The Library of the Unwritten - A. J_ Hackwith Page 0,68

she needed to do. That’s what she’d done with Claire for years, but it was always with Claire. Claire had no idea what she was asking. Muses enabled, supported, inspired; they didn’t act.

But muses also didn’t stand around hallways looking foolish and green at the gills. At the corner of her vision, the gargoyle had begun to stare. Brevity pushed open the doors.

A locked-down library was a space of ink and whispers. The darkness was absolute; the blue glow of the inspiration on her wrist barely lit the gloom in front of her face. The light from the hallway behind her was immediately drunk up by the shadows pooling at her feet, so tangible that Brevity nearly tripped as she made her way in.

“It will listen to you. It will listen to you. It will listen. To you.” Repeating it enough tamped down the flicker of apprehension in her chest. Brevity let the door close behind her and raised her voice. “Lights.”

Even to her own ears, her impersonation of Claire’s confident command felt quailing and swallowed up too fast in the dark. Brevity clenched her fists and tried to make her way to where she knew the front desk was. “Library . . . lights.”

Her hip collided with a hard corner. A stack of books avalanched past her shoulder. “Oh, tit-eared motherfuck.”

Muses didn’t act, but they could cuss with the best. She continued her grumbles as she crouched to grope for the books. “C’mon. Lights . . . please? I know you can hear me!”

With an almost sullen slowness, a dim glow blossomed in the table lamp. It eased, unfurling light until it spread to the next sconce, then slowly began to light up the stacks. The Library responded with a resigned sigh, fluttered pages and sleepy shadows.

“You don’t gotta be a jerk about it, you know.” Brevity finished scooping up the books and surveyed the facing stacks. The light was too grudging to be bright and cheery like it was for Claire, but the glow was enough to make out the books still on their shelves, muted and sleeping, their trails of color dim and still.

The Unwritten Wing was a world of color to Brevity. Each book a whipping, seeking coil of light when it was awake. As a muse, she could see them. Books desperately wanted to be written, and were constantly sending out tendrils, hoping to catch and find purchase in a fertile mind. It had been nearly overwhelming when she’d first arrived, rejected and unwelcome. Claire had resented everyone back then, and she had been open about her feelings toward her new assistant. To be honest, the years hadn’t made her much less brittle. Brevity often wondered, if Claire could see the books like she did, would she have more sympathy for the stories in her care? Brevity tried to care enough for them both.

Asleep, the books were withdrawn, tucked within their borders and emitting only dull pulses as Brevity passed. She picked a row at random and slowly walked the stacks, checking as she wrestled with her unease. These were books. She was a muse. This was the Library. This was home, or as near as Brevity could make one. She’d thrown her whole heart into making this home. There was no reason for the hairs on her neck to prick, for the inspiration gilt on her skin to coil and flutter anxiously.

But shadows gathered a little too deep in the corners of shelves, and books slept fitfully under her fingers as she ran them along the spines. Dust hung suspended in the light thrown by sconces, as if someone unknown had just passed through and left the Library unsettled in her wake. The gloom increased as she ventured farther into the stacks. The air became so still it suffocated. And as she turned a corner, cold hands landed on her goose-bumped skin.

A shriek, and probably several years of her immortal life, escaped Brevity. She spun, hands in front of her face though they couldn’t quite decide whether to make a fist or shield. It took a moment for her heart to restart when she recognized the blue-skinned girl in front of her. “Aurora! Are you trying to kill me?”

Aurora was a damsel from a space thriller—likely from the late 1960s, if you judged by the skimpy miniskirt and midriff that she had arrived in. She’d built up more of a wardrobe over her years in the damsel suite, and now she worried at the