Tess shuddered and tore the paper into pieces. It fluttered around her, falling to the ground around her feet. She capped the pen.
“Are you coming?” Anna called.
Tess closed her eyes. There is no such thing as the devil. You have not slept. You are overworked. This is all inside your head. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m coming.”
seventeen
Tess
TESS DID NOT SEE ELIOT THE NEXT DAY, OR THE DAY AFTER. With every hour of his absence, Tess grew more and more certain he was dead in his office with only that damn book watching over him. She wasn’t certain if she was annoyed because his sudden disappearance made her worry about his well-being or because it forced her to remember he existed in the first place.
And besides. She couldn’t get rid of the feeling that the book had … She didn’t know. But something happened when she read it. She wasn’t alone anymore. Something was watching her: in her room, in the stacks, on the streets. She’d wake in a cold sweat with words on her lips and dust on her fingers.
The book had to go back.
The master key was in Mathilde’s office, in case one of the seniors lost their keys. She hated that she was breaking another rule for Eliot, even though it wasn’t like Eliot had asked her to check up on him, and she wasn’t sure why she was doing it in the first place. If he was dead because of the book, he probably deserved it. That’s what he got for not listening to her.
Tess waited for Regina to leave for the day before she slunk back into the office. Mathilde had a staff meeting and left her office unlocked in case there was an emergency and Tess needed the phone. The key was just where it always was: hanging on the wall above Mathilde’s desk, between a key for the building and an extra for the cages.
While she was back there … If he wasn’t in his office and she took the book, she needed a way to get it back where it belonged. Tess bit her lip. She hated deception, but this was necessary.
She had a house key for her old home on the lanyard in her pocket. It looked very much like the extra key to get back in the stacks.
Just until they put the book back. Mathilde would never notice.
Tess made the switch and slipped the key into her pocket. She headed to the third floor before Mathilde caught her back there.
There was no reason to knock on Eliot’s door. He hadn’t come in, so he wasn’t here.
Except there was some flaw in that thinking, apparently, because when Tess pulled open the door and crept inside, Eliot was sitting behind the desk, reading a book. Tess squeaked, jumping back into the walkway, before her shock turned into anger.
“Tess,” he said. Eliot was too surprised to fully maintain his composure. “I haven’t seen you in days.”
“Right,” Tess said. She stormed into the office and shut the door behind her. “You haven’t seen me in days, but I don’t think that’s my fault. How did you get in? How did you get out?”
Eliot fussed with his tie underneath his sweater. “I, uh, I’ve been coming in early. No worry of yours—I’ve just had a lot of work to do, what with classes starting and all.”
Tess wasn’t buying it. “And how did you leave?”
His voice was a little bit higher when he said, “I didn’t want to disturb you, and there’s that exit to the third floor of the building, which is so convenient—”
Convenient and locked, unless he had a passcode. In fact, all the library was locked if he didn’t have a passcode. “But how, Eliot?”
There was that blush again, which was still familiar. “My father’s passcode,” he said quietly. “It gets me in and out.”
Eliot Birch was a bastard. Tess rested her hands on his desk and leaned in. She wanted him to hear her and completely understand the words she was saying.
“You’ve been avoiding me. And I know it’s about the book.”
“Tess—”
“No.” The book was there, balanced on the edge of the desk, as far away from him as it could be while still being within reach. Tess snatched it and backed away. Eliot reached for it, but he wouldn’t touch her, wouldn’t come closer, wouldn’t physically take it from her. He was too kind and too British for that. “This is going back. Today.”
Eliot’s shoulders slumped. “Tess, please.”
Even holding the book made her nauseous. She couldn’t imagine how he’d stood to be in the same room as it for so many days.
“Are you okay?” Eliot asked, not masking the concern in his voice.
“I’m fine,” Tess managed around the bile. She had to get out of here. She had to get the book back in its cell, where it belonged. This was not just any old grimoire. There was something dark, something deadly, something powerful about this book.
