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My entire library has been ripped from the shelves. Countless first editions and treasures I’ve collected for centuries lie in piles on the floor, their pages rustling in the cold wind. The fire is still smoldering in the hearth, offering enough light to see that several volumes were also added to the flames. Chest tight, I cross to see the spines of Bleak House and Middlemarch amongst the charred remains, and grief locks fingers around my neck.
They’re only books—not family, not loved ones—but for two hundred years these volumes have offered comfort, constancy, and wisdom in my darkest hours. They are the one thing I’ve allowed myself to treasure or become at all attached to. To see them so thoughtlessly destroyed is equal parts enraging…and sobering.
They may be “only books,” but anyone who would throw a book into a fire—any book, let alone an irreplaceable, out-of-print antique—has very little concern for reason, compassion, or the elevation of the species.
Forcing my gaze from the fire, I stamp out the cinders glowing on the carpet and quickly gather the salvageable volumes into piles on the table in front of the couch before retreating to the cellar, which thankfully seems untouched by my destructive visitor. I pack my faded canvas pack with toiletries and a change of clothes, gather my toolbox and a few boards leftover from the last extension of the bookshelf, and hurry back upstairs.
There, I wedge the front door closed, hammering the boards into place across the frame to keep the wind from blowing it open again. With one last look around, I decide organizing the detritus from my desk can wait—all my truly important papers are in the vault at the Blackmore estate and my amateur scribblings aren’t of value to anyone but me.
I exit out the back, nearly colliding with a fretful Laura on my way out.
“Growwanh!” She snatches at my coat sleeve and begins dragging me down the steps.
“I know, I know. But we still have time. And if it gets too close, I’ll go ahead and meet you by the east door to the catacombs.”
She whimpers as we start down the dirt road toward town at a swift pace.
“I know you don’t like going to town alone, but you’ll be fine,” I assure her. “It’s too early for most people to be awake and the bear shifter family moved to Canada last year. You won’t be mistaken for one of theirs again.”
Laura grumbles beneath her breath—no doubt complaining about how traumatic it was to be forced into the elementary school after the substitute teacher assumed she was one of the Bowen children, the ones who couldn’t seem to stay in human form for more than an hour or two in the winter months. The natural desire to hibernate can be hard for young bear shifters to resist and, unlike other shifter children, they don’t stay in their adolescent bear bodies for long. Even at a young age, they can easily reach six or seven feet tall when standing on their hind legs.
In the four years the Bowen family called Nightfall home, the school went through an obscene number of desks. They kept getting splintered to pieces when one of the kids would nod off during class and shift in their sleep.
As kind as Bart and Lydia Bowen and their children were, the teachers of Nightfall breathed a collective sigh of relief when they announced they were moving north to care for their aging parents. Even in a town built for extraordinary creatures, some people still don’t quite fit in.
I know that better than most…
I’m the only Blackmore who doesn’t live on the clan’s estate, the only one who seems to find parties and lavish celebrations tedious, the only one who doesn’t consider us all one big, fang-flashing family.
But those people aren’t my family…at least not all of them.
I consider Darcy, Colin, Edmond, and a few other men with whom I share a maker and a history, my brothers. The rest are strangers to me—vapid, shallow strangers, who seem more concerned with filling their eternal nights with hedonistic pleasure and gossip than anything that might benefit the town or the world around them.
And what have you been doing to benefit the town or the world? Out there alone in the cold and damp?
Ignoring the inner voice, I pull back the tangle of dried brambles concealing the east entrance to the catacombs and go to work picking the lock, while Laura chews on her paw and rocks back and forth on the snow-dusted ground nearby.
“We still have time,” I promise her, even as sweat breaks out on my lip.
But it isn’t the threat of the sun I can hear sizzling its way out of the sea that has me feeling the pressure. That watched feeling is back, lifting the hairs at the back of my neck…
I want to spin, raise my fists, and challenge whatever it is that’s hunting me to show itself, but a glance over my shoulder reveals Laura practically apoplectic with anxiety. She’s stripped large chunks of fur from her paw, revealing red, irritated flesh and her rocking has become a frantic bobbing accompanied by a low, persistent keening sound.
Forcing my attention back to the rusted lock, I ignore the way my skin crawls and the feeling that Laura and I aren’t alone here beneath the trees by the old mill. Hopefully whatever this thing is, it won’t be able to follow us into the catacombs. And even if it does, I know where the ancient weapons are shelved. I’ll be able to protect Laura and myself until the sun sets or one of the librarians hears something amiss down in the sub stacks.
But even as I soothe myself with the comforting thought, a part of me warns that the librarians rarely have time for the supernatural section of the collection. The catacombs have been largely abandoned since Matilda the Wise, an ogre with a gift for organization and keeping unruly books on their proper shelves, retired fifty years ago. It’s too big a job for Sophie and her assistant to manage in addition to the surface library, programs for the children, and half a dozen book clubs.
Laura makes a sound like a cow tipped in the middle of a deep sleep. I turn to see her frantically flapping her arms in the first pale, milky yellow rays of light cresting the horizon.
Crouching closer to the door, I jiggle the metal pin on my pocketknife with renewed purpose. “We’re almost in,” I say, praying the words are true.
My cells vibrate in response to the sun’s heat, warning I only have seconds to save myself from being burned alive. Suddenly, I realize I’m not ready to go, and not simply because I made a vow never to take my own life or the easy way out.
For the first time in years, I actually want to live.
As my flesh begins to sting like it’s being stung by thousands of fire ants, memories of Annie rush through my head—her voice, her face sweet in sleep and even sweeter when she smiles, her eyes locked on mine in a silent promise that she won’t let me push her away.
My fingers fumble, dropping the pin. I curse and snatch it from the ground, but by the time I fit it back into the lock, smoke is already rising from my clothes, blurring my vision. Laura rises onto her hind legs behind me, spreading her arms to shield me with her shadow, but she can’t stay that way for long.
