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I shake my head, leading her to a part of the couch not splashed with Quiggley’s blood. “I have no idea.”

She gives me a shrewd look, her lips pursing. “There are so few undead in the Nordic traditions that can survive being killed. Being disemboweled.” Lacie shivers, but I tuck my hands in my lap, sure she won’t want any comfort from me after our argument.

Because she was right, wasn’t she? I endangered her by making too big of a play. It was rash, and now we’re in for it.

I clear my throat, listening to the way her pulse begins to slow in Quiggley’s absence. “In your experience, what can survive?”

Lacie sharpens, pulling out her phone again. I can tell she likes having something to do—and focusing on this, however horrible, gives her a job. She taps a few times through some pictures and holds up a shaky image of the diary she’d been reading.

“I didn’t get far enough the other day with this one. But it seems to indicate that some wights are simply … indestructible. The only way to destroy them is through…” She turns the phone back to me, quoting the document, “… ‘the will and might of the old gods’ strength.’” Lacie chances a glance at me. “I don’t know what that even means.”

Strange, that those words seem familiar. I close my eyes briefly, skimming through hundreds of years of memory. The problem of being alive this long boils down to this: everything decays. All the things you think you care about, the things you think you love, the things you absolutely hate, they decay, moth-eaten and threadbare.

There were things I wanted to remember that disappeared like rain boiling off a hot spit of rock on a dark sand beach, and things I wanted to forget that carved deep grooves into my brain.

The sick thing about memory is that you don’t get to choose which. Time does that for you.

And something here is familiar, something I might have wanted to forget or remember—and that either way I need.

Lacie’s looking down at her lap, phone cradled in her hands. “I need to get back into the Rare Book Room. There has to be some information about this. But…”

Right.

“When I was at open office hours, Dean Shea said something about some drunk idiots pulling a fire alarm and there being a water leak? Though their story and timing are suspicious, it holds up to scrutiny. Lyle told me he had no luck getting in.”

Lacie stands suddenly and begins to pace, and I am seized with the desire to throw my arms around her, to still her franticness. “No, no, that can’t be. The collection … it’s too massive to lose.” She takes the heels of her hands to her forehead and grinds against her skull. “All of the work I’m doing is based on primary sources from that collection!”

My eyes track her as she paces, tears gathering in her eyes until sobs overwhelm her. Something inside me gives a pulse of pure pain to see her so broken. I stand and gently take her shoulders, then wrap her into a hug.

She doesn’t shake me off. Instead, she leans into me and cries. The thing inside of me shudders with delight at the scent of her skin, and I thrust it back. She’s mine.

“There, there,” I murmur, patting her. “Hush now. There are other places. Other sources.” But I feel the acuteness of her grief, the knife-slice of pain inside of her. The way her heart batters against her chest as she hiccups. She won’t be alright for some time. Humming softly, I wrap my fingers around her damp face, stroking the teardrops away with my thumbs. “Hush, lamb.” My own throat thickens with transitory grief.

I understand the weight of things lost. Everything, even that which feels most permanent, is devoured by the hunger of time. Yes, everything decays. Even me.

I plant a kiss on her forehead, then catch her lips with mine. Gentle, questioning, my insides stammering. I don’t know how to fix what she has seen me do, or the lies I’ve told her. I don’t know how to put a library back together. But I can offer her the only comfort I’ve ever been good for.

It is nothing like our kiss the other night. It is slow, gentle, a knot of heat building in my chest as we fall against the wall of the apartment, then finally pull apart. Lacie gasps for breath, tears still coming but more slowly. Her lashes clumped with salt behind her mussy glasses, her lips a bitten pink, she looks more human and more perfect than anything I could hope for.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper.

She swallows hard, wiping her face with the wrist of her shirt. “I just don’t know what to do. God,” she groans. “I’m so tired of all of this. I’m so tired of working so hard only to hit dead ends.” I know she’s not only talking about her lost books.

“It will be okay, Lacie. Come. Let me get you to bed.” I start to walk toward the door, but when she doesn’t follow, I turn and raise a questioning eyebrow.

“What if he comes back?” Her face is a mask of panic. “What if he comes to my apartment, and I’m alone? I don’t want to be alone, I—”

I nod. “Then you won’t be.”

Gently, I lead her to my sleeping nook, turning my back as she clambers into some of my clothing for the second time in a week, and I breathe through the intensity of my need. When she finally tells me that she’s ready, I tuck her into my bed under silk sheets, dimming the salt lamp. Bellatrix jumps up in the crook of her knees, curling into a void of purring black fur.

I sit down on the edge of the bed and watch her, unblinking, until her eyes become filmy with exhaustion. She’s asleep within minutes, my chest dense as a piece of granite as I fist my hands. Something is changing inside me again. After I devoured Sims’s energy, I thought perhaps I was experiencing momentary indigestion. But now, I feel strange, syrupy. My thoughts aren’t connecting as fast. After Quiggley, my fingertips are beginning to tingle, that rooting, thieving pain stealing its burning way through my synapses. Pressure hits me like a knee to my chest and I stifle a gasp. I need to not do this right now. I need to not get worse than I am.

How can I take control of this situation? What is something I can do right now, even if I die?

I glance at the clock. A few minutes after midnight, the neon green blinking the seconds.

How much of the collection could be ruined? I’d promised her I wouldn’t go rogue, that I’d tell her where I was going and when … but she needs her rest. And I’m not used to working in a duo.