The Library of the Unwritten - A. J_ Hackwith Page 0,81

the systems in place to avoid missing books. There were plenty of places to hide a hero.”

“Why?”

“I wasn’t as big on rules back then as I am now.” Claire gave Leto a tight-lipped smile. “For what reason? Foolishness or loneliness? It doesn’t matter now.”

“It mattered to me,” Beatrice said, almost too soft to be heard. Claire’s throat tightened.

“In any case . . . librarians hold the reins of their libraries. Soon hiding wasn’t enough. I concocted a simple plan to get her out. I would get her past the wards, delay the alarms’ triggering. The idea was that I would go with Gregor to ‘assist’ hunting for her. Then I would slip away with her calling card. There would be the matter of outrunning the Hellhounds, but we would have a ghostlight for a head start and . . .”

“And no one would stop Claire when she put her mind to something.” Beatrice’s comment made Claire finally look at her, giving an unreadable shrug.

“Something obviously went wrong,” Hero said.

Claire hesitated, but Beatrice took over. She spoke haltingly, with a slight velvety accent. Her words weren’t measured or polished but had a steadfast certainty that felt like a lifeline. “We got caught. Librarian Gregor found out somehow—I suspect he knew the whole time. Never was certain. But he was waiting there for us the night I planned to leave. He had my calling card in his hands and . . . he intended to enslave me in that place. Stamp me to Special Collections.”

“Stamping. The monster,” Hero said with a look of mocking horror.

“Claire stopped him,” Beatrice said firmly, and a recoil of disgust shot through Claire.

“Stop. Just stop.” Claire found it difficult to press the words between clenched teeth. “At least do him the honor of telling it accurately. I murdered him.”

The pronouncement came out louder than she had intended and hung, suffocating, in the air. Claire didn’t care to see how it landed with anyone, the looks they were giving her. A cauldron of memories, hurts, fears, bubbled up in her chest, and it took a great effort to lower her voice. She dropped her eyes and said it again, testing the truth on her lips. “I murdered Gregor.”

Leto let out a wounded sound. “But that’s impossible. In the Library—”

“In the Library, there are . . . words, fail-safes,” Claire explained evenly. “Words taught only to librarians, for the defense of the Library. Words that will unravel a soul like the Hellhounds do—it doesn’t work on things native to Hell, of course, not on demons like Andras. But on human souls or creatures of other realms, it evicts them. Unmakes and banishes a soul, like waving away a puff of smoke. They don’t die, of course, but it can take decades, centuries, for a human soul to reassemble.

“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