The Library of Shadows

Applewood bacon and a short stack of pancakes could absolutely wake the dead. Este didn’t remember falling asleep. All she knew was one moment she was bleary-eyed, trying to make sense of an escape plan after returning from the Lilith, and the next moment the sun was up and the whole dorm smelled like a twenty-four-hour diner.

She hauled herself out of bed, rubbing a palm against her crusted eyelids, but paused in the doorway. “I guess you guys should change your name to the breakfast club.”

The whole PI club crowded around the cramped kitchen—Bryony leaned over her plate of sticky pancakes at the island, Arthur perched on the counter with his swinging feet tapping against the cabinets, Shepherd shoveled food into his mouth at superhuman speeds, and Posy stood next to him, stealing bites off his plate.

“She lives,” Bryony cooed around a syrupy bite.

Posy peeked around Shepherd’s shoulder. There was no hint of a smile, no excited recognition of Este’s continued existence, the straight face of someone with enough siblings to perfect the silent treatment. Bryony turned back to her plate, Shepherd focused on his flapjacks, and Arthur offered her a flat smile but nothing else.

Seeing them like this, padding around her dorm in their flannel pajamas and wrinkled sleep shirts, sheared through a heartstring Este didn’t know she was holding on to. They were planets revolving around each other, just like the ghosts in the senior lounge—a solar system anchored by each other’s gravitational pull. They’d found their place and fit into it perfectly. Este was an asteroid, blazing through their quiet harmony.

These, she realized in the stiff stillness, were Posy’s friends. Not hers.

For a moment, they stood like that in a speechless stalemate. Neither Este nor Posy was willing to dive into the trenches. Then, Este’s stomach grumbled.

“You want some grub, Logano?” Shepherd asked with his dorky lax-bro grin, breaking the tension with a sledgehammer. “Dr. Kirk’s downstairs dishing up, and I grabbed double.”

Shepherd slid a plate across the counter to Este. Two strips of bacon and two pancakes topped with a slice of butter and a drizzle of maple syrup. It smelled divine. Este’s diet had consisted mostly of bowls of frosted shredded wheat and almond milk at odd hours of the day for the last few weeks, supplemented with the occasional black coffee that her brain refused to believe didn’t count as a meal. She stifled a moan when the syrup hit her taste buds.

“These are so good,” she said around a bite too big. “Why is Dr. Kirk making breakfast?”

“Fall break starts today,” Bryony said. The duh was silent.

Sticky pancakes lodged in Este’s throat, and she swallowed hard to get them to slip down. She glanced at the all-pink calendar pinned to the fridge with cactus magnets—Posy’s doing. Sure enough, in glittering ink, Posy had drawn stars around the day. A long week of freedom before midterms kicked into high gear.

Este’s eyes focused on the tiny circle in the corner of the dated box where tonight’s new-moon symbol had been stamped. “Big day.”

Arthur and Shepherd gathered at the island, but Posy cradled a plate in her hands, propping herself up against the back counter instead. She made a big show of clanging her silverware around her plate like she wanted to make sure no one forgot she wasn’t speaking. So, she was mad mad.

Bryony zipped her bacon through pools of syrup before dripping it on her tongue. “I can’t wait until we’re in Paris drinking wine for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

Arthur clicked his tongue. “No one will be doing that.”

“Au contraire, monsieur,” Bryony said through the crunch of bacon. “You might not, but who’s going to stop me?”

“The legal drinking age?” Este asked, earning a steely glare in response. “Is that what you’re doing for fall break? Paris?”

“Hell yeah,” Shepherd said. “I’m gonna carb-load so hard. Bry’s parents own this, um, what’s it called?”

“Pied-à-terre.” The word rolled off Bryony’s lips like ivy nectar, sweet and sickening in equal measure.

Shepherd funneled breakfast into his mouth in heaping forkfuls, but that didn’t stop him from talking. “Yeah, that, and it’s in the fourth, uh—”

“Arrondissement,” Bryony supplied.

Another bite. “Which means there’s all this cool old shit like the church from that movie.”

“Notre-Dame?” Este offered, and Shepherd shrugged.

“Yeah, the one with the hunchback or whatever,” Shepherd said, waving his fork.

Arthur’s eyes narrowed. “You know there’s not really a hunchback there, right?”

Este’s shoulders sagged. She could almost imagine Daveed and Luca bickering and found herself missing the pauses where Aoife would have snarked and smiled, the human embodiment of a Sour Patch Kid.

And if she wasn’t careful, she could all too easily imagine a different reality where they were the ones jet-setting to Paris for fall break instead. Aoife would buy too many books at Shakespeare and Company to fit in her carry-on, Luca would make them all eat crepes at Champ-de-Mars, and Daveed would drag them to a club where Este and Mateo could sneak outside beneath an awning as the rain poured, one of his hands in her back pocket and the other tracing the line of her jaw, and—

“You were right,” Este blurted. A ripped Band-Aid. It would only hurt for a moment. “About Mateo. You were right.”

