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“What does that even mean?”

“It is a question occupying a great many books in the Library. It is also a question that only you can answer to your own satisfaction.”

“So, we’ll take Sophie to this circle, and I’ll find another way.”

The assistant lowered her head. “There is only one other way.”

“Which is?” I could sense the jaws of a trap closing around me.

“You can take the white.” The assistant indicated her porcelain perfection. “Seal the cracks in timeless service.”

“Yeah,” I said. “No.” Actually, working in a vast library wasn’t that far off my dream of taking Xavier’s chair at Books, but doing it in a white gimp suit wasn’t something I was signing up for.

“You have a…burden…upon you, Red.” A faint blue glow filled the assistant’s eye hollows as she struggled for the words. “It is not…fair. But it is. A day will come when this offer seems like salvation.”

“I’m fourteen.” Emotion pricked in my eyes. I fought it off with anger as I so often had before. I was a whining wimp. I’d just come from a hospital full of little kids who’d be eaten by cancer despite all the drugs and machines and knives. “Fuck all that. Save my sister.”

“While she is in these woods her heart no longer counts time. She will never die here.” The assistant looked down at the pool. “Your friend, Rose Penrose, is in more immediate danger.”

And the surface of the pool filled with an image of the place I had so recently left. Among scattered books, a woman lay in a pool of her own blood, impaled by an ugly piece of iron. The woman had been with Rose—she was the witch I had taken the curse upon my own shoulders in order to free.

Chapter 27

Rose

Hannah Cooper lay sprawled in a growing pool of her own blood. The expression on her face was one of enormous surprise. The huge nail that transfixed her was a black iron rivet, one that looked to have been forged by hand on a blacksmith’s anvil.

Rose had dropped to her knees beside the witch, but the hands reaching to help fell back to her sides. The Chimney Woman was beyond her aid.

The Great Smith was in the bookshop. He had found Hannah’s book. How long before he found a way to reach Rose? How many nails had he brought with him? How many books would he have to skewer before he impaled her? And he knew about the Library—he had fashioned her to break it open. If she didn’t face him in the bookshop, he would come after her himself. He’d sent the worm and the worm had failed. He would come himself now.

Rose didn’t know what power the Great Smith believed he’d wrought into her, what edge he had honed…All she’d proven herself to be good at was running. Leaving one world after another to be corrupted in her wake. And even when it had just been the bookworm on her trail, the Great Smith had touched every book she’d entered. The Great Smith of Oz. The Smith of Hearts in Wonderland. Lord Smith in his mill town down the river where the flow would inevitably draw her from the Riverbank.

“You killed my friend.” Rose felt her grief and anger like thorns, pushing out through her flesh. Hannah might not have called her a friend, but it was what they had been. The Chimney Woman had had a hand in raising her. Maybe that had started because the Muse had forced a stray child on her. But there had been more to it, whatever the witch might have said or thought. “You killed her.” Rose’s fists grew so tight they hurt.

Red had friends in that bookshop. Good people.

The Great Smith knew Rose would run. He expected her to. And Rose ran. But at him.

She sprinted away from Hannah’s corpse and, with a wild scream, threw herself into the pool. She could have followed Red, but she didn’t. She took what she had learned and aimed herself at her enemy.

This time it was more like being swirled down the plughole with the bathwater. The bookshop spun around her—shelves, walls rushing past, a bare bulb overhead a circling sun. Single letters, words, whole phrases escaped the books that rotated on her axis, accumulating on her skin to ink her into the world above.

She came to a halt, or rather the room did, and stood teetering, too dizzy to take a step in case she veered headfirst into an unexpected wall. She stood in the small square alcove where she’d met Red and where she’d held his hands. The same alcove where Hannah’s book had been—the ragged edges of the cavity just visible behind the restacked books.

At the exit into the rest of the book warren, a man with dark skin and a fuzz of black hair lay sprawled much as she’d left Hannah, but without the blood or the nail, just a contusion on his forehead. Rose stepped toward him then stopped dead. A figure crossed the corridor on a perpendicular path. A hulking man with a bald, gleaming head, a leather apron, who held in one hand, resting on his shoulder, a sledgehammer.

It seemed for a moment that he had missed her, and in that small span of time, Rose realized where her impulsive anger had brought her. To face a man of great power with nothing but empty hands and outrage. Cold fear doused her rage as effectively as a bucket of water tipped into the fireplace.

When the Great Smith took a step backward and turned his gaze toward her, Rose instantly retreated, looking wildly about for a book into which she might escape. The man turned, filling the corridor, his heavily muscled arms brushing the shelves to either side of him. He came forward. In his right hand he held Hannah’s black book, a nail hammered through it—a big ugly thing like the ship’s nails they used to hold the planked sides together with.

“I have you now.” A grim smile spread across his face. Despite his size and the aura of brutality that surrounded him, he had the eyes of an engineer, or a doctor, intelligent and curious. Somehow that terrified Rose more than an unalloyed brute would.

Rose reached for the nearest book.

“Don’t be tiresome, Miss Penrose. I can follow where you go. But it will cost me, and costs must be recouped.”

“You destroyed my parents’ lives!” Rose shouted the words at him, anger returning. “You experimented on me.”