Chapter 12

I'd only been down in the library's lowest level once, while playing a game of midnight hide-and-seek with Cabell.

After he'd caught us slinking back up the stairs like the tiny fiends we were, Librarian had explicitly asked Cabell and me not to go down there again. Truth be told, the guilt had been less of an impediment than the steel lock he added. The stupid thing had been vexingly impossible to pick.

This time, the door was left open.

A knot in my gut I hadn't wanted to acknowledge began to tighten. If the little weasel wasn't down there …

What does it matter? Let him have run back to Madrigal with Merlin's prophecy. Good riddance. It would only show this had never been about amends. I would gladly be proven right.

I shook my head and stepped through.

Seven years ago, the basement had been crowded with towering stacks of wooden crates and wilting boxes with empty shelves waiting to be filled. I hadn't been able to stay long enough to explore; the chamber stank to high hell of the poison they'd recently used to annihilate the dynasty of rats battling the Hollowers for ownership of the building.

Back when the library was a sorceress's vault, this had been the central chamber, and it still bore some signs of that: the clawed-out curse sigils on the walls, small alcoves where each treasure had been carefully stored, a chandelier made of unidentifiable bones, and a long, winding staircase in the shape of a massive serpent.

I descended slowly, taking a quick look around to get my bearings. It was just as cold and dank as I remembered, but the Dyes had improved the space, throwing old, faded rugs over the cracked mosaic floors and installing candle-like sconces on the walls that flickered on when I passed a motion sensor.

Gone were the boxes and crates, and the empty shelves were now aligned in neat rows, filled to bursting. Immortalities—leather-, skin-, and scale-bound—were chained to the shelves. The air was choked with the smell of decay and old blood.

And there were … so many. So many more books and Immortalities down there than I remembered or imagined.

The tension in my stomach released with my exhale.

Emrys stood at the far side of the room, his hands braced against a gorgeous old desk. His lips moved silently as he scanned the book in front of him, assisted by the light of a Tiffany lamp.

"You …" I stopped on the bottom step, outraged. "You bastards. "

"That's practically the family motto at this point," he said idly. "You're going to have to be more specific with your grievance."

The sheer amount of material they were hiding down here was staggering, but it was all the more infuriating to know that this collection was just overflow from the even larger one at their estate. Immortalities and relics completely lost to the rest of us.

I snaked through the shelves, trying to capture in my memory the names listed beneath the Immortalities.

"Haven't you been down here before?" Emrys asked, leaving his work to walk along the far end of the shelves, watching me. "I would have thought you'd sneak down here just to prove a point."

"Not since its esteemed days as a rat graveyard," I said. "Was the point of keeping this collection here just to remind the rest of us that we're powerless peasants? "

"I'll try to remember to ask my father that before I eradicate whatever is left of his shriveled soul," Emrys said.

He returned to the desk, and with one last, long look around me, I joined him.

"You can't kill what's already dead," I reminded him. That had been one of Nash's favorite lines during ghost stories.

"I know," Emrys said, running his finger down the book—some sort of log—in front of him. "That's why I think we're looking for the Mirror of Shalott."

My lips parted, annoyance stinging me like a wasp. I moved to the other side of the desk, facing him. "You did not figure that out."

He only smirked.

"When did you know?" I demanded.

"I suspected it right away because of all the creatures on its frame," he said, turning the record around and leaning toward me. "But I wanted to find out who currently has it before I brought it to the group."

Liar, I thought, the word echoing in my bones. If I hadn't come down here, if I hadn't seen what he was looking for, would he ever have told us his theory? Or would he have slipped away before we'd realized he was gone?

I held his gaze, suddenly aware of how close our faces were. "Are you sure it wasn't to beat us to it?"

His frown deepened, and for a moment, just one, I could have sworn his gaze dropped to my lips.

I felt that glance everywhere, a flush of heat spreading from my core. Shadows gathered around us until the Immortalities, the walls, the desk, everything but him, faded.

