Ex Libris

by Paula Guran

  Always, it was the little things.

  Then she scooped her left hand downward. She could feel the donut box, even though it was far away. She levitated it, seeing it in her mind’s eye, and waited until it was over the trees before igniting it. Then she sent it to the library, as fast as the breeze could take it.

  If anyone saw the burning box, they’d think it sparks or debris from the library fire, or a figment of their imaginations.

  The box arrived, and she lowered it into one of the still burning sections, careful to keep it away from firefighters.

  Then she closed the trunk lid, and leaned on the window sill.

  Her heart was pounding as if she had run five miles. She had trouble catching her breath. Sweat dripped from her forehead.

  She was out of practice on everything, and that wasn’t good. She really had become complacent.

  And she still had some magic to go before she could quit.

  She wiped off her forehead with the back of her hand, then crouched beside the bed. She removed a locked box with her many identities and two dental models of her mouth.

  Her hand was shaking as she removed one of the dental models. This was the tricky spell, and she was tired from the easy one. She had to make real human teeth out of one of the models. Then she had to send it to the library, and lower it into one of the still burning sections. If there were still-burning sections.

  She had been moving awfully slowly.

  She grabbed the glass of water beside her bed. The glass was smudged. Magoo had probably stuck his little face in it, just so he could touch the water with his tongue.

  Even so, she needed the refreshment, so she drank. The water was warm and stale, and she thought she could taste cat saliva. Probably her overactive imagination.

  She drank the entire glass, then set it down, and squared her shoulders. She held the dental model, squinched her eyes closed, and imagined it as bone, yellowed with age and tarnished with plaque.

  She opened her eyes. She was now holding a mandible instead of a model. It actually looked like someone had ripped teeth from her mouth.

  She shuddered just a little, opened the window six inches and stuck her hand—and the teeth—outside. Then she sent them to the burning library.

  Her mind’s eye showed her that one section still burned. She lowered the teeth there, snapped the mandible in half, and let it fall. It didn’t matter if it hit someone. They wouldn’t know what it was. They would think it was just debris.

  She shut off her mind’s eye for the second time, leaned back, and felt her legs wobble.

  If only she could sit for twenty minutes. But she couldn’t. She had to get out of here before someone remembered her, before someone decided to check up on her.

  That fury rose a third time—no one was thinking of her at all—and then she remembered that it played to her advantage.

  She wiped a shaking hand over her forehead, and turned around.

  That hideous man with the overloaded face was standing in the doorway, holding Magoo with one hand. If anything, the man looked even more menacing than he had in the library.

  And Magoo seemed remarkably calm. He hated being held without having someone support his back feet.

  And he hated this man.

  She held her position, as if she were frozen in fear. Her heart was pounding too hard. She hated it when someone snuck up on her, but that was her fault. She hadn’t retuned her ears.

  Even when she was trying not to be careless, she was being very careless indeed.

  “Making your escape?” the man asked. “You’re a little slow this time, Darcy, aren’t you? Complacent. It trips up escapees every single time.”

  Her heart pounded harder. He used her real name. She stared at Magoo, whose ears were flat.

  Then she made herself swallow against a dry throat.

  “Put him down,” she said, careful not to use Magoo’s name. She didn’t even have to work at making her voice quaver. “He didn’t do anything.”

  “True enough,” the man said. “He isn’t even a real familiar. And even though he’s lived in close proximity to you for—what? a year?—your magic hasn’t rubbed off on him.”

  The caveman’s numbers were wrong. She wasn’t sure if that was deliberate. She wasn’t sure if he had said that to get her to correct him. She wasn’t going to correct him.

  Because Magoo was a familiar, but she had cloaked him long ago. And he had clearly practiced his itty bitty magic more than she had. He had made a doppelgänger, and that doppelgänger was at least a year old. How often had Magoo used that doppelgänger with her, so that he could do whatever it was he did when he didn’t want her to catch him? Enough so that this doppelgänger had some heft and a tiny bit of catlike life.

  Good for Magoo, sending the doppelgänger out when he heard the caveman come through the door.

  Or was the creature that the man held actually Magoo?

  Her heart rate spiked.

  She was going to have to use her mind’s eye to check, which meant magic, which meant even more doors opening, more people coming for her. Those tears pricked her eyes again.

  “What do you want?” she asked the man, even though she knew.

  “We need you back in Alexandria,” he said.

  How many times had she heard that answer in her nightmares? And for how many years? Ever since she had inherited the library. The real library and all of its knowledge, once thought lost.

  Her stomach twisted. “And if I don’t go?”

  He raised Magoo—or the Magoo doppelgänger—and shook him slightly. The cat made a mew of protest. Unless the man had magicked Magoo, that really was the doppelgänger. The actual Magoo would’ve bitten the man’s fingers off.

  “Do you really want to test it?” the man asked.

  She clenched her fists. No, she didn’t want to test it. And no, she didn’t want to deal with the man either, because that would mean fire, and if she somehow set this place on fire, and the library was already burning, then that would draw attention to Mary Beth Wilkins, and Darcy (no, Victoria. She had to think of herself as Victoria) didn’t want any attention ever falling on Mary Beth.