She spoke slowly, mostly so she didn’t vomit all over his vanilla and paper–scented office. “I’m going to take the book downstairs and hold onto it. When Mathilde leaves, you and I are taking it down to the crypt, where it belongs. Understood?”
It was obvious Eliot was trying to change her mind just with his eyes, but that wasn’t working on her today. She took his silence as acceptance and swept out before he could put up a fight.
eighteen
Eliot
IT HAD TAKEN ELIOT QUITE A LOT OF EFFORT TO AVOID TESS for so long, and not just because it was a pain in the arse to either slip into the library before anyone was there or to sneak in through the third floor while Tess was occupied. It also took a lot of effort, Eliot hated to admit, because he liked Tess.
The issue was the book. It felt powerful. Vital. He’d handled many grimoires, and sometimes, he could tell just by the feeling of the cover if it would be useful. This book … It was warm to the touch, like a living thing. Sometimes, sitting alone with it in his office, he swore he could hear it breathing.
The book might have answers. Answers he needed.
Except, as usual, there was the problem of Tess Matheson.
He wasn’t eager to return the book, but after nearly a week with it, the volume wasn’t yielding any of its secrets. Eliot had thrown all his tricks at the book: clarifying spells, truth magic, a very intense session of chanting Latin he’d found on the internet. Nothing had worked.
He was resigned to the fact that the book just wasn’t ready. Maybe, he thought as he walked back from class to the library, it wouldn’t be ready anytime soon.
So in the battle of two evils, the book and Tess’s anger, he decided to return the book. It wasn’t like it was going anywhere. He had a plan working in the back of his mind, one that would take some perfecting, but he suspected it would work.
Tess wasn’t the only one who worked at the library. And her cohort, Regina—whose name he’d finally remembered—seemed more willing to cooperate.
Eliot rounded the corner to the foyer outside the library. Tess was there, curled up on a bench. She had her back to him, but he recognized the back of her head and the thick, dark blond ponytail on top of it. Wisps of her hair escaped from it, sticking out around her ears and haloing the top of her head. He slowed his pace, coming around the corner quietly, so as not to disturb her.
Tess had headphones in, so she didn’t hear him coming. Her back was up against one arm of the bench and her knees were tented. She held a book in her hands. It wasn’t that he was surprised to see her reading—the girl worked in a library, after all—but he’d never expected to look at Tess and see a girl. Usually, when he looked at her, she made sure that he was only seeing edges: a serrated blade of animosity, a blunt peak of stubbornness, a sharp corner of hostility. She was never just a girl, like she was now. A girl reading a book, who looked tired and wilted and … well, human.
Maybe that was it. Tess had never looked quite so human before.
The realization was more earth-shattering for him than he wanted to admit. Of course she was human. Mythical sprites and the like didn’t exist outside of his books, and he wasn’t an idiot. At least, he wasn’t an idiot most of the time.
But here was the thing: Eliot Birch sp
ent most of his time with the occult, the unearthly, the surreal. Yet in his time in Pittsburgh, even though they discovered that strange book and secret passageway, even though he had more grimoires in his office than he even knew existed, Tess Matheson was the most otherworldly being he’d encountered so far. It wasn’t about her sharpness or the exhausting way she spent most of her time tearing him apart. It was the fact that he saw her every day—when he wasn’t avoiding her, at least—and still forgot she was made of the same material he was.
“Hey,” he said, moving into the foyer.
Tess didn’t jump. She’d been expecting him, after all. She pulled out one earbud and craned her neck to look at him.
“I expected you to come sooner,” she said.
He shrugged. He’d been on his way, but then his mother called. They’d spoken for nearly an hour before Eliot realized how late he was.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was held up.”
She narrowed her eyes. The lack of an explanation wasn’t enough. But Eliot wasn’t explaining more. She’d have to deal with the scraps he offered.
