Was she dead? Was this the afterlife? Sitting up, she rubbed her hands over her face, and found her glasses were still on, if a bit lopsided and smudged up. Cleaning them off on her black turtleneck sweater, she replaced them on her face.
She didn’tfeeldead. All right, fine, she had no idea what being dead felt like. But she was pretty sure she shouldn’t feel as though she had bumps and bruises from tripping over the chair and cracking her elbows on the floor.
The marble floor underneath her was cold to the touch. The stone tiles were huge, some four feet by four feet square.
Wherever she was, it was a library. Anenormouslibrary. Rows of bookshelves reached as far as she could see in both directions, stretching high overhead. They reminded her of the libraries she had visited in Europe on her trips there for her Masters degree. The old wood was polished and oiled to a deep, dark shine that seemed to absorb any light that touched it, turning it so dark brown that it was almost black.
Countless books and scrolls were stacked on the shelves, notebooks and scraps of paper shoved in anywhere they’d fit. Tables and chairs ran down the main aisle beside her for visitors, though there wasn’t anyone else in the library that she could see.
Shadows clung to every corner, obscuring what could be hiding in the darkness. Looking up, the building had three floors, and an arched, coffered wooden ceiling that she could barely make out in the dim light.
The whole place smelled exactly like she would expect a place filled with aging and antique books to smell—of dust and old leather. Picking herself up off the floor, she brushed herself off.
“Hello?”
Her voice echoed. Part of her expected an angry librarian ghost to shush her, but nobody answered.
The room was dimly lit from stained-glass fixtures that hung from the ceilings overhead, dangling on long chains. They cast the room in strange shadows of every color, but the dominant shading was mostly amber with shadows in an odd, unsettling shade of magenta-purple.
At the end of each aisle of books was a window, though it didn’t do any good to help her understand where she was. Like the lamps, the windows were made of stained-glass. It was night, judging by the pale light that was filtering in through the stained-glass windows, only giving enough illumination to just barely show the images they depicted.
It resembled a window in a church, the way it was made and painted—the way it glorified the figure in it. But the first figure she saw was of Professor James Moriarty. She blinked. Odd. Down the other aisle that was the mirror image of the first? Mr. Hyde.Veryodd. Turning, she peered around the corner, looking for anyone hiding in the shadows. No one.
“Hello?” she called again. No one answered.
Reaching for her phone, she sighed. She’d left it on the table. No dice.
Picking a direction in the massive library, she just started walking. There was nothing much else to do, besides justgo.There had to be an exit. And people. And a phone. She needed to call for help. And an ambulance. Whatever drugs that book had been laced with had really done a number on her.
She was clearly tripping balls and had wedged herself somewhere in the library, and she had to hope one of her coworkers found her.
“Is anyone there? Hello?” And she needed to also call Sidney and tell her she was alive, and while she was coming down from whatever screwed up new form of LSD that the book had been covered in, she was?—
“That depends entirely on how you defineanyone.”
Sasha froze. The voice had come from behind her. She turned, but…no one was there. She recognized the voice—she’d heard it once before. It was the voice from when she touched the book.
It belonged to the man who had been playing the piano. Sharp. Dangerous. But with a low rumble to it that set the hair on the back of her neck standing up.
The man’s accent was decidedly British, and his tone had that twist of a smile to it that promised that whatever horrible thing he was about to do to her, he was going to enjoy it agreatdeal.
“Didn’t realize that was a word up for debate,” she muttered, half under her breath. Deciding she wanted nothing to do with whoever the voice belonged to, she turned to go in the direction she had been heading.
And walked right into someone.
Taking a quick, staggering step back, she rubbed her nose. It felt like she’d stepped right into a damn brick wall! “Sorry, I?—”
The man chuckled. “Words arealwaysup for debate. That is the joy of language. Ever changing. Ever evolving.”
Sasha stared.
Whoever this man was, it was very quickly clear that he…wasn’t normal. She took a careful, slow step away from him.
No, it was very quickly clear that he wasn’t awho.But awhat.It wasn’t even clear at first what about him was so uncanny. But everything in her body told her to run.
Because something primal in her body told her he wasn’thuman.
The man—or whatever he was—was, to his credit, just standing there with his hands clasped behind his back. His hair was as black as obsidian and slicked back, though curls of it stuck out at untamed and odd angles, as though despite his best intentions, it wouldn’t obey.
