by D. N. Hoxa
On that, we agreed. “Yeah. We don’t need even more people to chase right now.”
“No, we don’t. And Helen is still a friend. If I can keep her out of the Guild’s reach, I will.”
“So who will tell us about the Treasure of Saraph?”
Damian grinned. “Books.”
“What kind of books?” Because Malin had plenty of them. More than I could count—and she’d even read them all.
“The kind we can find in the Shade Library,” Damian said. “But you don’t have to come, little thief. This isn’t your fight anymore. The soul was returned. The Guild has no reason to suspect Malin anymore.”
I didn’t need to think about it. “No, I want to see this through. I’m curious to know what they’re doing, and if it’s as dangerous as you and the Guild think it is, you’re going to need help.”
What I didn’t mention—what I didn’t even want to think about myself— was the fact that I wanted to spend more time with him. And, yes, I did remember why I was mad at him in the first place. He was a filthy liar.
But then again, so was I.
Who knows? Maybe one of these days, I’d stop deliberately putting a veil over my eyes and see things for what they truly were. For now, when he walked to his car, I followed, much to Kit’s dismay.
Damian Reed had a library card.
Consider me shocked.
I had one, too, except I had no idea where it was now as I’d only used it twice—to read about hellbeasts when I first became a mercenary. And before I met Malin. I’d never needed it again because Malin had more than enough in her collection, and the Shade Library was small.
The building was round, only one story high, and it had books in eighteen different languages. I’d thought about coming here to search for books on Alpha Primes before, but I’d need to register every book I read, and I didn’t want anyone knowing that, so I’d skipped. Besides, I doubted there was a book about them in here. I’d had trouble finding three textbooks containing valuable hellbeast information four years ago. It was mostly standard spell books issued by the Guild—and lots of fiction.
“Are you sure we’ll find what we’re looking for in here?” I asked Damian when he came back from the reception desk.
“Not here.” He nodded at the other side of the reading hall. “Let me show you.”
I followed him across the room, between the two rows of huge desks. White marble statues of men and women were placed all around us, and they were looking down at the reading desks. To be honest, it was kind of creepy, like having someone over your head the entire time you were reading. Glamoured crystals that spilled warm yellow light dotted the ceiling, and a few of them floated around on air. The dark wooden shelves were engraved with feathers and flowers, and all the books looked identical—hardbacks, dark brown covers and white letters on the spines. Only one man was sitting in the reading room, both hands on his head as he read his book, and he didn’t seem to even hear us when we passed him by.
My eyes skimmed over the titles that I could see on the shelves, but nothing caught my attention, and when we reached the end of the room, Damian kept going. Confused, I watched him head toward one of two marble statues, both of them of women, these two looking at each other, their hands outstretched toward one another. Behind them there was no shelf, only a gigantic painting with a golden frame, that kind of looked like Starry Night, except with a lot more planets in the sky.
I followed Damian behind the statue on the right. I had never been to the end of the Library before, so I’d had no idea that there was a narrow hallway practically hiding behind the last bookshelf and the statue. I turned around to look if there was another behind the other statue, but there was only a white wall. The corridor turned to the left and ended abruptly in a white wall with a drawing of a red dragon over it. My God, it looked so real. The colors seemed to be alive, and I had the impression that if I touched it, I’d feel all the tiny scales on its body and the claws at the tips of its wings. It also felt like the dragon’s green eyes were staring right at me.
“That’s…strange,” Damian whispered, then put his hand on the dragon’s head.
“What’s strange? What exactly are we looking for?”
“A door,” he said, shaking his head. “The Shade usually opens it for me by now.”
Oh, that. I sighed. “Yeah, it’s probably me.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Shade kind of hates me lately.” And I still had no idea what I’d done to piss it off.
He narrowed his brows in confusion, but then something moved on the wall—the dragon’s long tail. It was just a tiny movement, the tail moving down less than an inch on the wall, but I saw it.
Then it began to disappear. The entire wall changed color from white to brown in the shape of a hexagon. Three seconds later, a very old and very heavy-looking wooden door appeared in front of us.
“What the hell?” Was it another drawing? It seemed so real.
“This is the backroom of the Shade Library,” Damian said and grabbed the brass-colored round handle. He pulled the door open, and it groaned loudly, making me flinch.
On the other side of it was a room three times the size of the reading room we’d left behind. And it was dark.
I stepped inside, my mouth wide open. More books than I ever thought existed in the entire City lined the shelves, identical to the ones we already saw. They were built inside the walls, and more of them stood alone on the left in a perfect row. I couldn’t see where they ended. Atop were stones statues of gargoyles, their sharp teeth bared. More statues made of marble and rock were placed around every desk spread out on the right. The desks weren’t as big as the ones out in the reading room, but there were more of them—at least thirty that I could see—and they would fit no more than four people at once.
Then, I looked up.
