The Archive of the Forgotten (Hell's Library #2) - A. J. Hackwith Page 0,121

at Rami’s palm, but he clasped around her wrist with a precise kind of confidence and pulled. Brevity fluttered toward him as if she weighed nothing at all, and when he set her feet gently to the ground—his ground—it felt more like sticking to the filmy surface of a bubble than standing.

The puddle that made up Claire, thankfully, did not stir at all. She didn’t appear to notice their presence, or if she did, she simply chose not to care. Brevity swallowed down the feeling of impending grief. “I can see the ink, but . . . the books like me. They wouldn’t do this to us. What is this?”

“Souls,” Rami said quietly. “The heart of any story is a little, tiny sliver of an author’s soul. That’s how any story is made.”

“What?” Brevity blinked rapidly, trying to hold on to that thought. It felt important somehow, the way dream revelations felt important right before disappearing upon waking.

“Later.” Rami’s voice was hard and grounding. “All you need to understand is that the ink is slowly taking over Claire, piece by piece. Trying to bury her under its own existence. We need to anchor her before I—before I try what I’m going to try. Otherwise we could lose her too.”

“Okay.” Brevity took a deep breath and held a little tighter to Rami’s hand. “Right. Claire?”

With Rami’s anchoring influence, the black core appeared to be turning in a slow orbit. Claire’s face began to turn away without stirring.

Right, it wasn’t just Claire in there, and it certainly wasn’t Claire in control. Brevity needed something the ink would respond to. Something that would get its attention, and also Claire’s.

“Do you want to hear a story?” Brevity breathed, through searing tears that felt like they were flooding her throat. “I promise it’s a good one.”

There was no color inside the ink that had smothered Claire; too much was going on beneath the surface. But there was a ripple, however faint. The wax-wasting drip of her hair slowed, as if cooling.

“A story. A soul for a story, and a story for a soul.” Rami’s voice was thoughtful and he was nodding when Brevity glanced back. “Try it again.”

Brevity swallowed and focused on Claire, the familiar outline she could still pick out through the black. “This is a story of a woman who lived in a library.”

The edge of the puddle had a questing tendril that stayed reaching toward Brevity even as the center turned. She chewed on her lip. “There was a woman who lived in a library, not because she was a great reader. Not because she was a great writer. Not because she was anything special at all, but because she’d lost the way of her own story.”

Claire didn’t stir, and with the melting slowing, she looked more like a statue wrought in ebony. She was drawing out the ink, not Claire. Rami shook his head, and Brevity grasped desperately for something to separate the two.

It wasn’t fair. Claire was the storyteller, not Brevity. The only story Brevity ever had, she stole. This was all on her shoulders, and they would all die here in the ink because Claire wouldn’t listen. “You’re so stubborn,” Brevity hissed through clenched teeth. A watercolor of frustration took on the bold strokes of anger and Brevity let it. “She was so stubborn, this woman in the library. She was selfish and mean and lashed out at anyone who tried to help her. She wielded a blade against books and words against everyone else. She was so wrapped up in her own self-pity, so certain of all that she’d lost, that she couldn’t see all she had gained. All of us that were right there, right there in front of her and hurting and confused and scared just as much as she was! We were right there!”

Brevity’s eyes were full of tears. Perhaps that’s why she couldn’t make sense of the way the ink moved over Claire’s skin now, rippling, shifting, almost drying into black scales. Half-fractured and curled in on herself as she was, Claire looked like a dragon’s egg ready to hatch—or rot away. Brevity held on to her anger; it felt solid in her chest. It was the only thing that kept her pinned here—wherever here was—besides Rami’s hand.

“She was selfish and cruel, and she acted like it was because she was smarter, stronger, than everyone else. But she wasn’t. She was just stupid. So stupid she couldn’t see the friends that surrounded her, the