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“What is it that you’re not telling us?” I shook my head. The emotion was choking me. I couldn’t have formed words to tell him even if I wanted to. “Harlow, tell me. I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me.” There was a desperation in his tone, and I finally cracked.
“Hel said she’s going to sacrifice me. Well, it’s Hel, she didn’t outright say it but she confirmed it. Then she spouted some bullshit about how it wouldn’t be the end of life for me. Which I assumed meant she was going to make me a demon or something in Helheim, but she said I’d be something new, different. She’s so cryptic it’s hard to read between the lines. At the end of the day, it’s still pretty clear.” I glanced up and finally met his eyes. “I’m going to have to die for Hel.”
“Over my dead body,” Hiro said vehemently.
“I’m stuck at Dark Haven. I can’t leave Monty or Kol there and they can’t exactly go far from the portal. It honestly explains why he only came to me in short bursts before I came here. This is where I belong and now it’s apparently where I’ll die.”
“You need to tell the others. They can keep you safe, Harlow. You’re not alone and on the run anymore. We have each other and between all of us, we can stop this. There has to be something else. Another way.”
“I don’t want anyone else to die for me,” I muttered, a single tear slipped out and he reached over, brushing it off my cheek. He used two fingers under my chin to lift my face. I met his gaze and the fire burning in his green eyes was enough to steal my breath.
“You. Are. Not. Alone.” He said each word with emphasis so I couldn’t doubt it.
“Okay,” I relented. He nodded once and went back to his books, a new desperation in his body language as he flipped the pages.
He was the next to break the silence. “Here. This one’s talking about Earth. Well, technically Earth and another place I can’t pronounce, but Earth is the important thing here.” He moved in next to me, shoving my book aside and placing his in front of us. He was close enough now I could smell his spiced-sage cologne, and I breathed it in before focusing on the page.
I wish I hadn’t read it. Each new word sent another shard of ice slamming into my chest until it was impossible to breathe.
“No, there has to be another way,” he protested. “This isn’t right.” He must have only now gotten to the part I was reading.
“So she’s not going to sacrifice me,” I whispered in horror. “She wants me to sacrifice myself.”
Hiro crouched down next to me and grabbed my arm. “Okay, but think about this logically. With you being the one having to do it, that means you don’t even have to die. She can’t force you or it wouldn’t be willing.”
I let out a humorless laugh and shoved my blonde hair out of my eyes. “If only it were that fucking easy. What happens to the world, the humans around Dark Haven, the cities already suffering? I can’t let humanity fall for me. Could I really be that selfish? And what kind of life would we all have if a fucking apocalypse came about? Even I’m not that terrible.”
“You’re not,” he agreed. “But look at this library. There are millions of books here, Harlow. There has to be something here we can use, you don’t have to die. That’s just one option of many.”
He took the book back to his chair and flipped through it again, trying to find anything to counteract what we’d found. But I couldn’t read anymore. I was numb now, terrified, and unable to cope. Hel was wrong, I wasn’t brave enough to do this, nor was I suicidal.
At least not at this point in my life.
“Here’s something else,” he said. Though it wasn’t a convincing tone. “It can be sealed with the unwilling blood of a traitor. How many demons did they kill every day, aren’t they traitors to Hell?”
The last thing I wanted to do was burst his bubble, but he was dead wrong.
“No,” I said. “From my understanding she didn’t start the rebellion but she’s helping them. At the very least she’s feeding them information and giving them the means. She’s not complacent, she’s calling the shots even when she denies it.”
“Fuck,” he cursed. Hiro threw his book aside and grabbed another. Not wanting to just give up, I took one as well.
“There’s a binding spell. Do you think we could try and bind it at its current point?” I mused. “No, they’re already slipping through, we need to reverse it.”
We’d already been here for over an hour, and I felt like we were even more desolate than when we walked in the doors. Or teleported in, rather.
“Librarian?” I called out. He was nowhere in sight but in a blink, he was standing in front of us, eyebrows raised, though his face remained unchanged. “Can I ask you questions? I assume you have an insane amount of knowledge in that head of yours.”
“I do,” he said in that monotone voice of his. “You may ask.”
“Do you know how to close a portal?”
He didn’t even hesitate to think it over before responding. “It depends on the portal. There are several types, even from the same worlds. This library is accessed from thirty-seven realms alone. The most common way is generally sacrifice, or the world leaders of that realm closing it willingly. The only other option is out of your hands. Several other gods could attempt to close it, but it has to be more than six, otherwise it could throw off the balance. There is always a failsafe... otherwise gods would close portals over petty squabbles. You have no hope in that regard.”
Everything he said was with purpose, no emotion to be found. He wasn’t trying to insult us; he was simply speaking facts.
“Thank you, librarian,” I said, swallowing down the lump that formed in my throat.
“I refuse to think that’s the only option. Don’t give up on me now, Harlow.” Hiro was pleading with me, and I couldn’t break his heart. Not yet at least.