"Were you worried I'd left again?" he asked, his voice low. Warm. He was watching me through his lowered lashes, his throat bobbing as he leaned that little bit closer. I barely heard him say, "And here I thought you didn't want me around …"

His breath mingled with mine. My heart fluttered in my chest, like a small bird trying to break from its cage. His lips moved, shaping a word without giving it voice.

Real. The word winged through my mind, breathless. Real.

But then Emrys straightened, pulling back. Tapping a finger on the open book in front of him, he returned his attention to the page, letting out a thoughtful hum—as if it had never happened.

As if I weren't right there in front of him, like a discarded thought.

In that moment, with the color burning high in my cheeks, I wasn't sure who I despised more: him, for all his little games, or me, for letting him win that round.

I blew out a hard breath through my nose and looked down at the page. It was labeled MIRROR OF SHALOTT at the top, and two different hands had written dates and names beneath it.

January 1809–June 2000 Laurent Perreault, Paris Guild—Attic of home?

Sold August 2000 to Edward Wyrm, London Guild—Rivenoak

"My forefathers may have been at home here with the rodents," Emrys said, "but even I can admit they kept good records."

"God's teeth," I said. "Wyrm?"

"Good old Wyrm," Emrys confirmed. "I seem to remember he and Nash had some kind of tiff … ?"

"That's a very nice way of saying that Nash used him as a human shield while opening a vault and cost him a kidney," I said.

"Is that all?" Emrys asked dryly.

"It was such a stupid thing for Wyrm to be upset about," I said, glaring at the paper. "He has a second, perfectly fine one."

A smile ghosted Emrys's lips. I forced myself to look away.

"Don't you dare laugh," I warned him. "He banned us from entering Rivenoak in front of his whole guild. "

"I know," Emrys said. "I remember."

"You remember ?" I repeated, feeling the mortification of that moment wash over me anew. "You were there?"

He nodded. "And for the record, he later got drunk and admitted it wasn't Nash's fault at all. He triggered the curse and wasn't fast enough getting away. And Nash let him lie to spare his pride. He's an arrogant ass."

Emrys could have knocked me over with a flick of his fingers. Nash not being at fault for once was one thing, but Emrys telling me that was almost … kind, which made it all the more confusing coming from him after the day we'd had.

Well, I consoled myself, the gods might have hated me enough to allow him to witness that first degrading moment, but at least they'd spared me the second.

Emrys's brow furrowed, as if he sensed my thoughts. "… Why do I get the impression that's not the only reason you despise him?"

"I need another reason?" I shot back. He didn't really care, and I wasn't about to give him another little dagger to gut me.

I hadn't let myself think of what had happened with Wyrm in years, content to let it melt away in the bitter sea of resentment I felt toward my own guild after they'd abandoned Cabell and me as children.

I was grateful, then, that I hadn't let my guard down enough to tell Emrys the full story of the years we'd lived in the library. How, a few weeks after Nash's disappearance, Wyrm had contacted Librarian, asking if he could come and speak to Cabell and me. How he'd shown up in all of his finery, smelling like expensive wood, and sat with us in front of the fireplace. How Wyrm had told us in a revoltingly gentle voice that we would be coming to live with him at his palatial estate, and wouldn't that be just wonderful?

At the time, at all of ten years old, I'd been willing to overlook everything that had happened in the past because I was so angry at Nash myself, and because Wyrm was promising all of the things I couldn't: that we would never go hungry, that we would never have to sleep rough out in the bitter cold, that we could go to school and not have to travel from town to town every few days. That I wouldn't have to watch my brother suffer, and see every day that I was failing him.

Looking back, I knew better than to believe in the fairy tale he was selling. I really did. But I'd been so desperate for it to be true, to believe that someone could care, and that things could get better for us, that I'd gone along with it. I hadn't noticed the subtle line of questioning about where we'd recently traveled with Nash, about what he'd been looking for, that Wyrm threaded through all of his promises. I didn't know back then that he had been looking for Arthur's dagger too, and that he'd have no qualms about using two children to dig for information about it.

