”

“Are they strong enough to bring down the ward, then?”

She shook her head. “Not nearly powerful enough.” Claire reached into one skirt pocket and withdrew her hand, closed over something. A cruel smile twisted at her lips. A smile that suddenly spoke less of heartache and more of dark, vengeful things.

“But this is.”

She opened her fingers and a crumpled scrap of paper, pillowed by cloth, drifted on her palm. A familiar scrap of paper. A scrap of paper that glimmered with dark green script and whispered of destruction and had started this whole mess.

Rami’s eyes widened, and so did Claire’s wicked smile. “I’d hoped to save it for Andras’s traitorous face, but this will have to do.” The sound of beating wings and dark tidings rushed closer, and a gust of air stirred them from around the corner. Claire canted her head up, a gleam in her eye. “Will you join us, Watcher?”

A CHARACTER’S COLORS FADE when its book is destroyed.

Brevity stared at Aurora’s unmoving face, her heart a fist in her chest. If you were human, and if you closed those eyes, she might just be napping. Sleeping anywhere—balanced on books, on the couch in the suite— as she was prone to do.