The ceiling was a night sky, a dark velvety blanket dotted with stars that shimmered, as if I were looking at the real sky outside. From the corners of the room, thick vines twisted and turned, as if they were trying to meet each other in the middle, but could only extend halfway. Glamoured crystals not nearly as bright as the ones outside floated around the shelves, and the cold air made me feel like I was really outside. The smell of old paper filled my nostrils, and I hadn’t realized how much I liked it until now.
I never knew such a place existed, least of all somewhere I’d been before. I couldn’t get enough of looking at the details—the hardwood floor, the books that weren’t identical in here—all had different colors and sizes—the paintings that hung on the dark brown walls in the small spaces between the shelves.
“Wow,” I whispered, completely in awe. It wasn’t just beautiful, it was like I’d stepped into another world altogether. Like I was in Wonderwood all over again, but I doubted there would be any horses with wings and snakes with five sets of eyes here.
In fact, now that I was slowly coming back to my senses, I realized that there was nobody there. The entire room looked empty. The absolute silence was a dead giveaway.
“You like it?” Damian said. He was standing at my side, hands in his pockets, smiling.
“It’s beautiful.” It was more than beautiful. “And empty.”
“Yes, there aren’t many people who read at this time of night,” Damian said. He was right. It was probably already past midnight. That was working hours at the Shade. And partying hours.
I started walking again, looking in between the shelves as I went. I even let my magic search for essence just to make sure than nobody was hiding in the darkness, but there was nobody there.
“Don’t worry, little thief. Even if there were people here, they wouldn’t be able to attack. The Shade doesn’t allow fights in here. Come on,” he said and started for the tables.
“How did you even know this was here? I’ve been in New York for four years. Malin has lived here all her life, and she has no clue.” And she was going to flip out when she saw this. I already couldn’t
wait to show her.
“It’s not exactly public information. The Guild denies its existence because it has no control over the books here. For anyone to find it, someone would have to show it to them personally—unless the Shade decided it doesn’t want them in here for some reason,” he explained, his eyes on the books as he went. He stopped in front of a shelf in the middle of the room before he disappeared from my sight.
“Really,” I said in wonder. “I’m surprised it let you through with me here.” I found him in between shelves, looking up at some books, and I did the same. So many titles. So many different languages—most of which I didn’t even understand.
“I don’t think the Shade hates you. It’s wary of you, that’s all,” Damian said and pulled out a book from the shelf, looked at the cover, and handed it to me. It was a huge thing, with a maroon cover and possibly close to a thousand pages thick. Artifacts and Relics, Volume 13. “Shades can feel power, and they don’t enjoy any creature with too much of it.”
He then put another book in my hand, this one half the size, with shiny green covers. Theurgy and Other Rituals. Damian took two other books himself and went back to the tables. His eyes sparkled with excitement. For the first time since I met him, I could actually hear his footfalls, like he couldn’t care less about being heard. I followed as I watched him put the books on one of the tables in the middle of the room. He took off his jacket and hung it on the back of one of the chairs before sitting down. He was moving so much more than he usually did, too.
“You like it here.” He liked it here a lot and I had no idea why it surprised me so much. Maybe it was because I’d never seen him like this before—so relaxed and so careless. He was always looking around himself, always listening to everything going on around him, but not here.
“It has the best collection of books from the entire world, in 290 different languages. You’ll find everything in here, from encyclopedias to romance novels,” he said in a rush.
I held back a laugh as he rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and made himself comfortable. The white shirt looked good on him.
Everything always looked good on him, which made me wonder if maybe it was just me. I went and sat on the other side of the table.
“Look at these,” he whispered, touching the leather of his own book with the tips of his fingers. “This must be at least four hundred years old. So well preserved.”
Oh, God. “You’re a book nerd,” I said in wonder.
He looked at me, surprise flashing in his eyes for a second. “How else do you think I spend all my time?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Killing people and carving cute little figurines from their bones?”
He threw his head back and laughed, the sound sticking to my skin like glue. I really did love his laugh. It was exactly the right amount of soft and rough.
“Art is what’s kept me alive,” he said, shaking his head. “What I imagine gets every immortal through the years. Without art, we have nothing because the brain loses parts of itself all the time. Every form of it is special. There was a time when I enjoyed painting, music, architecture, even theatre, but nothing is quite like books.” He opened the cover of the big book in front of him and studied the first page. “Books are infinite. They have no limits,” he said, and when he looked at me, I could swear he was alive. “And just when you think you’ve read it all, know it all, you read a single sentence that takes you back to the very beginning, and you realize just how much you don’t know still.”
Fucking hell, I could just sit there and listen to him talk for hours.
“I never thought you were the type.” And I can’t even tell you why.
“Bad guys can enjoy beautiful things, too,” he said with a grin.
A glamoured crystal floated toward him and stopped just a couple inches over his head, giving him more than enough light to see everything on the pages clearly. The light it cast on his face made him look unreal—like a painting, like that dragon on the wall. I wanted to start reading, but I just couldn’t look away. He was so focused on the book while he turned the pages, like the world around him no longer existed.
