by A J Hackwith
The mockery slid off the Watcher’s stony face without effect. “You will have to try harder to enrage me, I’m afraid. Hand over the book.”
“Seeing as I have no idea what book you’re referring to, you’re going to have to be more specific.” Taunt failed, Claire reached for placating. “Honest, I really don’t know what you’re after.”
“Don’t waste my time. The book. You didn’t get all of it, did you?”
Leto’s mind conjured the hero’s unwritten book with fangs of jagged missing pages. Leto swallowed hard, and Claire turned guarded. “There might have been an accident. What concern would that be for a Watcher like you?”
The man’s hard lips took on a smug demeanor for the first time. The blade in his hand didn’t waver as he withdrew a small clear bag from his coat pocket. Inside fluttered a scrap of paper, a corner ripped from some larger piece. As his eyes landed on it, Leto thought he heard a faint hiss, quiet words he could almost make out.
“Because I got there first.” The man gave a hard smile.
The whispers swam Leto in vertigo. He shook his head to clear it. “Is the author okay?”
The Watcher paused. “What?”
“The—”
“Hush, Leto.” Claire cut him off. She frowned at the paper in the man’s grasp. “If those are the pages, that belongs to the Library, Watcher.”
The Watcher straightened his sword. “It belongs to Heaven, as everything does. Now, I will have the rest of the book from you.”
“I’m afraid you’re out of luck. It’s already been sent back to the Library. But if you want to come by during visitors’ hou—”
“Liar!” A voice like thunder sent the hairs on Leto’s neck on end. Claire flinched as if she’d been shocked. The Watcher had cleared the space in a moment and rested his sword at Claire’s breast. “I am Ramiel. Soldier of the First Host, the Thunder of God. I’ll have the truth.”
Light shuddered just beneath the blade’s surface, though Leto swore Ramiel hadn’t moved. Leto twitched, and Claire shook her head ever so slightly.
“Ramiel . . .” Claire breathed, and for the first time Leto heard fear in her voice. “I wasn’t aware fallen angels had such a passion for literature.” Leto blinked at the word. Angel.
“Will you hand over the book, Librarian?” Ramiel’s shoulder inched down as his lips pressed into a pale line. The clear bag with the parchment dangled from his free hand at his side. Leto found himself listening for the whispers. He wasn’t sure if he wanted more to pick out the words or to block his ears. “I will not ask again. I know you are neutral. You were once human. I have no quarrel with your duties. But I must return with the book.”
The pause was charged, air before a storm. When Claire spoke, her voice was calm again. “Leto, dear. Remember to blow out your ghostlight.” She spoke without breaking her gaze from the angel. “Unfortunately, my duties extend to every book in my care. I cannot help you.”
“A pity. I wish it were otherwise.” A shutter came over Ramiel’s gaze, eyes guarded. His sword arm trembled. The air felt on the edge of cracking, and then Leto knew.
He didn’t know what a Watcher was; he didn’t know what a Watcher did. Didn’t know about fallen angels or books in Hell. Leto barely knew himself. But if he was human, then everything human in him—every teenage, powerless, frustrated human fiber—knew what angry men in power did when denied something they felt they were owed. Leto darted forward and grabbed desperately at the nearest thing in reach: the bag dangling from the angel’s fingers.
He’d intended merely to create a distraction, but the reaction was immediate and violent. Ramiel grunted, jerking his sword away from Claire’s chest. His arm swung back, and Leto flinched against the railing, waiting for the blow.
Instead, Claire’s arm crashed against Leto’s chest. They careened backward and pitched against the wood.
“Deep breath!” she ordered as the world spun. The railing dug into his back and then they toppled over the edge of the pier. The Watcher’s startled face tilted out of view, sword faltering as a free hand reached out. And then they hit the black cold water.
