Filthy inmates lay in heaps on the floor, their eyes blank and their chapped lips slack.
That had been me. For years. A grungy, mindless heap of skin and bones waiting to rot.
The drip, drip, drip of water dried the spit from my mouth until I wanted to clamp my hands over my ears and hum over it.
The staircase leading up into my head loomed, pristine and warm, a safe place for me to hide. But I was done with taking the easy way out. I would stay present, I would do my job, and then I would go home.
“This is it.” Boaz plugged in his code then waited for the green light before pushing open a reinforced steel door. “Go on in.”
Golden light spilled across my face, blinding me, and the familiar smell of old books overrode the stench polluting the corridor. Boaz didn’t have to tell me twice. I couldn’t scurry through fast enough.
The jolt of stark white paint, untouched by the ugliness above and around it, and the gleaming tile hurt my eyes after having spent so long in the dark. As my vision adjusted, I distinguished the shape of a guard bent over the thick spine of a hardback thriller. Not exactly Athenaeum material.
“Pritchard,” he grunted.
“Marx,” Boaz grunted back.
Muscles tight enough to snap, I held my ground, expecting Marx to pat us down, quiz us, something.
“Civilians in the stacks.” Licking his thumb, Marx turned the page. “Guess there’s a first time for everything.”
“Guess so,” Boaz replied.
That was apparently that.
Whooshing out the breath I hadn’t realized I had been holding, I felt sensation returning to my limbs.
Without setting down his book, Marx rose and used an old-fashioned iron key to twist open a locked door behind him. “You know the rules. Make sure your friends here follow them. You know how pissy Baker gets when protocol is broken.”
The scraping of metal on metal left me shivering like the first chemical rush after a plunger depressed.
Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it.
Anyone looking to drug me and fling me into a cell would have to go through Linus first.
Boaz strode into an antechamber and entered a third code to access the Athenaeum.
Breathe in. Breathe out. In. Out. Innn. Ouuut.
I crossed that final threshold, heart knocking against my ribs, and gaped at the books filling floor-to-ceiling shelves.
“Gloves.” Boaz offered me a white cotton pair. “There are no guards in this chamber, but it is monitored remotely. They’ll kick you out in a heartbeat if you break the rules. They weren’t kidding about that.”
Given that the sum of all surviving necromantic knowledge resided here, I couldn’t blame them. A glance at Linus confirmed he was almost drooling over the vastness of the information here for him to absorb.
“Why store it here?” More books than I had ever seen in my life surrounded us, and given what a packrat Maud was, that was saying something. “The damp is bad for them, and I can’t imagine the location makes it easy on its keepers to conceal their comings and goings.”
“This area is climate controlled.” Boaz pointed out carvings on the shelves. “There are sigils to prevent moisture damage, tearing, flaking, spine cracking.” He crossed to a monitor and woke it with a touch. “As to the why, Atramentous is a fortress in the middle of nowhere. It’s the last place any sane person wants to go or would ever expect to find a library. As to the rest—” He shrugged. “Prisons require guards. Prisons like Atramentous require Elite guards. No one looks twice at an Elite reporting for duty here. Everyone is aware of Atramentous’s reputation, and they want the best-trained soldiers the Society has to police the worst criminals the Society has produced.”
“Enlightenment found in the dark,” Linus paraphrased the line from Severine’s forged last words to me. “The Society does enjoy its cruel irony.”
“This is an impressive setup,” I admitted. “What I don’t get is why you wanted to come here.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Boaz made quick selections on a touchscreen, proving his familiarity with the indexing system.
“Yes, that’s why I asked. I already know, but I wanted to hear you say it.”
“I had to see it for myself.” He kept going, digging through the archive to locate what we sought. “I had to know if it was how I imagined.” He mashed a final button and collected a printout. “It was worse.” He passed it to me. “I wish I had never requested library detail. Whatever answers I hoped to find, they weren’t in this place.” He exhaled in a rush. “But I can’t help wondering if maybe it was all part of the goddess’s plan.”
The strained quality of his voice caught my attention. “What do you mean?”
“I might not have been telling the whole truth about receiving special dispensation.”
“What?”