What I knew was that he'd told us to pack our things and wait for him to return in the morning, and we had. We waited all morning.

All day.

All night.

In the rare instances I let myself think about that day, I had to relieve the deep, unbearable burn of humiliation that arrived when I'd finally accepted we'd been tricked. I had to remember the way Cabell had tried so hard not to cry as we carried our things back up into the attic. I swore to myself I'd never let any man make a fool of me again.

And yet there I was, standing in front of someone else who'd played me like a fiddle.

"You know what this means, right?" Emrys began, interrupting that unwelcome descent into memory.

"Oh, I can't wait to hear this," I muttered.

"You've never been inside the estate, have you?" he continued, as if to really rub it in.

"Didn't we just establish that?" I snapped back. Wyrm's personal home also served as the guild's headquarters and library. We'd been banned from ever doing business there .

"Well, I have, and I think I know exactly where they keep the mirror." There was an edge of triumph to his look. "So you're not quite rid of me yet."

My lips parted as I scrambled for an argument. The air around me grew colder with each second, as if to help trap me there. "You think we can't figure it out ourselves?"

Even as I said it, my inner logic, rarely heard, whispered, This is for Cabell.

"There are only nine days left until the winter solstice," he reminded me. "And you have no idea what Lord Death's plans are. You're—"

He broke off midthought, his head snapping back in alarm. The air spiked with a depth of cold I'd felt only once before, when the White Lady had appeared in the field of blinding snow. Instinct and terror collided, begging me to move, but the death mark flared with such acute pain it felt as though I'd been stabbed there, straight to the heart.

I couldn't move, couldn't breathe, even as the shadows behind me snarled.

Emrys reached out and grabbed me by the jacket, hauling me over the top of the desk to his side as the ghost materialized from the dust and darkness where I'd stood only a second before.

The sight nearly made my bones jump out of my skin.

The woman's long ropes of hair drifted around her, glittering and translucent. Even the dim light seemed to shy away from her, flickering over her face but refusing to linger more than a moment on her hideous expression of hunger.

White, glowing eyes fixed on me with recognition, her lips silently forming the word. You.

"What … the hell … is that?" I breathed out.

The heat of Emrys's body was the only relief from the iciness that filled the air.

" That would be the sorceress this vault belonged to," Emrys said, drawing us back. "Enora, what's gotten into you? "

Her features sharpened like a knife, more wraith than human. Dust, grime, loose parchment, scraps of fabric, and fragments of tile rose to form her like clay in a sculptor's hand. They encased her in a hideous skin of filth and decay. Giving her a body.

A phantom wind blew through the basement, rattling the chains on the Immortalities and slamming the door at the top of the stairs. I jumped at the noise, gasping at the sudden stench of ash and a rancid sourness. Flecks of dead earth and wood splinters were still finding her, scratching at our own skin as they tore through the air.

The ghost opened her maw, revealing fangs of stone and tile shards.

Revenant, my mind screamed. She was becoming a revenant.

Her arms stretched out like twining vines, her talon-like nails raking through the air toward my chest.

One of Emrys's hands released me, fumbling with the desk drawer to retrieve something—a clay talisman, with a sigil for protection against the dead.

"Noooooooo," the creature wailed, turning the air rancid with her misery. She lunged toward us, but her hands dissipated as they reached the talisman, clumps of dirt and ash from the fireplace raining down on the desk.

"You knew this thing was down here?" I squeezed out.

"She's a shade," Emrys said, bewildered. "She's just a shade …"

A shade was a soul that remained in the mortal world, refusing to pass on. It didn't possess the kind of malice or corrupted pain that would produce a more terrifying specter like a wraith or White Lady. Shades were stubborn, not monstrous.

At least, they were supposed to be.

"I've never seen her like this before," Emrys said. "She's helped me do research in the past. She was charming. "

"Great," I said. "Now she's a charming revenant who wants to claw our faces off."