Ice spasmed through his nerves and the water closed over him. A brackish taste flooded the back of his mouth before he remembered to clench his throat shut. Diffuse light bled away as they sank into the bay. Claire’s hand clamped tighter onto his chest as another hand pawed for the pocket that held his ghostlight. Leto got the idea and managed to pull the tiny lighter out with a free hand.
His lungs burned. It was too dark to see, and his movements were turning thick and sluggish from the icy Puget Sound waters. Claire’s hand fumbled on top of his, and she thumbed the switch. The ghostlight flared, sparking light into the dark water with an impossible blue flame.
A trickle of bubbles breathed against his cheek as Claire mouthed something. He could not hear them, but he caught the last words as they bloomed quiet in the center of his head, like a half-remembered poem.
“. . . and I’ll drown my book.”
7
CLAIRE
A librarian has already failed if a book requires repairs. Books will age, yes, even in the Library. Need new binding, a tidying up of revisions. But true damage happens only when a book escapes.
I expect you, apprentice, will never fail so in your duties. But should a book need repair, be prepared to devote all your time and patience. It is simple enough to repair a book’s paper form; even its manifested form will mend. But a book in the Unwritten Wing is the manifest potential of a story—the words are the thing. Potential cannot be ripped out and replaced like parchment or leather. You cannot substitute your own words. A story must be fed, encouraged to grow its own roots.
Keep the books from damage, Gregor. Repair those you can save. But beware the stories that find their freedom.
Librarian Yoon Ji Han, 1817 CE
WHEN CLAIRE BLINKED, ENDLESS gnarls of red thread danced on the insides of her eyelids. She groaned, rubbed her eyes, and drained the remains of her cold tea.
They’d landed back in Walter’s office, flopping about like fish, and bringing a hearty helping of the bay water with them. Walter had insisted on wrapping them both up in his jacket—it was big enough to practically engulf both Claire and Leto—and escort them personally back to the Library. The big gatekeeper tutted about the disgrace of such treatment the whole way.
The hero was still unconscious. Claire allowed Brevity to make a tolerable amount of fuss before retreating to the restorations room with the hero’s book, supplies, and the scrap that Leto had, miraculously, held on to during their escape. Despite the panic in his wide eyes, he’d demonstrated quick thinking; Claire was forced to revise her impression of the confused teenager.
She’d allowed Brevity in to deliver a hot pot of tea and a clean change of clothes before turning her attention to the process of restoring the book. If Claire was going to get answers as to why a fallen angel, let alone a Watcher, was interested in an unwritten fantasy novel, she would need to make sure the hero survived long enough to answer questions.
After hours of painstaking work, she was no longer afraid they were going to lose the book entirely. An unwritten story was fragile when damaged. Pushed too far, it could fall apart, like ice cream on a summer day melting away for lack of authorial intent. There had been no time to do it properly with a full rebinding, but Claire had held the book together with thread and paste. She breathed every curse she knew under her breath as she stitched blank sheets into the wounded front pages, carefully tying the savaged front matter together with tiny red binding threads. The new pages were strong, but it still might all be for nothing if it didn’t restore the story. She’d spent the last two hours trying to coax the words, first with soft assurances, then with orders, finally with the blunt end of her quill, nudging the trembling text to repopulate the blank pages.
But they wouldn’t budge. T
he best she’d been able to do was convince some pointless footnotes to spread to the heading of the first page. The rest of the replacement pages remained infuriatingly blank, their text lost forever. Which was going to leave the hero in a predicament. Stories needed a beginning to make sense. Claire had to restore the book if he was going to go back to where he belonged. Something was missing. She turned to the scrap they’d procured from the Watcher.
With tweezers she withdrew it delicately from the plastic bag, turning it over under the lamp. The paper was yellowed and fibrous. Lichen green ink glimmered when the light hit it, and a delicate scent of anise and ash was detectable when it drifted under her nose. There was neither green ink nor such a scent in the rest of the book before her. She shook her head, setting aside the strangeness to try to puzzle out where it fit.
