by A J Hackwith
“I know that,” Claire snapped. Her eyes flickered over the room. The door led down the stairs to the street. But what good would descending them do? “Doesn’t mean I have to make it easy for them.”
“For who?” Hero raised his voice, nearly drowned out.
The floorboards shuddered beneath her feet, as if something impossibly large had slammed into the building. Claire braced herself against the wall for support. She squeezed her eyes shut, swallowing down the bile that rose in her before answering.
“Hellhounds.”
Hero’s frown froze, and their collective gaze turned toward the door.
Creatures had to be terrible to escape Hell, and the hunters sent after them had to be even more terrible. Hellhounds were not made to retrieve, for Hell gave no second chances; they were made to destroy. Hellhounds didn’t stop to listen to reason or defenses. Their jaws tore through not just flesh and bone, but soul and spirit. They could rage through the world unseen, and neither time nor space nor reason would placate them. Once they’d been loosed, they’d stop only once they had you in their jaws. They were made to eliminate, they were made to be tireless, and they were made to be ruthless.
When their ghostlights expired, Claire and Leto had officially become lost souls. And lost souls were within the Hellhounds’ purview. They would hunt their prey to the ends of the Earth.
The room rocked again, but though the howling had become nearly incessant, it didn’t sound any closer. Her pulse pounded in her throat once, twice, three times. But nothing came through the door. Hellhounds could ghost through wood, stone, steel. When on the trail of an escaped soul to destroy, they were relentless. Nothing stopped them—nothing should have stopped them.
Andras was the first to move to the window and he stilled as if transfixed. “Claire, you might want to see this.”
Claire glanced at Leto, wide-eyed and panicked behind her. She was unsteady as she pushed away from the bookcase and joined Andras at the window. “What—”
“There.”
The apartment they were in was built into one of the tiered walls of the city, which gave the window a clear view of the grassy moat and sunbaked fields beyond. She took in the massive walls, the bridge with a thinning stream of travelers flowing through, the way the afternoon sun’s light was syrup and honey across the fields dappled with old buildings beyond.
She looked down.
Directly beneath the wall, darkness moved. Creatures, large as lorries and composed entirely of smoke and jagged shadow, prowled the thick city wall. Howls like cudgels and bodies like secrets. There was a handful of them, and they swarmed like airborne sharks, drifting over the empty moat that surrounded the city. Each took a turn throwing its massive body against the walls, and each time one did, the floor shuddered, and Leto and Claire flinched.
“It appears they’re stopped,” Andras said.
“Nothing stops Hellhounds. What in the world is holding them?” Claire wondered.
“The Treaty of Mdina.”
The voice was low, too low to be Leto’s, too human to be Andras’s, too serious to be Hero’s.
Claire spun. The collector stood very still a few steps from Claire, familiar enough to make her heart clench. The deep brown skin at her neck was smooth, showing no sign of the gunshot wound. Dark twists of hair curled neatly over a strong, composed face.
“What the hell—” Hero already had his pistol leveled, but Claire held a hand up. The collector’s eyes were deep and calm, and though Claire stared, she couldn’t quite bear to meet them. She studied her mouth instead. Her lips were parted on words Claire wasn’t sure she could stand to hear. But she had to.
“Talk,” Claire said.
The book collector’s shoulders dropped a little, as if she’d been expecting a warmer greeting. “During the last great war, there was a treaty, sealed with wards. This city has been warded against anything not of mortal make for years. It means you and your people are safe.”
Claire shook her head. “Hellhounds are too powerful to be stopped.”
The woman—woman, because even Claire couldn’t pretend she was just a character—shrugged, shoulders rolling in such a graceful, familiar way Claire found it hard to breathe. “They’ve tried before, but the wards have held for decades. No demons, no angels, no servants of any realm can breach it.”
The quaint little greeting that their guide had performed at the gates. It’d been a ritual. An invitation. Claire said, “You knew we were coming. You let us in.”