“Well, Mathilde is gone for the night,” Tess said. “So that’s good.”
Eliot led the way to the library doors and keyed in his father’s code. Behind him, Tess snorted, like she was both surprised and annoyed the code worked after all.
The sun was setting outside but there was no way to tell from inside of Jessop. The large windows around the room were shuttered for the night, even the ones on the upper levels. Ghostly blue lights emitted from the power buttons on the computers across the room. Apart from that, there was only darkness.
“I’m going to turn on the lights,” Tess whispered, even though there was no need to keep her voice down. They could shout if they wanted to. There was no one in the library—probably no one in the building, even—to hear them.
Eliot stood very still as she moved away from him. He could hear the sound of her breathing, the pat of her footsteps. There was a sort of dull electricity in the air. It reminded him of the sound from the tunnel. The not-quite-hum, not-quite-song.
The lights flickered on, buzzing and thrumming. Eliot blinked against them, letting his eyes adjust. Tess was already in motion. She crossed back to the circulation desk and ducked under it, rummaging through a drawer.
“Lock the door behind you, hmm?”
Eliot did as he was told, then followed Tess towards the back. She held the book at an arm’s length, which would’ve been comical if she didn’t look so pained by the action, then pulled a ring of keys from her pocket and unlocked the office. Eliot realized she must’ve taken them earlier, without Mathilde noticing.
He did not look at the haloed wisps of hair around her head, made even more luminous in the harsh fluorescent lights of the stacks.
He did not think of what she must’ve been doing all day, or how sometimes, he looked down from his office and watched her read with her head cushioned on one hand and her lower lip between her teeth. He did not imagine what it would be like to touch her, to sweep the hair away from the back of her neck and let his hands linger on her shoulders, on the knob of her spine.
Eliot did not do any of these things because he believed if he denied something vehemently enough, his reality would become truth.
Except Tess caught him looking, so he lowered his head and felt his cheeks blaze pink.
They reached the bottom floor. Tess shifted the book onto her hip and fussed with the stolen keys.
“I’ll take that,” Eliot said, reaching for the book.
“No,” she said, too quickly. She bit her lip, and Eliot was pretty certain she thought he’d run away with the book if she gave it to him.
The key slipped into the lock, and the click of the tumblers was loud enough to make them both flinch.
“I hate being in the stacks by myself, especially at night,” Tess said. It was odd for her to offer information if he wasn’t specifically asking for it. He stared at her for a moment before he realized what she’d said.
“I feel the same way about my office, sometimes. And my dorm.”
Tess opened the cage and let him in. “Where do you live?” she asked. He recognized she was making small talk, perhaps to both block out the silence around them and also to distract them from what they were doing. It surprised him somewhat that she was willing to sacrifice her steely ignorance of him just for this.
Or perhaps she was beginning to warm to him. Doubtful, but faintly possible.
“On Dithridge.” Eliot craned up on his toes and scrabbled along the back wall of the stacks for the switch or lever or whatever it was. “In one of those older houses, converted into dorms.”
“Ah,” Tess said, and Eliot wondered if she knew the street he was referring to—or, even worse, the other boys who occupied those dorms: kids whose parents were oil tycoons and diplomats and celebrity lawyers, kids who were considered rich even by Jessop’s standards. Not that Eliot’s family was that rich. He was associated with them because of who he was, not what he was worth.
“And you?” Eliot asked. The switch was not to be found yet, so he moved down a shelf and continued the search.
“I live in South Schenley. It’s by the park.”
“Everything is by the park,” Eliot said. Falk was located in Oakland, a suburb of Pittsburgh. A small school by anyone’s standards, Falk was oddly shoved into the spaces not occupied by the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon. The main buildings were in an area of Schenley Park called Panther Hollow, which was awful because everything was either up or down a hill.
Eliot was still considering the nuances of Pittsburgh geography when his fingers found the switch. He flicked it, and a grating sound filled the cage. Near the cage door, Tess winced.
