The Library of the Unwritten - A. J_ Hackwith Page 0,115

before she could ruthlessly tamp it down. Maybe. But not a chance I wanted.

Hero took silence as a sign to propel forward. “I argued. I said he shouldn’t be hasty. You might convince the angel to let us back through. Aid us, even, the way you like to talk. He said he saw the way they looked at us, and there was no chance. He . . . he said he blamed himself, for the ghostlights, for losing to Andras. For doubting.”

Claire’s bare toe tripped over nothing as she sped up.

Hero caught up with Claire and released a helpless sigh. “What would you have had me do?”

“Stop him.” It came out like a hiss, but caught on its own jagged edges. Claire’s eyes burned and the path began to waver ahead of her.

Hero shook his head. “I think he wanted to make the choice. To ensure you got back to the Library. He was so certain, so at peace, and then . . .”

The calm inside her shattered. Claire whirled on him. “What? Then what? The nine-stone-soaking-wet teenager overpowered you? You should have stopped him. Held him to the bloody ground if you had to! He was just a child. He didn’t know—”

“He was a man who made a choice. You don’t get to take that away from him.” Hero’s voice was hard. It brought Claire up short. “He made a choice, and you’re doing his choice a disservice by calling him a child. Leto wasn’t a child. He was a human, a young person who’d had everything taken from him, yet he deserves . . .”

Hero pursed his lips, as if stopping himself, and seemed to jump to a different train of thought. His tone cooled to clipped edges. “I am a book. A creation. A possession. As you are so fond of reminding me, I am bound to go only where the Library allows me and will spend all my foreseeable eternity having decisions denied to me.” He held up the wrist that Claire had stamped when she’d cornered him, what seemed a lifetime ago.

“But Leto, Leto was a human, and he had a right to his choices. You helped him remember that.” Hero lifted his shoulders. “I might have disagreed with his choice, but I would not steal his right to make it, because I know how that feels.”

Words caught on her lips, clotted just under her tongue. Claire disliked the taste of guilt that came with it. The swoop of regret in her stomach. She’d stamped Hero, bound him to her will, and doomed Leto. Claire struggled with the impulse to deny the rage, and the grief that drove everything like a flood in her head. Instead, she turned away. Took another left. “Let’s just keep going.”

* * *

◆ ◆ ◆

THEY KEPT GOING.

Claire lost track of time, lost track of the number of lefts they took as the sun sank lower. It became a blur of stone and distant moans that threatened to burrow into her skull. Until they came to the stairs.

Labyrinths didn’t have stairs.

They were set into an empty expanse of wall, worn, but sufficiently intact to look as if they’d bear a person. The uneven steps were hemmed by more stone and quickly twisted upon themselves, a curved staircase that didn’t reveal more than a few steps before disappearing upward. Claire tilted her head up. The walls were high but open to the perpetual twilight. Not high enough for a second floor, not high enough for the stairs to lead anywhere, despite the strange new light that dribbled down them, just around the bend. The stairs couldn’t lead anywhere, couldn’t exist, no matter how she twisted the physics.

If this place had physics.

“It could be a way out,” Hero suggested.

“More likely it leads directly to the creature we’ve been hearing for the last few hours.”

“Probably. But . . . it is on our left.”

That, against all reason, decided it. Claire swallowed her doubts and ascended the stairs. After three corkscrew turns and a dozen steps, they broke upon the landing of another long, tidy hall. Unlike to the ruins they’d left behind, this hall was well maintained.

The sky was still open above them, but the darkness was lit intermittently by torches ensconced at regular intervals along the hall. Hero swept up one of the torches that kept the deepest shadows at bay. “Just in case,” he muttered a bit sheepishly.

As they turned another corner, they could see a new break in the wall up