The woman nodded. “Anything restricted by the wards needs an invitation from a resident. When I realized what I had, I’d hoped . . . I set one of my people to watch for you.”
“And you are . . .” Andras waved his hand impatiently. “I’m gathering McAllister is not your true name.”
She hesitated, eyes straying to Claire. There was uncertainty in the gaze, and it hurt. It already hurt. There was no salvaging it. Claire jerked a nod, and the woman inclined her head to Andras, though it was not a warm look. “You can call me Beatrice.”
“How Shakespearean.” Hero lowered his gun slightly. “Now that imminent doom isn’t upon us all, explanations are in order.”
Claire scoffed. “We absolutely don’t have the time to—”
“Actually, if your character is telling the truth, we have a great deal of time. Which we will need, since she has yet to reveal the pages, and we have yet to figure out a way to deal with the Hounds.” When Claire turned, Andras had a narrow look for her, as if he were trying to make a particularly bothersome puzzle piece fit. “It is relevant to our interests.”
Claire’s gaze fell on Leto, who looked trapped between terror and confusion. And he was trapped. Caught in the mess that Claire had made of her own past. If nothing else, she owed it to him. She drew a small breath and faced the window again. Staring at the Hellhounds was the cowardly option, but she took it as she considered where to begin.
“I wasn’t even the librarian yet. Newly dead. It might have been . . . what, 1989? Only a few years working in the Library under Gregor, the former librarian. I loved the Library at first. Yes, I was distraught at the idea of being dead; Hell is an alarming thing to wake up to. But the Library itself was . . . magical. I loved books when I was alive. And the idea that they were preserved there was . . . beautiful. Beautiful, but lonely.”
The quiet pressed and prodded at her shoulders. It almost made Claire grateful for the howling Hellhounds. “Librarians have always been unwritten authors. And it’s natural for unwritten authors to be curious about their own books. It wasn’t hard to find them. At first, I spent my free time merely walking the stacks, staring hard at the spines with my name on them as I walked by. That progressed to touch. I knew better than to read them, but . . . I found any excuse to work in the shelves, moving books around them. I suppose it was the attention, the curiosity, that did it.”
“Your book woke up,” Hero supplied grimly.
“One of them, yes.”
A low sigh wisped behind her. “Oh, pup,” Andras said.
Claire flinched at the pity. Her shoulders had crept up with tension. But she had to barrel on. If she stopped, she’d never get through it. “Frightened the holy hell out of me one day while I was straightening the shelves. She was just . . .” Claire resolutely avoided looking at the unwritten woman in question. Resolutely avoided remembering how seeing her for the first time, there in the Library, so immediate and so familiar, so alive in a place of dead things . . . She did not remember how that felt. Did not remember the twist in her breath, the sharp thrill of wanting. Did not feel the old hurt. “I recognized her instantly. She was . . . part of me. One of the parts of me I would have written into a book, if I’d written one while I was alive.”
“You said this was in the Library, though. She escaped?” Leto asked.
“Not then. She didn’t need to, at first. I h
id her.” Her voice had become quiet, clipped, as she tried to get through the tale with the fewest words possible. “The Library, by necessity, is infinitely vast and always changing. Even a tenured librarian can’t locate a single book without a calling card. That’s why we have the systems in place to avoid missing books. There were plenty of places to hide a hero.”
“Why?”
“I wasn’t as big on rules back then as I am now.” Claire gave Leto a tight-lipped smile. “For what reason? Foolishness or loneliness? It doesn’t matter now.”
“It mattered to me,” Beatrice said, almost too soft to be heard. Claire’s throat tightened.
“In any case . . . librarians hold the reins of their libraries. Soon hiding wasn’t enough. I concocted a simple plan to get her out. I would get her past the wards, delay the alarms’ triggering. The idea was that I would go with Gregor to ‘assist’ hunting for her. Then I would slip away with her calling card. There would be the matter of outrunning the Hellhounds, but we would have a ghostlight for a head start and . . .”
