taught you swordplay.” He moved again, taking advantage of her reaction to kick her solidly in the gut. Claire crumpled to the floor, breath seizing in her lungs. She felt Andras stop behind her, a cold shadow. He was toying with her. Andras would win any fight, fair or otherwise.
Claire understood it then. She stayed on her knees.
“Hear me,” Claire whispered, words lost to the floorboards. “Hear me, please. I have done my best, but we need you now. If you ever had power, if you ever cared about this place and those in it, please, I need you now.”
Andras heaved a long sigh. A toe nudged her spine. “Praying? I’m disappointed in you. Even if Lucifer was the worshipping type, he’s abandoned you. I thought you were better than cheap begging.”
“Please,” Claire breathed. She leaned against a shelf of books. The leather was cool against her cheek. Nothing stirred beneath it. She squeezed her eyes shut with effort. “This isn’t how the story ends. Not yours.” Hers, perhaps. But hers wasn’t the only story inked in the bones of Hell.
The whispers, when they came, were nothing more than a soft hush of wind. Claire opened her eyes and turned.
Andras still held a disappointed frown, dagger out as if he was waiting for his fancy to take him. His gaze stumbled, catching on something just over Claire’s shoulder. She held very still. She felt the figures at her back, dozens of them. No, not dozens.
Hundreds.
And she knew the books were awake.
Books woken up after a long, very long, sleep. Heroes and villains and damsels and knights. Monsters and rogues and saints and madmen. Books and stories and characters and conflicts from ages long past, furies and passions honed over an eon to a killing edge. Aliens and monsters and queens and mercenaries and children. They crowded the hall behind her and clung to shelves; those with wings and tails crowded overhead. Dozens, hundreds, more. The weight of the wakened Library balanced, heavy and infinite, in the air.
They didn’t bother with the niceties of dimensional physics. Out of the corner of her eye, feet flickered against the floorboards. Boots turned to hooves turned to heels turned to soft shadow. The only thing constant was the weight, the weight of a million gazes on her back. The pressure was like a great wave, obliterating and terrible. And when it turned its gaze on Andras, a tremor shook through the demon’s shoulders. His hand fell to his side, and Andras began to back up. Claire felt the pull of the tide of old stories, hungry ghosts, and dug her knuckles into the floor. It was all she could do not to lose herself with it.
Andras’s voice was haughty but unsteady. “I’m the Arcanist, Grand Duke of Hell. You can’t—”
“We can.” The words came to Claire’s lips, like grave dust. “We are the dreams that did not die with the dreamer. We care nothing for the dark.”
“Nonsense. I’m a demon! I can offer you freedom, escape, power beyond imagination.”
“We are imagination.”
Air rushed out of the aisle, sucking Claire’s breath with it. When she felt the first figure pass her, like a trace of frost over her skin, the prudent thing would have been to close her eyes. There were things human minds weren’t meant to comprehend, and Claire felt her own mind pressed, spread too thin. But she’d called this. She’d asked, and the Library had answered. She’d woken them up. All of them. She ground her hands against the wood until her nails splintered, and she looked up.
Andras backed into a wall, shoulders hunched, with his dagger out. Not in a proficient pose like before, but sweeping, searching for a target. Figures coalesced in the air between them, like a mist swirling on a current. His blade passed through the chest of the nearest figure. It parted like water and then, instead of disintegrating, the figure solidified and power spread like a ripple. Andras’s eyes were gold-and-black cat eyes, all human traces gone, when they found hers and caught.
“You’re not a murderer, pup. Have mercy. You know me. We could have—”
A dark-skinned woman, ageless and terrifying as the dawn, appeared out of the shadows at Andras’s back. A rush of power and a spike of light forced Claire to squeeze her eyes shut. When she opened them, empty air hung where Andras had stood.
The dagger clattered to the hardwood, loud as Claire’s pulse. It was no longer black, but as silver as Andras’s