It didn’t. It took no time at all to come to the conclusion. No matter where Claire positioned it, no matter which way she twisted the scrap, the book rejected it. Even if it had belonged to one of the missing, burned pages, the book would have recognized it as its own. Instead, it took all of Claire’s strength to keep the tome from skittering off the table to flee the tiny piece of parchment.
The book jerked again. Claire lost her grip on the tweezers, sending the scrap drifting off the table for the hundredth time. The book fled to the far shelf in a froth of paper and leather. The librarian hissed a dark curse and bent to snatch the stubborn scrap between two fingers.
And the blood sang in her veins.
The shadows tilted, and her vision swam as a chill shuddered from the paper, up one arm, and down to her toes. A flash. The edge of a shadow, the fault in a rock, the supple joint in the pulse of the world. Tender hollows designed to break. And time, time, so much time, howled underneath. A wildfire of images hit her, burning up all thought, breathing ash in its wake. Undoing. Unending. Unyielding. She came back to herself bent over her chair, gagging for air while the scrap of paper drifted toward her toes.
That was, most definitely, not an unwritten book, nor anything imagined or written by man.
Claire clenched her hands, clamping down on the shiver that threatened. Her pulse was still stuttering in her head, but she retrieved the tweezers and carefully lifted the scrap. She could see the age of the otherworldly parchment now, the fineness of the fibers. Not paper, not parchment. There was no way it belonged to the hero’s book, belonged to any of her books. Impossible that she’d missed it before.
“What are you . . . ?” Claire turned it under the light. Whatever it was, it was old. Powerful. The fallen angel wasn’t after the hero’s book after all—this was something different. A fallen angel working for Heaven sought it. Thought the Library had it.
But it wasn’t of Heaven; of that much Claire was certain. Nothing that sang that song could be. It was a song of destruction and endless hunger.
That was Hell’s song. But Hell had no literature of its own.
A muffled groan escaped through the closed door. That would be the hero. Claire carefully set the scrap down with a sigh, pushing it away in favor of more immediate concerns. Vague murmurs drifted in through the door, summoning her. The hero would need her attention next; then she could focus on the mystery of the scrap in front of her.
Claire worked the kinks out of her aching hands before opening the door and, likely, answering yet more of Leto’s unending questions. The human-demon had an inexhaustible supply, it seemed.
Her gaze flicked again to the whispering page. Questions.
She had a few.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
BY THE TIME CLAIRE joined the group in the main section of the Library, the hero was sitting up. He draped a lanky muscled arm over the back of the couch while Brevity clucked instructions at him over her teapot. Leto perched at the far edge of the sitting area, wound tight as a spring.
Leto was returned to his demon features, but Brevity had taken the opportunity of his soggy condition to replace his ill-fitting suit with a more comfortable pair of slacks, suspenders, and a buttoned shirt, arms rolled up, in a vivid blue that matched the muse’s tattoos. He looked slightly less cadaverous and more like a high school kid on an internship. Claire smiled. Brevity was in the middle of interrogating him, her hands animated over the caddy of saucers and cream.
Leto caught sight of Claire first and coughed on his tea. Brevity’s head whipped around, and she stomped toward Claire. “You were attacked by a Watcher?”
Claire cast a sharp glance at Leto. “I see someone’s been catching you up.”
“Attacked,” Brevity insisted. “By a Watcher. An angel from before the world was made.”
“Technically, a fallen angel. If I remember Enoch right, Ramiel was one of the human sympathizers.” Claire paused. “Though he seems distinctly less sympathetic now.”
“Attacked.”
“Threatened,” Claire corrected, shrugging her off to let the repaired book hit the desk with a thud. “Leto here staged quite a heroic intervention before anyone was attacked.”
Leto colored as he looked to the floor. “Well, I just . . . really . . .”
“Why would he be after a character?”
“One emergency at a time, Brev.” Claire turned her attention to the hero.