“And no one would stop Claire when she put her mind to something.” Beatrice’s comment made Claire finally look at her, giving an unreadable shrug.
“Something obviously went wrong,” Hero said.
Claire hesitated, but Beatrice took over. She spoke haltingly, with a slight velvety accent. Her words weren’t measured or polished but had a steadfast certainty that felt like a lifeline. “We got caught. Librarian Gregor found out somehow—I suspect he knew the whole time. Never was certain. But he was waiting there for us the night I planned to leave. He had my calling card in his hands and . . . he intended to enslave me in that place. Stamp me to Special Collections.”
“Stamping. The monster,” Hero said with a look of mocking horror.
“Claire stopped him,” Beatrice said firmly, and a recoil of disgust shot through Claire.
“Stop. Just stop.” Claire found it difficult to press the words between clenched teeth. “At least do him the honor of telling it accurately. I murdered him.”
The pronouncement came out louder than she had intended and hung, suffocating, in the air. Claire didn’t care to see how it landed with anyone, the looks they were giving her. A cauldron of memories, hurts, fears, bubbled up in her chest, and it took a great effort to lower her voice. She dropped her eyes and said it again, testing the truth on her lips. “I murdered Gregor.”
Leto let out a wounded sound. “But that’s impossible. In the Library—”
“In the Library, there are . . . words, fail-safes,” Claire explained evenly. “Words taught only to librarians, for the defense of the Library. Words that will unravel a soul like the Hellhounds do—it doesn’t work on things native to Hell, of course, not on demons like Andras. But on human souls or creatures of other realms, it evicts them. Unmakes and banishes a soul, like waving away a puff of smoke. They don’t die, of course, but it can take decades, centuries, for a human soul to reassemble.
“Gregor had just taught me those words, warned I might need them someday when I was librarian.” Claire spoke through bile rising in her throat. “Someday, he said. And the words just . . . came out. I hadn’t even thought they would work. I mean, he was the librarian. Why would—”
She stopped herself. Her gaze dragged up, against her will. Leto’s mouth hung open in abject dismay, while Hero’s face was blank. Andras, bloody Andras, actually smiled. It was a soft thing, a proud thing. The next howl of the Hellhounds she felt in her bones.
“I saw his face when I did it. He’d been calm, so calm, up to that point. Gregor was always so infuriatingly at peace with his work. But then I invoked the words. There was surprise. Pain, confusion. Then there was an unquenchable terror. And he was gone.”
There was a silence that was difficult not to fill with a scream. Claire had screamed, quite a bit, in the horror-torn hours afterward.
“Why don’t I know these words?” Andras said.
Hero made a disgusted noise. “Really, Arcanist? That’s what you’re getting from this?”
“Maybe Hell doesn’t trust you as much as you thought.” Claire plowed ahead, barreling toward the end of the story now. Not as if it had ever really ended, for her. It just echoed on and on. Beatrice’s presence proved that. “I couldn’t leave after that—too much chaos to clean up. I removed any record of Beatrice, of my book, from our inventory. I buried the rest of my books in the stacks so it would never happen again. I let everyone assume I’d been promoted. That Gregor’s soul had gone to rest. There were rumors, of course, but Hell prefers rumors to investigation. I . . . became librarian. Andras helped with that.” She tilted her head, considering his reaction. “Did you suspect?”
“That you banished your own mentor in a pique of infatuation? No.” That unpleasant smile formed on Andras’s lips again. “I suspected something tragic had occurred. You were . . . you were not as you are now, my girl. I wish you’d told me.”
“Wait.” Hero held up a hand and shot a look at Beatrice as if he’d just tasted something sour. “She did all that for you, killed for you, sentenced herself to Hell, and you still just . . . left?”
Beatrice’s gaze didn’t waver. “Yes, I left.”
“Such valor, such heroism.” Hero’s lip curled, something akin to real anger sharpening his gaze. “You obviously cared for her a great deal.”
Beatrice’s demeanor chilled. “Don’t presume to speak about things you don’t understand.”