“There was no time. It can take months for a book petition to be granted.” He looked to Linus for backup. “The Lyceum has fallen, Savannah is in chaos, and the Grande Dame is too busy playing general to hold the formal hearing required. The odds of her gathering enough dames and matrons to cast the votes required are nil. So, I had a friend on the inside give me her code.”
That explained the handsy greeting he received upon arrival and why the woman had taken liberties. Boaz only had one kind of female friend, and they tended to be very friendly toward him.
“Commander Roark had the right to override the Grande Dame. He was the ultimate authority when it came to the Athenaeum.” Boaz rubbed a hand over his buzzed hair. “So I forged the paperwork to give us immediate access and then backdated it. That got us down here. But without him to issue a password override, I had to borrow one.”
“You’re an idiot.” I gave him a quick hug before I changed my mind. “A total moron.”
And we were all going to get in so much trouble when this was over.
“Yeah.” His arms came up and held on for the briefest moment before releasing me. “That’s what the women in my life keep telling me.”
“Maybe you should listen to them once in a while?” Fresh urgency to get this done and get gone before Boaz’s deceit was discovered kindled in me, and I led the way to the section where the Marchand collection was being stored. “Hard to believe everything known about the goddess-touched condition is right here at our fingertips.” I almost caressed the first spine before I caught myself. “Here goes nothing.”
As we rehearsed in the van, I reached for Linus’s hand, playing damsel overcome by memories for the cameras, and he removed his twist-tie ring and pressed it into my palm. Curling against his chest, I pricked my fingertip and drew the sigil first on myself and then, when I didn’t turn into a mindless zombie, I gave him a matching one.
The fit of smugness that had me glancing up at him died a swift death when I saw his eyes had bled black from corner to corner.
Thumb poised to smudge the sigil, for all the good it might do, I shook him. “Linus?”
Jaw tight, he blasted out a sigh. “That was harder to watch than I anticipated.”
“Remember this the next time you’re tempted to play guinea pig for yourself.”
“Time’s wasting.” Boaz tapped the face of his tactical watch. “You two need to get reading.”
“We’ll discuss the dangers of field-testing original sigils later,” Linus assured me, forever unfurling in his eyes.
“Sure thing.” I patted his cheek, which caused Boaz to tense on my periphery. “He would never hurt me, Boaz. Not in a million years.”
“Never,” Linus agreed, and blue sliced through the black. “That doesn’t mean I won’t lecture her on sigil theory until her ears bleed.”
The great thing about having sex with your former tutor is boobs are really distracting. I’ve gotten out of a lot of not-quite-homework by flashing them, and he never seems to catch on. Or if he does, he doesn’t seem to mind. They were my get out of lecture free cards, and I played them every chance I got.
“I’ll take the left.” I kissed his frosty lips. “You take the right.”
Power tingled in my palm when I lifted the first book. The thin barrier of the cotton glove I pulled on was no match for it. Like called to like, and its energies prickled over my skin. A glance over at Linus’s studious expression convinced me he wasn’t experiencing the same sensations. Otherwise, he would have been examining me out of the corner of his eye to see if it affected us both.
Shoving that aside for later reflection, I turned to the first page and began reading.
An audible click filled my head, and I wobbled beneath the tangible weight of…I don’t really know what. But when I picked up where I had left off, I couldn’t read enough.
A fierce hunger burned in my gut, igniting a longing for an unnamed craving, but I couldn’t be sated. The more I read, the more I wanted to read. The quicker I read, the more the words blurred. I couldn’t have stuck a straw in the spine and slurped it up faster than I was devouring it with my eyes.
More, more, more was all I could think as my brain began sizzling with information overload.
The jolt of a cool hand on my nape snapped my head up, and I gulped like I had been drowning without realizing how far I had drifted.
“Our time is up,” Linus told me. “We have to go.”
Sinking back into my skin, I pulled my thoughts back in order. “How did I do?”
“You cataloged the entire collection,” he marveled. “I finished my half, but it’s superfluous.”
The instant he set down a book on his end, I had snatched it up and gulped down its information. I remembered that, the agony of waiting, the thirst for the next long drink at what had seemed like an endless fount of knowledge. But to hear it had run dry after all…
Suddenly parched, my tongue darted out to wet my lips and found them cracked.
“Did you retain it?” Bracing his hands on my shoulders, Linus stared into my face. “All of it?”