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“What?” She startles.
“Sit down.”
Uneasily, she sits, one hand pulling the fabric of her tartan skirt close around herself.
“I’m not trying to mislead you,” I say, trying to soothe her. “I’m really just trying to help. If you think that I would try to wrangle tenure by killing people, I guess that’s your prerogative. But do I really seem like that kind of person”—monster—“to you?”
A beat of silence passes before Lacie sighs and shakes her head. Relief, unbelievably kind and better than I deserve, washes over me.
“No, you don’t. I’m sorry, Marcella.”
“I’m ruthless, but not cruel. Get it straight.” I offer her a smile. “Those bite marks, they were needlelike, both times. Deep. It’s a calling card, and we should hold it in mind.”
Lacie nods, slowly releasing her death grip on her steak knife. “There are only a few places in the world with better repositories of information than Preston.” Her eyes chase to meet mine, her glasses flashing gold in waning candlelight. “I’ll go to the library tomorrow and start looking for real.”
I lean across the table and brush the hair from her face. “Good girl.”
FOURTEENLacie
It’s taken some time—specifically two days—digging around the library catalog but I think I’ve found something to help. Never mind the pile of ungraded work at my elbow. Never mind that I haven’t slept since we found Laurel dead in that hallway a week ago. It feels like forever.
I can’t stop picturing Lyle’s face as he shook Marcella in the fellows’ restaurant hallway. He didn’t look right.
It’s his face I see when I wake up, heart pounding, with a slash of blood on his sleeve as he yells words I can’t understand.
God, please, I just want to sleep a full night without my nightmares chasing me. All I see are twisted bodies, pools of drying blood.
If I can figure this out, I can rest.
That’s how this works. If I get an A in investigating this, if I get us closer to what killed Laurel and Therese, Marcella will offer me a smile and a pat on the head and forgive me for my drunken accusations, and I can relax. Focus on my classes, instead. The lust I feel is a mistake in translation—it’ll disappear once I’m on the right path. I know it. And tonight’s the Winter Ball, and between that and this diary I’ve found, surely my luck is turning.
It’s early, and I’m doubly lucky that the librarians at Preston know me—I spend every break here. They’ve sat with me when my parents didn’t answer my calls, quietly putting those mini packs of tissues on my books when I run to the Perk for coffee. They leave books in my carrel that they think I’ll find helpful for my classes.
And because of that, because they’re as close to family as I have, they often let me into the Rare Book Room before hours.
When I say the words “Rare Book Room,” it probably conjures images of Gothic halls replete with candles and book stands made of oak. But the reality is this: the outside of Preston’s Rare Book Room is beautiful, the wood carvings on the door gilt. There are twin gargoyles, the ones from Preston’s coat of arms, their paws and claws stretched over the script signage.
But inside, the trappings of beauty fall away, leaving me with humidity- and temperature-controlled stacks of books on motorized shelving. I’m still not allowed to go back into the stacks on my own—that’s reserved for librarians—and my hair’s pulled back tightly so any oils don’t touch the pages nearing a thousand years old.
Millenia of knowledge, and most students don’t even know this place exists.
Since undergrad at Columbia, I’ve spent every single moment working toward this: working here, under the auspices of a grand education. Learning my letters. I just didn’t think I would be using it for this.
Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires by Dom Augustine Calmet lies to one side, its pages deckled by time, the cracking leather exposing catgut twine holding the spine together. I started there but quickly realized that the 1700s tome was unhelpful. We’re not looking for a vampire. We’re looking for something that has slid along the backside of history, quietly killing, quietly existing.
If I don’t think about it too hard, I’m not afraid. It can just be a story I tell myself: once upon a time, there were monsters.
But the monsters are real. Marcella has shown me they are. Even Lyle sees it.
Shaking my head, I glance at the hermetically sealed clock. It’s only fifteen minutes to 8 AM, and I need to get this notation done. In front of me I have a book the size of my palm re-bound inside newish red leather, linen-wrapped weights pressing the disintegrating pages open. It’s not like Calmet’s dissertation. Rather, it’s a handwritten notebook in Old East Norse, and I’m struggling with the slant and swoop of the writing. It seems that the person who carried this tiny book, a diary really, was a noblewoman of some rank. The notation on the library listing can’t place the author, but notes that there is a full burial chant on the final page, as well as entries on warfare, as would have been common at the time, when Iceland was held under Danish fealty. I have seen the word draugur half a dozen times, but vættir, or wights, are also mentioned. Icelandic is barely changed from Old Norse, and I feel confident that this is the monster we want—not a draugr, or even a crowd of draugur, but vættir.
A thing.
Beings.
The peoples of Scandinavia and Germania were so afraid of these monsters that they couldn’t even give them a real name. Taking a steadying breath, I work to translate the Old East Norse, transcribing one of the diary entries onto a piece of paper beside me with the only allowed writing utensil: a No. 2 graphite pencil.
The lord and protector of the realm sent a party to root out the beasts. He and his mighty warriors visited a monastery abandoned in Dyrhólaey.
