of thousands of grimoires, coming together as one.
She didn’t have words to explain any of this to Nathaniel. Not yet. Instead she looked into his eyes, and said, “Trust me.”
Whatever he saw in her face drew him up short. He nodded. And then, as though he could hardly believe what he was doing, he turned to the shelf behind him and began to unhook the chain.
Together they ran down the hall, freeing as many grimoires as they could reach. With every chain she tore down, her courage blazed brighter. Ashcroft had made a mistake. He had come to her library. Her home. This time, he wouldn’t escape the consequences.
She reached a familiar cage and halted, momentarily forgetting the noise, the paper flying through the air. A withered face floated in the dark, its needle-tipped ribbon glimmering amid the shadows.
“Will you help us?” Elisabeth asked.
The many-toned voice sounded amused. “Is he handsome, this Ashcroft?”
“Very.”
“How delightful. Just show us the way, dear.”
She didn’t have a key that would open the cage, but she didn’t need one. She wedged Demonslayer between its bars and twisted, bending the old, brittle iron until it curved enough for the grimoire to flutter free. Then she snatched up the Illusarium’s glass ball and ran onward. An illusion ghosted to life at her side: the Director, Irena, her molten red hair flowing into the mist. Pride illuminated her wan features as she gave Elisabeth the faintest of smiles. Before Elisabeth could call out to her, she was gone, subsiding back into vapor.
Nathaniel made a choked-off sound. At first she thought he had seen Irena, too. But when she looked at him, his head was turned toward a different spot in the mist, where the figures of a smiling woman and a small, grave boy in a suit were swirling away. Silas gazed in the same direction, his eyes as bright as gemstones. The Illusarium had shown Nathaniel something else—his family. She freed one of her hands and sought his. Their fingers intertwined, squeezing tightly.
Moments later, they burst through the gate. A tidal wave of grimoires swept after them, tumbling into the Northwest Wing at their heels. Leading the expanding swell of parchment and leather, they flew past the skeletal angels carved into the archway and careened around the corner, straight into an army of demons.
Her heart nearly stopped. Scales and horns and wattles filled every inch of the atrium. Rifts spiraled up the tiered bookshelves, rising toward the dome, whose indigo glass had begun to shatter, the suspended shards glinting against the Otherworld’s sky. More fiends leaped from the rifts every second. Imps scampered across the railings, and goblins loped along the balconies on all fours. There were hundreds of demons. Possibly even thousands of them.
But Ashcroft’s forces were still outnumbered.
An imp stopped gnawing on a bookshelf to glance in their direction. Then, slowly, it looked up. Its black eyes widened, reflecting a swarm of specks, each shape growing larger by the second. A shadow stretched across the atrium as the grimoires came crashing down.
Elisabeth braced herself. An instant later, her world dissolved into a maelstrom of pages. She and Nathaniel stood hand in hand, their hair whipped by the wind, Silas digging his claws into Nathaniel’s coat, everything blocked out by a seemingly endless cyclone of parchment that battered them like thousands of wings. The smell of ink and magic and dust choked her nostrils. For a moment, she couldn’t breathe. And then, as abruptly as a flock of birds whirling past, the torrent ceased and their surroundings cleared.
For every demon, there were a dozen grimoires. A goblin keeled over, engulfed by a throng of books that surged over its body like a school of piranhas, gnashing and snapping their teeth. An imp squawked as pages snapped shut on its long ears, lifting it into the air. Nearby, a withered face rose above a pair of fiends, evaluating them like a professional seamstress. A needle whipped expertly between them, and they toppled to the floor, laced together with thread. Across the atrium, demons foundered, howling at paper cuts and blinded by wads of ink.
Rallied to action, grimoires cascaded from the balconies in waterfalls of gilt and multicolored leather. Dust clouds rose as they spilled onto the tiles from three, four, even five stories up. A flash of peacock feathers came from the direction of the catalogue room, and Madame Bouchard’s operatic wail sent fiends writhing and pawing at their ears.