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The thought left a bad taste in my mouth. No. I’d be a janitor first. Still, I had my notes that he’d said he’d wanted, and he owed me something for not reporting to the board that he was turning Horace. What had I been thinking? I’d been thinking that maybe it was an inside job, in which case, the fewer who knew about it, the better, but Horace hadn’t remembered anything useful, other than that he had been trapped in the library, so maybe it was an inside job after all. I really needed to visit Bert.
I took my box away from Felix and smiled as well as I could with my arteries detached from their essential source of oxygen. “Thanks, Felix, but I can take it from here. I don’t want you to get involved with them while the issues with Horace are making the board trigger-happy. You don’t need to lose your job too when you’re only a few years away from retirement.”
He scowled. “And who’s going to take over when I retire? Not Jessica.” He sighed and shook his head before he gave me his own sad smile. “You’ll find your way, Libby. There’s always hope of a new and brighter day.”
I sniffed again while a big ball of pain rolled around in my chest. My library had been ripped out of my heart, and I was supposed to hope for a new and brighter day?
I ducked through the door and descended two and three steps at a time in the ever-growing darkness until I was three floors down and the soft sound of the door closing let me know that I was alone.
I sat down on the stairs, put my face in my arms and cried. Unfortunately, as I was getting really worked up, I was interrupted by a nibble in my ankle that had me scrambling to my feet and summoning a light.
The light revealed dozens of eyes shining back at me that flinched back in unison. Were they imps? They were something, and I was bleeding, very slightly, but an open wound was not the way to go ask a vampire for a favor. Maybe I’d offer the Scholar my blood again in exchange for a job just to be annoying.
One of the creatures lunged at me, and I kicked it back, screeching into its friends. “You want to play?” I demanded, walking down towards them while the ball of light floated above me and tears still overflowed my stupid eyes. I walked quickly, because a moving target was harder to hit, but they took the challenge quite determinedly, and I ended up kicking several who tried to attach their sharp teeth to my ankles. They were so annoying.
I leapt over a bunch of them, and my box rattled around as the bottles jostled together. Why didn’t the Scholar do something to clean out his back stairs? I ran, taking the steps two at a time until they were all behind me, chasing me down into the darkness. I was still leaking tears, but I didn’t have the mind space to really feel the awful sundering when I was being chased by imps, so that was something.
I ran and ran, around and around until the stairs ended and I leapt into the darkness and then right into an arm that wrapped around me, spinning me around and then teeth, fangs were against my throat. I froze, panting, gripping my box while the undead creature stayed like that for another beat before he released me and spun me back around to face him. It was the vampire who had guarded the front door.
“What’s your name?” I demanded, frowning at him.
His gleaming red eyes widened in alarm. “I didn’t hurt you.”
“No, but I keep running into you, and it’s good to have names.”
“Prescott is what you may call me.”
I sank down on the floor and tried to breathe, but leaving the library, realizing that the only possible job would involve fanged, clawed, scaled monsters who might snack on me at any moment was so incredibly depressing. I was already crying, which was embarrassing enough, but really, I could hardly care about that when my library was torn from my chest, leaving a raw, gaping wound behind, even if I couldn’t see it.
“Lady Librarian, can I help you?” Prescott asked, delicately.
I sniffed and then buried my face in my arms. I wasn’t a Lady Librarian anymore. Any minute now the imps would arrive, and I’d have to take off down the hall into the darkness again. That was my life, endless running and never getting anywhere. My home was gone, and now I had nothing.
I wasn’t usually so emotional and whiny for lack of a better word, but it hurt so much, right in my feelings, where I was used to keeping everything out, so I wasn’t on top of it.
“Do you need a tissue?” Prescott asked, handing a clean white handkerchief to me.
I took it and wiped my face, but the tears kept coming. What a waste of a perfectly nice white handkerchief. I blew my nose, loudly, several times and then my book pulsed, curling the edges of the spelled bandages, reminding me that I had things to do before I sat down on the floor like a child.
The last time my book had leaked was when I came back from a long mission to the House of Mercy, and the new librarian had no idea how to strengthen protection spells, so had undone them instead, and my book had started turning everything around it into a weird forest. The new, incompetent librarian had put it in a small garden shed away from the main building that was still like stepping into a hollow tree, only green goop for sap that stained if it didn’t eat away your flesh in slimy, smelly tendrils. It was terribly cozy.
I sniffed twice. “Prescott, could you take me to whoever is head of your vault? I have a book that needs spelling.”
He cleared his throat. “Of course, but nothing would be allowed into the vault without the Scholar’s signature.”
I sighed. “Of course it needs his signature. Fine. Could you take me to a room where I can do some spellwork while you contact your master and the head of the vault? It’s very volatile, and no one needs an infestation of growing green acid goop.”
“There is somewhere I can take you, but it’s the dungeon, and I’m not sure how you’d feel about that.”
I’d feel terrible, but my feelings were already occupied with the devastating loss of my library. When Mother Mercy had hired another librarian instead of me to take over the old librarian’s work, it had hurt more than I’d expected, like getting my feet cut off, but this was much worse. Maybe I shouldn’t work in a library. This emotional attachment to buildings and immaterial objects was ridiculous.
“Take me to the dungeon, Prescott, as long as there aren’t any imps.”
“This way,” he said, gesturing me down a hall to the left.
We walked forever, down stairs that wound into the depths of the musty, cold earth. We went through an enormous cavern with a waterfall on one end, but that wasn’t deep and mysterious enough. We went even deeper until we reached a long hall with cells on each side.
“Hey, Prescott,” a growl came out of the shadows. “Is it feeding time already?”