He exchanged a worried look with me. When he nudged me behind him, I realized he still had a grip on me. I was too harried, too distracted by the hard throbbing of my death mark, to object as we took a long arcing path around the shelves, heading for the stairs.

The revenant stalked behind us, leaving a trail of grime and soot smeared in her wake.

"That's a good Enora … stay back now," Emrys said, holding the talisman out in front of us like a shield. She snarled and snapped like a wounded animal. Her hands hovered inches from my throat, stroking the air, as if imagining how it would feel to shred my soft skin instead.

"Noooooooo," she wailed, almost sobbing as we made our way up the stairs backward, not daring to turn our backs on her.

Her body contorted into grotesque shapes as she climbed on hands and knees behind us, the ridges of her spine rising like thorns. Her jaw unhinged itself like a snake's. "Noooooooo!"

Nash's words shuddered through me, throbbing in time with the death mark.

Like spring, you are cursed to die young.

"—sin?" Emrys was talking to me. "Tamsin!"

I forced myself to respond. "What?"

"Can you get the door?" he asked. "She's not going to get out, I promise."

I was embarrassed by how hard my hand was shaking as I felt for the knob behind me. It took another beat to get a good enough grip on it with my sweat-slick palm.

I all but fell backward into the library's marble atrium. The impact knocked some sense into me, and I scrambled back. The statues kept watch as Emrys struggled with the door, with hanging the talisman around the handle.

With a scream of rage and seething magic, the revenant blew it open, throwing Emrys back into the nearby statue of Athena with enough violent force to stop the heart in my chest. The talisman flew the opposite way down the hall, clattering as it hit the floor. My mind tracked the sound of it, screamed at me to retrieve it, even as I scrambled toward Emrys's prone form .

There's no blood, I thought, rocked with relief. I gripped the back of his jacket, shaking him. "Emrys!"

He groaned, but the sound was swallowed by the revenant's mournful wail; she sobbed and screamed until I had to cover my ears. My stomach turned as her cries echoed against the cold white stone, as inescapable as her path toward us.

Toward me.

The stench of rot poured from her as her eyes fixed on my face once more, her grasping claws trembling as they stretched toward me.

"Tamsin!" Neve's cry carried down the hall a moment before she appeared, her face etched with fear.

"Run!" I shouted back.

The revenant spun toward her, snapping her teeth at the sight of Neve summoning a spell. As her otherworldly song rose, a blue-white light gathered around the sorceress. The words from my dream echoed back to me, haunting and otherworldly. Protect her, protect her—

The revenant went utterly still, as if caught in some unseen web. When she spoke, there was none of the mindless rage. There was only terror. "No … no … not you —!"

Neve balked, taking a step back in alarm as ash and dirt dripped off the revenant, crumbling onto the pristine white marble floor. Beside me, Emrys forced himself to sit up, shaking his head as if to clear it.

Ash and dirt and debris fell away from her form as it crumpled, until only the ethereal outline of the ghost remained. "Not you, not you—forgive me!"

The spirit flew back toward the door to the basement, singeing the air with the scent of raw magic. The commotion had drawn Caitriona and Olwen, and the sight of them just beyond Neve's shoulder finally spurred me to action. I released my grip on Emrys and ran for the talisman.

"What was that thing?" Neve gasped out as I slammed the door shut and hung the talisman around the handle.

As if sensing me there, the spirit surged forward again, rattling the door, straining it against its hinges. For a moment, I was terrified the talisman had cracked when it had fallen.

But it held. The sigil lit with a cerulean glow, forming a seal around the door, imprisoning her, but not her voice.

Emrys stood slowly, his gaze catching mine as the revenant's screams turned to a lament of desperation.

"Great Mother, I did not see! I did not know! Forgive me—forgive me—!"

Neve's shocked face mirrored my own. She brought a hand up to her chest, touching the pendant hidden beneath her shirt. I knew what she was thinking. I was thinking it too.

What are you?

But when silence finally came, there were no answers to be found there, either.