“I understand perfectly a coward who—”
“Enough. It’s past.” The last thing Claire needed was two snarling heroes giving her a headache.
“You’re a murderer.” The pure venom in Leto’s whisper jolted the air in the room. Claire turned to find him staring at her with an alien look of disgust. “You killed someone who trusted you. For what . . . for a crush . . . for her?”
Claire’s mouth fell open. She expected judgment—deserved it, even—but not from quiet, thoughtful Leto. “It’s not like—” She reached out a hand, but the boy jerked back.
“Liar.” He said it with a cutting softness. His lips trembled, opening and closing around his disappointment. Leto turned and stalked out of the room. A moment later, there was the sound of the front door snapping shut.
“He’s . . . upset.” Hero stated the obvious, though it seemed to perplex him. “Shall I go after him?”
Claire shook her head. “No. He’s not wrong.” And, she thought bitterly, they had nowhere to go anyway.
She raised her face, looking at each of the remaining men in turn. She saw herself reflected in their eyes, changed. Respect, disgust—it didn’t matter. It was a grotesque kind of mirror. But when no one else stormed from the room, Claire straightened her shoulders and turned to Beatrice. “You became a book collector.”
Beatrice took a breath, a smile warming her serious features. “I did. Antiquities dealer, technically. Turns out, my previous experience as a protagonist didn’t leave me with many marketable skills besides tenacity.”
Claire made no effort to return the smile. “A book collector with pages of the Codex Gigas in a magically shielded city.”
“That does seem to be quite the coincidence,” Andras said.
Beatrice’s smile faded. “I found Mdina shortly after I escaped. If you’d come wi—” She stopped herself. Started again. “The codex find was a recent turn of events. I’d become a book collector, yes. I found a partner, Avery, with an interest in the obscure and arcane. I had gleaned just enough understanding from the Library to feed him bits of trivia to seem useful. I’d been chasing the rumors of the missing pages for years, only found them in the possession of an unaware French farmer’s family a few months ago. Avery got a lead out of nowhere. Tried to steal from me, before he passed. I should have seen it coming. Cancer riddled, at the end. Obsessed with gods and demons, immortality. I’d thought they would probably end up to be f
akes, or copies, but I—I admit, I’d held out hope that if they turned out to be authentic—”
“You kept them here,” Andras interjected, eyes glittering and keen. “Did you read them? Do they really contain . . . ?”
“Not the issue at hand, Andras,” Claire said.
Beatrice risked a penitent look. Her hand hovered, as if her mind had a thought to reach out to Claire, but the rest of her knew better. “I knew if they were authentic, there was a chance . . . I knew someone from the Library would be after them. As I said, I had a man watch the gates.”
“For what purpose? To trap us here?”
“You’re not trapped. Just . . . shielded.” Beatrice faltered. Her hands were calloused from use, but just as slender as Claire remembered. They raked helplessly through her hair, once, and her curls came away softly mussed. “You are free to leave if you wish, but in the meantime, nothing can get in without an invitation. And I doubt the Hellhounds have the social graces to communicate with anyone.”
“As grateful as I am for invisible monsters, I—” A terrible thought struck her. Claire took a step forward. “Does the ward guard against angels?”
The unwritten woman frowned. “Like, from . . . Heaven? Yes, I suppose it would.”
“And if they got a mortal to invite them in?” Hellhounds were mindless, but angels had every social grace, when properly motivated.
“That would . . . grant them entry.”
Angels. If the angels found them here, they would be cornered without an escape. The codex would be lost and, likely, so would they. It was ridiculous, but focusing on a danger she could address helped her ignore the Hellhounds thrumming doom into her skull. “How many gates are there into the city?”
“Four main gates, not counting the catacombs, but those haven’t been used in—”
“Andras.” Claire turned.
“I needed to stretch my legs anyway.” Andras stood and cracked his neck. He furrowed his brow at Claire. “If you’re certain.”
“Watch for them and secure an exit. We’ll need to figure out a way out of here, Hellhounds or not.”