The Archive of the Forgotten (Hell's Library #2) - A. J. Hackwith Page 0,1
soft, a feat it wasn’t used to performing. Once, she would have known how to handle a wandering character. A warning, a scalpel flick, and stories would fold back into the books that confined them. Back when they were simply that—books to be shelved—and she was simply the librarian.
Nothing was that simple anymore. Claire had been shocked out of her decades of denial when a runaway book had forced her to divert a demonic coup and face the cruelty she’d inflicted in the past. Books, and the characters that awakened from them, might not be human but were worth a little humanity.
Rosia’s twin moon eyes blinked a momentary eclipse before she turned back to toying with the flooring. “I am.”
Nothing could ever be that simple anymore. “I beg your pardon?”
“I am with friends. They’re so hard to hear, though,” Rosia went on without acknowledging the question. “We play hide-and-seeks. They always win.”
Claire glanced behind her, but she was patently alone. Damsels were not typically solitary characters, even ghost girls like Rosia. They were the hearts of stories that had woken up and had been allowed to remain as they were in the Library, instead of being shelved into their books again. It’d been a small mercy that Brevity had persuaded Claire into allowing when she’d been librarian. Now, under Brev’s purview, the damsel suite seemed to have grown to an annex. It was a suspicious population growth, even accounting for the number of damsels and books lost during the siege.
Claire couldn’t say she approved. There was very good reasoning for keeping unwritten books asleep on the shelves. Woken up, personified, characters risked changing, and change was transformative to their books. They could warp away from the story they were intended to be, or just go a little funny in the head.
Claire suspected Rosia of the latter, but it was hard to be harsh with a girl who was part moonbeam. She crouched down, attempting to be less of a, as Brev put it, “boogeyman for books.” “This is the Arcane Wing. Characters don’t belong here—”
Rosia’s face crumpled, and she rapidly turned from eerie ghost princess to plaintive child. “But you’ll still take care of us, right?”
“I—” Claire faltered over the ache that knotted in her chest. Her voice was unsteady when she found it again. “I’m not the librarian of your wing.” Anymore. It made the pain worse to say that, so she didn’t.
Rosia, if possible, fluttered with even greater distress. “But you’ll take care of them? You have to.”
“Who—” Claire bit off the question as heavy footsteps creaked on the boards behind her. Ramiel came around the corner, clapping the dust off his work-hardened hands.
His rumpled trench coat was a shade grayer than normal, a result of a morning spent moving the heavier of the Arcane Wing’s residents around in the archives. He stopped short as he spotted Rosia. The pepper-colored feathers peeking from beneath the collar of his coat bristled into a disgruntled ruff. He had the perpetual look of a toy soldier sent one too many times through the dryer. Rami frowned in a way that sent his stony olive-tan features rumbling to concerned peaks. “Again?”
Claire rose to her feet and ignored the judgmental tone in his voice. “Please help Rosia back to the Unwritten Wing.”
“Will you be speaking with Brevity?” Rami asked.
“I don’t think so.”
Rami was an angel of few words but a whole catalog of looks. The one he sent her now was worth an hour of chiding in itself. His expression softened as he offered a hand to Rosia, crouching down so his broad shadow didn’t seem quite so imposing. “Up, on your feet, little soldier.”
Rosia took his hand and reached down to pat the floorboards fondly before allowing him to guide her out. Her fingers danced along the shelves as they passed, but it appeared even the Arcane Wing’s dangerous artifacts knew better than to harm one of her damsels.
Brevity’s damsels, Claire amended with sour impatience for her own brain. She followed Rami down the row and tried to amend his judgment. “I am sure Brevity has her own people in hand. It’s really not necessary.”
“I’m a people now? Why does no one tell me when I’ve been promoted? We could have thrown a party.”
The voice was too droll, too full of self-amusement, to mistake. Hero lounged against a table, having shoved a jumble of half-assembled (now utterly unassembled) bone relics out of the way to make room for the tail of his