The Archive of the Forgotten (Hell's Library #2) - A. J. Hackwith Page 0,118

us.

Who is us?

Once upon a time . . .

. . . Something is missing.

Something is missing. Once upon a time. Something is missing. Once upon a— Something is missing. Something is missing. Once upon— Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is missing. Once— Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is—

Do you want to hear a story?

34

HERO

Myrrh.

Huh. Well, that just figures, doesn’t it?

Librarian Gregor Henry, 1941 CE

HERO RAN INTO A charnel house of horrors. Books were flayed everywhere he looked, paper entrails twisting suspended in the air as if from butcher’s hooks. Many of the dead of the Dust Wing rested, content with their tombs and dust, but not here. Here was where stories had gone destructive and turned on their corpses instead.

He had hesitated at the sight when he and Rami had broken through into the clearing where they’d tracked Claire and Brevity. He’d hesitated, and that’d been enough. Claire had shouted, the scalpel had impossibly cast one sliver of light in the dark, and then the corpses around him ceased to matter.

Hero dived into the viscera of paper and gore. Bile rose in his throat every time he crushed a brittle spine under his heel, but he hurtled himself forward. He tore at the paper skins that tangled him. He would tear at his own skin next.

Ink swallowed Claire, between one breath and the next. No, “swallow” was too natural a word. It absorbed her, leaving behind a bleak Claire-shaped figure stained so dark it was impossible to make out against the darkness. The sight stopped him cold, just a step away. Her warm brown skin swallowed shadows, until even the ruffle of her uneven skirts and the small clasps at the tips of her braids turned pitiless black.

He lurched into motion again but was stopped by Rami’s hand at his hip. “It’s ink,” Rami reminded him. As if Hero could forget, forget the feeling of his own skin decaying and crumbling in on itself, the feeling of drowning in ashes, smothered and lost. As if he could forget the way Claire had screamed, which was why he needed to reach her right now—

It was a testament to how weak he was that Brevity broke past Probity first. The ink-bleached muse had fallen and struggled to get to his feet. Brevity scrambled across the bowl of shredded parchment but was still too far away when the muse zeroed in on Claire. It sniffed the air and clacked its teeth. Brevity lunged, tackling it around the ankle and dragging it to the ground with her. The muse fell, outstretched claws passing within a whisper of Claire’s unmoving obsidian face.

Brevity wrestled it back, biting back a yelp as the stained muse spun around and turned his claws on her. The sound drew the first lurch of movement, though everyone but Hero seemed too busy to notice. Only Hero saw as the black statue that was Claire twitched her limbs. Her head tilted at a sharp, mechanical angle, while the rest of her appeared to move with the sinuous nature of the ink itself. When her head turned its bleak gaze in Hero’s direction, his skin chilled surely as if a naked blade had scraped along it.

“Help us,” Hero whispered. To himself, to Claire, to gods he didn’t believe in. None, at least, would hear and answer prayers in the darkest corner of the afterlife.

The ink that had subsumed Claire appeared to shudder in its depths and gave a slow blink. She turned its attention to the feral muse wrestling with Brevity on the floor. She stretched out one arm, garnering everyone’s attention. Hero half expected the ink to drop from her fingertip, but she opened her mouth and spoke.

“You.” It was Claire’s voice, but splintered and shadowed by something else. The presence of something else was heavy in the air, but it felt like the shadow of an eclipse. Not a single entity, but crowding nonetheless. Like a swarm of blackbirds. It clotted the air and made it difficult for anyone to move as the ink-stained Claire took one step, then two. Black pools bloomed beneath her feet, as if the ink was spreading, but always retracted as she stepped away again.

Hero had an irrational urge to reach out and touch her, to grab for the footfalls of ink. What would happen now, Hero wondered, if that ink touched him