hearty helping of the bay water with them. Walter had insisted on wrapping them both up in his jacket—it was big enough to practically engulf both Claire and Leto—and escort them personally back to the Library. The big gatekeeper tutted about the disgrace of such treatment the whole way.
The hero was still unconscious. Claire allowed Brevity to make a tolerable amount of fuss before retreating to the restorations room with the hero’s book, supplies, and the scrap that Leto had, miraculously, held on to during their escape. Despite the panic in his wide eyes, he’d demonstrated quick thinking; Claire was forced to revise her impression of the confused teenager.
She’d allowed Brevity in to deliver a hot pot of tea and a clean change of clothes before turning her attention to the process of restoring the book. If Claire was going to get answers as to why a fallen angel, let alone a Watcher, was interested in an unwritten fantasy novel, she would need to make sure the hero survived long enough to answer questions.
After hours of painstaking work, she was no longer afraid they were going to lose the book entirely. An unwritten story was fragile when damaged. Pushed too far, it could fall apart, like ice cream on a summer day melting away for lack of authorial intent. There had been no time to do it properly with a full rebinding, but Claire had held the book together with thread and paste. She breathed every curse she knew under her breath as she stitched blank sheets into the wounded front pages, carefully tying the savaged front matter together with tiny red binding threads. The new pages were strong, but it still might all be for nothing if it didn’t restore the story. She’d spent the last two hours trying to coax the words, first with soft assurances, then with orders, finally with the blunt end of her quill, nudging the trembling text to repopulate the blank pages.
But they wouldn’t budge. The best she’d been able to do was convince some pointless footnotes to spread to the heading of the first page. The rest of the replacement pages remained infuriatingly blank, their text lost forever. Which was going to leave the hero in a predicament. Stories needed a beginning to make sense. Claire had to restore the book if he was going to go back to where he belonged. Something was missing. She turned to the scrap they’d procured from the Watcher.
With tweezers she withdrew it delicately from the plastic bag, turning it over under the lamp. The paper was yellowed and fibrous. Lichen green ink glimmered when the light hit it, and a delicate scent of anise and ash was detectable when it drifted under her nose. There was neither green ink nor such a scent in the rest of the book before her. She shook her head, setting aside the strangeness to try to puzzle out where it fit.
It didn’t. It took no time at all to come to the conclusion. No matter where Claire positioned it, no matter which way she twisted the scrap, the book rejected it. Even if it had belonged to one of the missing, burned pages, the book would have recognized it as its own. Instead, it took all of Claire’s strength to keep the tome from skittering off the table to flee the tiny piece of parchment.
The book jerked again. Claire lost her grip on the tweezers, sending the scrap drifting off the table for the hundredth time. The book fled to the far shelf in a froth of paper and leather. The librarian hissed a dark curse and bent to snatch the stubborn scrap between two fingers.
And the blood sang in her veins.
The shadows tilted, and her vision swam as a chill shuddered from the paper, up one arm, and down to her toes. A flash. The edge of a shadow, the fault in a rock, the supple joint in the pulse of the world. Tender hollows designed to break. And time, time, so much time, howled underneath. A wildfire of images hit her, burning up all thought, breathing ash in its wake. Undoing. Unending. Unyielding. She came back to herself bent over her chair, gagging for air while the scrap of paper drifted toward her toes.
That was, most definitely, not an unwritten book, nor anything imagined or written by man.
Claire clenched her hands, clamping down on the shiver that threatened. Her pulse was still stuttering in her head, but she