The Archive of the Forgotten (Hell's Library #2) - A. J. Hackwith Page 0,33

could have dug up. Telling what, though? A hot feeling threatened to well up in her eyes, and, damn it all, Claire hated to cry when she was frustrated. Crying, in general, was an indignity, but tears that came because she felt powerless to do anything else were the worst kind.

If she could just find a fulcrum, find a point to stand where the world made sense again, she felt she could manage. But everything had felt wildly askew from true since the Library fire. A slow, festering wound had opened between the Unwritten Wing and the Arcane Wing. And left unattended, it had burst—through the floorboards, through the tentative quiet—into the mayhem and confusion of ink that shouldn’t exist.

And there was the wound. Claire mentally poked at it. It wasn’t that she desired to be librarian again—she didn’t want the Unwritten Wing back from Brevity—it was simply that she wanted to understand what had happened. It had never made sense, and her lack of understanding was threatening everyone. Everyone expected Claire to solve the riddle. Knowledge was what she excelled at. Yet she hadn’t even been clever enough to keep from touching the stuff.

“. . . naught is lost.”

Claire sat up in her chair and glanced at the raven. “Did you hear that?”

Bird gave her a slow blink and released a rain of crumbs into her lap. She squatted into a fluffed ball and appeared to be considering relieving herself over the edge of Claire’s desk. Birds really were awful pets.

But Claire had heard something. Or she thought she had. It was a bit like when you’d been startled out of sleep and your brain was still rewinding to catch up. It always left Claire with the sensation that she’d been jolted awake by a sound she more remembered hearing than heard directly.

This particular sound was a memory of a voice, young and with a formal accent that really only existed in Arthurian melodramas. Moreover, it was no voice Claire recognized. She pushed away from the desk—Bird cursing at her for the disruption—and emerged from her alcove.

The Arcane Wing was not entirely silent. Somewhere, far flung toward the entrance, she could hear the methodical thumps of Rami occupied with his work. She almost went toward the sound, but something, or the memory of something, made Claire turn and squint into the shadows of the rookery.

A figure crouched against the wall but slowly unwound itself as Claire’s eyes adjusted to the gloom. A flash of brocade made her freeze and imagine for a ridiculous moment it was Andras, escaped and back in his old kingdom. But, no, Andras—or at least the idea of him—was imprisoned in a dagger Claire kept buried in the bottom of her own desk drawer, neglected and ignored. She blinked, and the figure resolved into a lanky blond man in a pit-sweated velvet suit that had been popular on the rock stars of Claire’s youth. Then, just as she’d frowned at that, the figure’s right pant leg blurred and jittered into the hem of a dress.

She stared, locked in place, as she tried to make sense of the effect. It was as if his—her?—as if their entire body had difficulty staying tuned to the same frequency. Hair buzzed from blond to red to black to pink. A blast of static seared away velvet into a cotton undershirt, a steel-ring cuirass, silk and feathers, some alien and organic armor, a gingham blouse. The figure made no threatening moves, or any moves at all for that matter. Perhaps they were entirely occupied with keeping their body together.

“Who are you?” The question came out mousy and frail in Claire’s mouth. The figure simply stared at her (with blue eyes, now black, now orange) and began to walk away.

Hold up. Claire had enough narrative sense to recognize a haunting when she saw one. The whispers, the voice, the creepy dream, and now this every-person person. One did not live this long in a library without understanding the clear markers of Suspicious Nonsense. She was not about to go plodding off after some mysterious force like a complete fool.

No, she was about to go plodding off after some mysterious force like an aware fool.

She discounted the possibility of not following it right off the bat. She might have disregarded it, at one time, but she had learned what happened if one ignored a story in Hell: it got worse. She considered briefly the option of hunting down Rami, telling him what