He raised his cup. “Back to the brig already, warden? I was still working on my tea.”
Claire narrowed her eyes. The hero was still pale, pale as the maddeningly blank parchments in his book. But his eyes were bright, and his hand was steady enough to mock her with a salute. Stable enough, for now.
“Your story still exists. That means it’s time for you to go home.” Claire tapped the book. “But you’ve managed to do far more damage to yourself than I thought possible for any story. At least any sane one.”
“Characters can go insane?” Leto blinked.
Claire waved a hand. “Anything long-lived will deal with bouts of questionable sanity from time to time. Unwritten characters included.”
“Perhaps if you spent half the energy working with us that you do keeping us contained here, such drastic measures wouldn’t be needed,” the hero said.
“A hero with a crusade. How unoriginal,” Claire said. “How are you feeling?”
The hero gave a sour smile. “Trapped. And famous, by the sounds of it. Perhaps you should let me stick around if I’ve got Heaven and Hell fighting over me.”
“You cause any more trouble, maybe I’ll let Heaven have you,” Claire said, though it was an empty threat. Even if Heaven wanted him, she had no intention of giving up any of the books in her care. “You’ll be perfectly safe back in your story, however. The pages are repaired, but the words won’t take.” Brevity made a small distressed noise, but Claire kept her eyes leveled on the hero. “I was hoping it might listen to you and repair itself. It’s a long shot.”
“Long shots are a . . . hero’s specialty,” Hero said with an uncertain lilt as he stood. He was smooth but not quite as graceful as he’d been hours before. He approached his book and laid a proprietary hand on the cover. “What do I need to do?”
“First, open the book.” Claire swatted his hand away to open it to the fresh, blank pages. “Now, talk to your kin, get them settled. Remind them how the story starts. ‘Once upon a time,’ all that.”
“I was thinking ‘In the beginning . . . ’ had a nice ring to it,” the hero sulked. He pressed his hand to the page and fell silent. They all did, librarian, muse, and demon alike. Claire felt the book stop its frantic, minute vibrations, and listened. The remaining words on the pages slowed their skittish mutations, twitching quietly as some private conversation went on. An invisible line pulled tight.
Then snapped.
The book shuddered. The hero’s hand flinched off the pages as it snapped itself shut. His brows knit together as he looked up, incredulous. “They . . . The gall! They pretended they didn’t know me! Me!
Oversized inkblots just—”
“The story didn’t recognize you.” The sliver of anticipation Claire had held dissipated. She’d suspected as much would happen, but she’d hoped to be surprised. She exchanged a glance with Brevity. “That makes sense.”
“No, that makes nonsense.” The hero’s voice was acidic, a barbed accent surfacing with his distress. “I’m the bloody—” He snapped his mouth shut abruptly. “Without me, there wouldn’t be a story.”
“It appears your book disagrees,” Claire said, and the hero glowered up at her. “By all means, make another attempt.”
The hero shifted uneasily. “All the better to allow you to put me back on a shelf?”
“Is that fear I hear?”
He shot her a stormy look and stepped up to the book again. He paused to spare a glance and a nod at Brevity. “Thank you for the tea, muse.” He winked at Leto before turning a cold look to Claire. “It’s been an unmitigated displeasure.”
Claire’s smile was just as icy. “Always glad to meet a fan.”
The hero’s lip curled and with a flourish he slapped his hand down on the cover. When nothing happened, the little remaining color drained from his face.
Claire cleared her throat. “Brev, you might want to guide our hero to a seat again.”
Brevity helped him stumble back to the couch. The hero’s green eyes had taken on a glossy look. “What does this mean?”
“Your damage disconnected you from your own story. Congratulations—that’s a feat. That means, at least until your book decides to accept you again, you’re a free agent.” Claire paused, then amended, “Well, not free. You’re still Special Collections, and you’re going to be answering to me.”
The hero’s face froze. His gaze fished around the room before coming to the book again.
