than in the daytime, no doubt a magical emanation of one of the grimoires inside the archives. Silas, a cat again and only visible as a swirl of movement within the mist, headed toward the gate. Elisabeth forced herself not to take in its looming presence, still fresh from her dreams. Instead she focused on what Silas had instructed her to do before they’d set out. It was going to take both of them, working together, to sneak inside undetected.
She pressed herself into an alcove in the wall and waited for a warden to pass, his lantern floating eerily through the mist. Then she darted back out of hiding. They had about a minute until the next warden came by.
Silas already stood inside the archives, having squeezed between the gate’s bars before transforming back into his human shape. She followed his gaze as he nodded upward. There, above the gate, some fifteen feet off the ground, hung an iron bell. She set her boots against the ironwork and began to climb.
She soon wished that she had brought a pair of gloves. Her sweaty palms found little purchase against the bars, which were already slick with moisture from the mist. It took her more than twice as long to scale the gate than she had estimated—long enough that the next patrol came walking past while she clung to the ironwork high above. She held her breath, her shoulders aching with the effort of remaining still, but the warden didn’t look up. His silhouette faded into the mist.
Freeing a hand, she retrieved a wad of cotton and piece of twine from one of her belt pouches. She wrapped the cotton around the bell’s clapper, and used her teeth to help tie it in place. When she was finished, she slid back down and landed with a bone-jarring impact on the flagstones. Silas reappeared opposite the bars. He had taken off his jacket and now used it to protect his hand from the iron as he turned a latch on the gate. It swung open silently on well-greased hinges.
“The gate is designed to open from within,” he had explained earlier. “It is a fail-safe, so no one is able to get trapped inside if their key is taken from them. But there is, of course, a mechanism in place to alert the other wardens should such an event occur.”
Above them, the bell swung frantically back and forth, but barely made a sound. Elisabeth’s tampering had succeeded. She slipped inside, aware the most dangerous part was yet to come.
If their key is taken from them, Silas had said. Not if they lost their key, for no warden would be foolish enough to misplace their key ring.
The restricted archives stretched down a long corridor, lined on either side by towering bookshelves that rose from the mist and spanned upward into darkness. Lanterns hung from iron posts at regular intervals, creating a path down the center. She had the unsettling feeling that the lanterns were meant to keep people from getting lost, even though the hallway appeared to travel forward in a straight, unbroken line. Her gaze wandered to the shelves, then darted back ahead. Most of the grimoires were chained to the bookcases. But the most dangerous ones had their own displays, raised up on pedestals or locked away in cages. During her brief look she’d caught sight of a manuscript bound with stitched-together human skin, imprisoned inside a cage studded with spikes like a medieval torture device. Another had teeth embroidered along the edges of its cover, restrained by an iron bit shoved between its pages. All of them were silent, watching her. Waiting to see what she would do.
She turned to speak to Silas, but he was nowhere to be seen. He had vanished into thin air, leaving the gate open behind him. She shouldn’t have been surprised, but his abandonment stung all the same. Perhaps he was trying to reinforce his message from the other night: that he was a demon, and not to be trusted.
It didn’t matter, she told herself. She had only needed him to get inside. The rest, she could do on her own.
As soon as the gate clicked shut, the muttering began. Voices of every description crept and slithered and hopped along the corridor. Her skin crawled; she could almost feel the voices reaching from the mist and grasping at her like hands. She drew her iron-laced hood over her head, and the sounds faded to a distant,