The books to his right slipped away, down into the floor. Darkness filled the empty space that the shelves left behind. They watched the maw open into nothing. A fierce chill crept up his skin, and he felt a sheen of sweat across his forehead. Tess looked similarly queasy.
He didn’t expect it to be harder a second time around, going back into that subterranean tunnel. He didn’t even think the last time had been that difficult. But now that he knew something of the book in Tess’s hands, now that he knew of the darkness that pressed heavily, he wasn’t sure how much he wanted to go down those steps again.
It didn’t seem like Tess felt the same foreboding chill, like they wouldn’t be so lucky to get out the second time. “Come on,” she said, flipping on her phone flashlight. “I don’t want to stand here all night.”
Following her was the only option. The weak beam of the torch bounced off the stone walls. They seemed darker this time, streakier somehow, as if they’d been exposed to a patchy rain.
He wanted to point out they could’ve just stood at the top of the steps and tossed the book into the void, but Tess was already turning down the tunnel towards the dead end.
He couldn’t turn back.
nineteen
Tess
TESS GENERALLY PRIDED HERSELF IN BEING THE TYPE OF person who didn’t care what others thought of her. And yet, the thought that Eliot Birch could believe she was afraid of this fucking hole in the ground physically pained her.
The flashlight beam at the end of Tess’s hand was trembling. Everything about this tunnel was too dark, too close; a sentient being. It was clingy, a living thing, like the book itself. This time around, the humming was closer, whispering: Tell me your secrets. I’ve shown you the truth of me. Stay a little longer, Tess.
Maybe Jessop was haunted after all. But haunted or not, Tess was not going to let this godforsaken tunnel get the best of her.
She just wanted to get to the end of it, toss the book, and go. The only thing keeping her from breaking into a run was the steady sound of Eliot’s footsteps behind her.
If she focused on hating him instead of being afraid, she would get through with her pride intact. If Eliot saw her break, he would have yet another thing to use against her.
<
br /> The tunnel widened into the room at the end, and she traced the walls with her light until she found the alcove Eliot had taken the book from.
She’d almost forgotten she was holding it, but now the book in her arms felt hot—maybe hot and wet, even, like when she’d skinned her knee as a child and the blood soaked through her pantleg.
“I’m dumping it,” Tess said. She needed to get rid of it. The sensation of heat was now coupled with that humming, ringing in her ears. The heat was too much like the fire; if they stayed any longer, she feared they’d both ignite.
Tess pushed the book onto the alcove. As it fell, it opened to the first page. Tess caught a glimpse of it: Ex Libris Tess Matheson.
No. She was imagining it. She slammed the book shut and spun around towards the entrance, running right into Eliot. She hadn’t heard him come so close. Immediately, on instinct, his hands caught her upper arms to keep her from stumbling back. Her phone slipped out of her fingers and clattered to the ground, sending an erratic shaft of light up the wall.
“Sorry,” Eliot said. His voice was very, very close. When he exhaled, she felt his breath on her skin. Her breath caught. She was surrounded by him, by the pleasant scent of pages that clung to him, by the warmth in his kind brown eyes.
This was too much for her brain.
Really, the vomit shouldn’t have been unexpected. The whole book situation made her queasy to begin with, and the added humming made a cold sweat break out across the back of her neck, which was usually a physical indication she was going to vomit. She shouldn’t have been surprised when her stomach finally decided to stop tumbling and eject whatever was inside all over Eliot’s sweater.
“Shit,” he gasped, jumping back, but it was too late.
Tess gagged, coughed, and pressed a hand over her mouth. Her skin was sticky and whatever had made a reappearance from her body tasted foul.
“Are you okay?” Eliot asked. He moved closer again—No, go away, dammit, I’m sorry, Tess thought—and laid a hand on her elbow. “Come on. Let’s get you back up.”
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