“You’re making it hard to focus, little thief,” he whispered then. Maybe not as focused as I’d thought.
Clearing my throat, I lowered my eyes to the books in front of me and I opened the big one—Volume 13 of Artifacts and Relics. I could barely see the letters—the glamoured crystals were too far away. I looked at the one closest to us and tried willing it toward me. It didn’t even budge. Figures that the mighty Shade wouldn’t grant me the pleasure of light in its library.
“Do you mind bringing some light my way, too? I can’t see anything,” I said to Damian.
But he didn’t try to bring me a glamoured crystal. Instead, he pulled out the chair closest to him and looked at me.
Did I really want to be that close to him in a place like this, where we were practically detached from the rest of the world?
I grabbed my books and went to sit beside him.
What felt like hours later, I finished the second book and found no mention of the Treasure of Saraph. My eyes burned a little—I hadn’t read that much in a long time, but it was impossible to just skim through the pages. I hadn’t found anything about the Treasure, but I had found plenty of very interesting things—like the witch rocks that could be found only on the beaches of the Dead Sea. They were tiny things with holes in them, and if you looked through the holes, you could apparently see through any kind of magic. And Tarnhelm, which was a helmet that could alter the image of the wearer or even turn him invisible. And the Sword of Orna, which burned red when unsheathed, and granted victory to any person wielding it in battle.
Half of them felt like fiction, but the magic inside me disagreed. They were all real—and probably only a fraction of what was really out there in the worlds.
I took the books back to the shelf where we got them, and I scanned the spines around them. One of them caught my eye—Common Misconceptions of Strength and Magic Levels. I could be wrong but a book like that could possibly have something about Alpha Primes in it. And I didn’t see any librarian here. We hadn’t needed to register the books we read before. So…
“If you want to call it a night, little thief, it’s fine. We’re both tired.”
Damian was right behind me, his two books in his hands. I tried my best to hold back my surprise.
“No, I’m okay.”
He proceeded to put the books back in place, never taking his eyes off me. My toes curled inside my sneakers and my heart began to race as it always did when he looked at me like that—like he wanted to fucking eat me. His eyes moved down to my lips for a second, and it was like he’d already kissed me. Thankfully, he turned his head to look at the books he’d put back, and I got to breathe a little easier. On his cheek, I could make out the sun stain perfectly. It hadn’t changed a bit since last night. Vampires healed ridiculously fast, but the sun marks were a different story. I wondered if it hurt him.
Before I knew it, I’d reached out my hand to touch his cheek. He stopped moving and held perfectly still when my fingers were an inch away from his skin. Then he turned to me, slowly, his eyes darker than they had been just a second ago.
I must have been more tired than I realized and my brain wasn’t working properly because it insisted that I’d always wanted to make out in a library. Such a Jamie thing to think about, but there I was. At least she would be proud of me.
Slowly, I rose on the tips of my toes while Damian watched my lips coming closer and closer…then something grabbed me from behind and pulled me up before throwing me back. My ass hit the floor and I continued to slide back for another second, until something stopped me abruptly, almost breaking my ribs. I looked up to see a shelf right behind me—I’d stopped just a hair away from touching it.
Not only that, but Damian was all the way on the other side of the room, on the floor, his back to a shelf, too. I waited a heartbeat. Nobody came out to attack us
, but I didn’t think that would happen. We hadn’t been attacked by magic—only the Shade.
Cursing under my breath, I stood up and walked back to the shelf. Damian was already there, two new books in hand.
“It must have thought we were about to fight,” he said with a grin, but it was bullshit. The Shade hadn’t thought we wanted to fight.
“Right. Best get back to work then.” I took the books from his hand and made my way back to the table. The Shade could suck it.
Chapter Fourteen
Damian Reed
“I found it,” Sinea said, both her hands on the pages of the book in front of her, her excitement spiking the blood in her veins.
I put away my own book and looked at hers.
Treasure of Saraph /Seraph
“Holy shit,” she whispered, running her finger over the two paragraphs below the picture of…berries? It was a branch with small green leaves and what looked like blueberries sprouting among them.
I read the paragraphs quickly.
The first written records of the plant are from 2000, BC. The plant was named the Treasure of Saraph by Allistair Mongormer, a British sorcerer who discovered the seeds in the Persian Gulf in 1589 during his last expedition to find spells and relics of ancient Mesopotamia.
Due to its power to grant immortality to supernaturals who drank the juice of the berries, the plant was deemed illegal by the Sacri Guild in 1602, and all samples and seeds of the Treasure of Saraph were destroyed.
I read it again, and a third time, then Sinea turned the page, but there was no more information about the Treasure of Saraph.
Time stood still for a second while my brain raced. It made perfect sense. From the song of the soul of Samantha Oldrick to Helen’s rebellion and her words—it all made sense. In his story, Gilgamesh goes in search of a plant of immortality after his friend dies, and he begins to fear death himself. According to this book, the plant was real—and it was found again by a British sorcerer. That’s what she was going after.