  “What do you get paid if you bring me to Alexandria?” she asked, not willing to say, Bring me back, because that would imply that she had left, and in actuality, she had never been to Alexandria. The library had. The library was born there, and parts of the library died there. Her ancestors managed to save some of it—much of it—during the four different times it burned.

  But they had learned to never, ever put the books back on the shelves, because doing so brought out men like this one. And sometimes started fires.

  She took a deep silent breath, then flashed her mind’s eye for a half second, looking past the man, seeing what his powers were, and seeing if that creature he held was the real Magoo.

  The man had less power than he thought he did, and the creature wasn’t Magoo. Magoo was crouching motionlessly in his carryall.

  She retracted her mind’s eye, but the man had noticed.

  So she stood taller, and let her power thread up. Without planning it, she extended one hand and sent a ball of flame to the man so quickly that he didn’t have time to scream before it engulfed him.

  His mouth opened, then his face melted as his entire body incinerated.

  She stopped the fire before it destroyed him completely. The stench of burning meat and grease filled the air.

  Magoo sneezed.

  The man’s body had toppled to the hardwood floor, and the flames had left a serious scorch mark. She walked over to the body, and poked it with her foot.

  She had needed a body. Actually having one would be so much better than those stupid teeth had been.

  She bent over him, and separated the top of the skull from the jawbone. She left the top of the skull to float just above the body. Then she removed some small bones from the feet and the hands, not enough to show that the hands were bigger than hers, but enough to show that th
e hands were human. She took a small portion of a rib as well.

  She compiled them into a little ball, covered them with a cloak, and sent them, still steaming, through the still-open window. She monitored them as she sent them to the library, and let them tumble into the section where she had sent the teeth.

  Then she uncloaked them. Their steam mixed with the smoke of the still-smoldering section.

  She shut off her mind’s eye and took a shuddering breath, then wished she hadn’t. It tasted foul, like rotting meat. She licked her lips.

  Her neighbors would notice that odor.

  She used the last of her energy to cremate the remains into little bits of nothing, careful to contain the fire. Then she put it all out, staggered into her kitchen, and took out a broom and dustpan. She swept up the ash, and dumped it into the toilet in small sections, flushing several times so that it wouldn’t clog up the system.

  By the time she was done, she was woozy with exhaustion. She hadn’t used that much magical power in years and years. And using it had opened the door to more interlopers like the man who had just died.

  She ran a hand through her hair and looked in the mirror. Shadows under her eyes, and a face smudged with ash. She washed off her skin, then staggered into the kitchen and drank an ancient bottle of Ice Blue Gatorade. It helped, a little.

  In the living room, Magoo mewed. It was probably a get-me-out-of-here mew, but she took it as a move-your-ass mew. Because she had to.

  She really had been careless. Not just here, but at the Midbury Lake Public Library.

  That fire. It had to be her fault. Not because she set it, but because she hadn’t monitored the books. With all the interest in the history of the ancient world these days, particularly the history of religion as it pertained to modern times, someone had probably ordered a book through interlibrary loan that she hadn’t seen.

  A paper book, one that shouldn’t be on the shelf of an library where she worked. A paper book about paganism or magic spells or showing ancient scrolls. The kind of book that had actually been in the Library of Alexandria in its heyday or in the Serapeum just before it was destroyed.

  The kind of book stored inside her memory, in a locked area, where she couldn’t touch it. Like the women before her, all of them, from the same family. She likened that locked area to a computer chip. It contained knowledge and power, but only tapped that knowledge and power when something demanded them.

  She had put herself in a position where nothing would tap the knowledge, or she thought she had. But she hadn’t done enough. She should have kept an active inventory on the books that her family guarded. She hadn’t, and it had caused this.

  Because, whenever one of the old books hit a shelf, or a facsimile of one of the old books hit a shelf near a library repositorian (like her), the ancient spells revived, the ones that had actually destroyed the library. If the books from the Library of Alexandria reappeared on shelves, those shelves were supposed to burn.

  Her family, one of the sixteen ancient families that guarded the library’s knowledge, had never been able to counter those spells. Her grandmother had died trying, so her mother simply avoided libraries, bookstores, and any other place where books gathered.

  Darcy had embraced libraries, but she had been cautious.

  Not cautious enough though, since that horrid man had found her. And she had destroyed her favorite little library by not monitoring what crossed its shelves.

  She went back into the living room. The carryall was inching its way across the floor. Apparently Magoo had had enough.

  She crouched beside him and put her hand on his back through the soft side of the carryall.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “We still have to go.”

  Before someone caught her again. Before someone took her back to Alexandria. Before someone tried to take that chip of library knowledge out of her brain, and destroy it entirely. Or, worse in her opinion, tried to revive it all at once, and use it for the wrong purpose—whatever that purpose might be.

  She put on the wig and hoodie that marked her as Mary Beth’s cousin, then grabbed both carryalls and walked to the door. The apartment still smelled faintly of greasy meat, and there was a lingering bit of smoke.

  That was on her. It was always on her.

