The Archive of the Forgotten (Hell's Library #2) - A. J. Hackwith Page 0,37

like the fang of a viper. “Claire, are you sure? You said the safest place for that . . .”

“Was out of sight, forgotten. I know.” It had to be the dimmer light in the alcove that made Claire look abruptly pale. Her gaze flicked around nervously before she appeared to remember herself. “But if this ink is a lingering threat from the coup, I want him secured far away from it.” Claire studied an indefinite point on the desk. “And me.”

“You?” Rami considered his accumulated observations and the nervy tension in Claire’s face. “You mean you are afraid to touch it.”

“Really, Rami! I hold a cautious misgiving about touching it, with my stained hand,” Claire corrected, a shadow of her imperious self shaking her mood. She sniffed. “As if I would grant Andras the gift of my fear. He’s unworthy.”

“I agree.” Rami stepped forward to take the dagger artifact that contained the essence of their fallen enemy—once friend, as Rami had understood it, though he had been no friend of any demon. Claire stepped back, knocking the arm of her chair against the wall. She hid the moment she flinched in a grimace.

“I’ll wrap it and place it in the very back of the vault,” Rami said slowly. The exposed blade was chill in his palm, but no colder than any polished metal. He hesitated at the alcove entrance, but Claire didn’t meet his gaze. “Andras is gone and can threaten no one now. He’s dead, Claire. Or as good as dead.”

“Yes, well . . . the dead do have a way of making a nuisance of themselves when it comes to me.” Claire’s smile was too tight to avoid being a grimace.

“It only seems that way,” Rami soothed as he tucked the knife away, watching as Claire visibly relaxed once it was out of sight. “I think we do the haunting to ourselves. Death keeps its own secrets.”

Claire sighed, nodding defeat if not agreement. “We do. And Death—”

Her chin froze midmotion and her gaze sharpened enough to send a prickle of alarm up Rami’s neck. “Claire?”

“Nothing. Nothing. Just a passing thought to consider.” Claire straightened, and she appeared so much more her old self that Rami didn’t dare question it. She made a shooing motion. “Get that in the vault, if you please.”

* * *

* * *

IT WAS A CAREFUL matter storing what was effectively the Arcane Wing’s most notorious prisoner in the archive vaults. Rami was grateful for it. It gave him time to formulate the careful way he would broach Hero’s proposed lead with Claire.

“I’d like to look into some things,” Ramiel said after finding Claire near the ink reservoir. She appeared to have gathered her calm again and had convinced the wing to repair the floor to something resembling a small—if incredibly gothic-looking—reflecting pool for the ink. She stared into it with what appeared to be expectation—as if the ink could talk to her. Abruptly, she nodded and took off for her alcove.

Rami followed and began to wrestle with the fear that now was a poor time to leave the mortal woman alone with her thoughts. “Claire?”

Claire looked up from the prodigious stack of books with which she had fortified her desk. For all Andras’s duplicity, he’d kept exacting notes on every artifact in the wing, which Claire had only begun to sift through. “Things?” she said, as if no time had passed. “You’ve run across something like the ink before?”

“No,” Ramiel said truthfully. “Whatever this is, it’s unique to the Library.”

“Then what do you hope to find that you can’t share with me?”

“We intend to make discreet inquiries into the other libraries.” Ramiel saw no reason to lie. Which was good because he had been told, repeatedly, that he was terrible at it. He had accepted it as a flaw of being burdened with a divine nature in Hell.

“And the last time I left the realm it was a minor scandal,” Claire said with the grace of an understatement.

Rami smiled. “It was a minor scandal on our end too.”

“Everything is a scandal to Heaven.” On another’s lips, that word might have made Rami flinch, but Claire had a clear-eyed way of looking at him that steadied him. Contentment, to be here of all places, was a radical novelty in Rami’s life. Claire had no idea of the miracle that was. Instead she made a sour face, which was so familiar it dispersed Rami’s previous concerns. “I have no idea how paradise realms can