  The magic inside her wasn’t her own. It wasn’t even the library’s. It was an ancient evil spell, designed to destroy the very things she loved.

  Books.

  Maybe the next time she stopped somewhere, she wouldn’t become a librarian. Maybe she would run a movie theater or open a donut shop. Or maybe she would spend her days in genteel poverty, sitting in a coffee shop and watching the world go by.

  She had a lot of time to think about it, and a long way to drive. Where to, she didn’t know. She would wait until she deemed herself as far from this place as possible, in a location that seemed as far from Alexandria as possible.

  Then she let herself out and walked down the stairs, quietly, so as not to disturb the neighbors, who were already gathering around the front of the building. She could hear the conversation: they thought the stench was coming from the burning library.

  Let them.

  People always misunderstood why libraries burned. They blamed old paper or faulty wiring. They never blamed the ignorant, who deemed some knowledge worthy and some too frightening to know.

  She wished she could defend that knowledge, but all she could do was protect it, and hold it, until someone else came up with a solution. And when the time came, she would pass that little kernel on to some other member of her family, who would adopt the burden and treasure it.

  Like she had adopted Magoo.

  “Come on, kiddo,” she said to him as they headed to the van. “Adventures await.”

  And she hoped those adventures would be of the gentle, placid kind. Like summer mornings staring at a still Midbury Lake.

  One could always hope. Because hope was what kept the bits of the library alive. Hope that one day the spells would lift, one day the library would be reunited, and one day the books would return to the shelves.

  And she would never ever have to grieve again.

  With Tales in Their Teeth, from the Mountain They Came

  A.C. Wise

  She woke with the words I love you on her tongue, speaking them aloud to an empty room.

  They tasted of smoke and ash drifting over a far-distant, muddy field. The War that had taken her lover had lost him. She knew he was dead, because she’d never spoken the words aloud before.

  He’d whispered them in her ear countless times—lying side-by-side in the furrows of their sheets, offered on summer days, spoken in the midst of roof-drumming rainstorms keeping her from her dreams. She’d smiled in return, meaning to answer every time. But she found her teeth locked, her lips stitched closed. He would squeeze her hand, echo her smile with sad patience, and say, Some day. When you’re ready.

  Ten years passed in a single, conjoined heartbeat. Then news came from beyond the Mountain. The papers were full of men and women dying in rain-battered fields. Her lover read them, and every day carved deeper lines around his mouth, and between his eyes.

  Over breakfasts of buttered toast, his untouched, he read to her of mud-spattered corpses, of bright poppies trampled beneath heavy-soled boots, and children crushed the same way, until their skin no longer hid their bones. He read of mass graves, of torture, and atrocities, and leaving grew in his eyes. When she wanted to ask him to stay, fear once more stitched her lips closed.

  She held him as long as she could in their house by the sea. But hands pressed to his skin, and stubborn lips and teeth refusing to shape words, could only hold him so long. His love was vast; it encompassed strangers, dying in fields he’d never seen. He went to War. Her love was small, and encompassed only him. She stayed behind.

  I love you.

  Now she could say the words until her throat bled with them; he would never hear.

  Moonlight streamed through the win
dow, illuminating soft-rumpled sheets. She wrapped arms around her body, surveying furniture and knick-knacks that would never mean as much, absent of his hands. She retraced his footsteps; she fit the whorls of her fingertips into the ghost of his touch.

  There was nothing to hold her here anymore. No hands pressed to her skin, no words waited to be spoken.

  She packed, and left at dawn. The absence of words had lost him, but there was a place she’d heard of in tales where she could drown herself in them. Abandoning the house by the sea, she set out for the Library on the Mountain.

  The librarians shaved her head. They called her acolyte. They gave her a new name, Alba, which they told her meant dawn. And they assigned her the duty of dusting and caring for the books in the Main Hall.

  She never saw the librarians, only their shapes, buried in deep-hooded robes the color of the sky just before sunrise. They wrote words on slips of paper, and dropped them into her hands. Their instructions given, the librarians hid their fingers in their voluminous sleeves again, and turned away.

  “Wait!” Alba called after them.

  The word echoed, vast and terrible, shocking the Library’s silence. She put a hand over her mouth, expecting a hood to drop, baleful eyes to fix her, and a hand to point her back the way she’d come. Instead, a single finger emerged, brief, thin, and pressed to invisible lips inside a hood.

  “Shh.”

  Footsteps made arcane patterns in the dust. The Librarians withdrew, leaving her alone.

  Alba memorized the librarians’ slips of paper—directions to the Main Hall, to a small cell she could call her own, to the Refectory where acolytes and novices took their meals. There were other scraps, telling her where she could and could not go. Acolytes were not allowed beyond the Main Hall, the Primary Stacks, or the First Archives. The Reading Rooms, the Second Archives, the Restricted Section, and the Vaults, were for novices, apprentices, and librarians alone.

  “Why?” Alba asked her neighbor at one meal.

  The dour man, his skin the color of his porridge, glared at her with sunken eyes. He snatched his bowl, and scuttled away, as though Alba’s single word bore the seeds of a plague to infect the Library’s stillness and bring it crashing down. After that meal, Alba never saw him again.