Mateo would never make it to Paris, and Este would never see him again. Leaving before she got left was her mantra, and she had let him get much too close without pulling away, so the radiating ache in her chest was what she deserved in return. All she had left to do was finish packing.

“Don’t act so surprised,” Posy said with an exaggerated roll of her eyes. Patches of red painted themselves across her roommate’s cheeks as if she’d been lounging in Cannes all week, sunburned, and not huddled indoors to escape Vermont’s October gloom. Posy’s plate rattled against the counter. “I’ve been trying to tell you there was something seriously spooky going on with him, and you weren’t listening!”

“You could’ve kept trying!” The room felt too big and too small all at once, like Este was both suspended in air and suffocating. She timed her breathing, in through her nose and out through her mouth, blowing waves in her plate’s syrupy sea to try to calm the storm inside her.

The Paranormal Investigators excused themselves with some flimsy excuse about Bryony needing to buy a beret and insisting Shepherd wear pants that weren’t shorts, and then it was the two of them. Posy had nowhere to look except right at Este with her jaw clenched and her arms crossed.

Este’s throat was hoarse from the well of emotions bubbling up when she asked, “When do you leave?”

Posy lifted her nose. “After the last class this afternoon.”

By the time they got back to campus after fall break, Este would be long gone. In a cabin deep in the Smoky Mountains or applying for part-time work at cafés in Chicago or, by some miracle, at another library like all the other libraries: worn in and familiar like a paperback with curled corners she knew well. It would be as if she had never existed here at all.

Este walked her dishes to their tiny sink and nudged the faucet on. She needed something to do with her hands. “That’ll be fun. Escargot, champagne, the whole nine yards.”

It took Posy a moment to respond, and even though Este had her back turned to her, she could imagine the way Posy gathered her short hair into a ponytail at the nape of her neck, considering how much snarl to put in each syllable when she said, “I would’ve invited you, but you’ve been so busy keeping secrets from me that I figured you didn’t have the time.”

Chiseled words with sharp edges Este hadn’t truly intended slipped out. “I know I’ve had a lot of weird stuff going on lately, but I wanted to tell you about Mateo sooner. I did.”

“As if.” Posy rolled her eyes so far back she probably saw her frontal lobe.

In another timeline, one where Este hadn’t said yes to the boy with the keys, where her scholarship and family legacy hadn’t demanded she sell her soul to the Lilith to make amends, she could have been toasting lattes over exam notes and cramming onto their couch to watch black-and-white horror movies the way the rest of the Paranormal Investigators did. Instead, she’d pushed Posy away in all the ways that mattered. Alone was a canyon, and Este had carved it out herself.

“I’m going to ask for a new roommate in the spring,” Posy said, words clipped.

Despite the way it felt like the very cobblestones that held this school together vanished beneath Este’s feet, sending her into a spiraling free fall as her one new constant left the way Este should have known to expect by now, she said, “Good because I won’t be back after fall break.”

Something softened in Posy’s timbre. “Why not? Where are you going?”

Este watched the soap bubbles pop. “Anywhere else. I can’t stay here.”

“After everything you’ve done?” Posy asked, hushed. “Did Ives kick you out?”

Because even mad at her, her roommate knew that Este had slumped into bed in the middle of the night for weeks, bones weary and brain fogged after late-night shifts. She knew that Este had been willing to sacrifice everything else for a chance to stay in this prestigious program—skipping every party, cramming for quizzes during breakfast, and slowly but surely fading into the background of her own life.

“Oh, Este. I’m so sorry.” Posy rounded the island and wrapped her arms around Este to reel her into a hug.

Or, at least, she tried to.

Instead, her fingers dragged through Este’s skin like she was a Disney theme park hologram, like she was Leia Organa begging Obi-Wan Kenobi for help, like she was a ghost.

Este jolted backward, away from her roommate. She flattened her palms against the countertop to prove she could. Her shoulders felt weird. Tingly, alive with electricity. Heat striped the place where Posy’s arms should have touched.

“No, it’s fine,” Este said in answer to the absolutely dumbstruck look on Posy’s face—her eyebrows arched into her hairline and her jaw had gone slack. “I was in the spire yesterday, and there’s this ivy up there that makes me temporarily impermanent, or caught between life and death, or something.” Each word was rushed, panicked. “I can hear dead things when I taste it and touch dead things if it’s on my skin. I must’ve brushed up against a vine or something, I don’t know. This is a side effect, I guess.”

She was fully aware of how incredibly delusional it sounded, even to Posy, the P.T. Barnum of paranormal. But her roommate’s hands had gone straight through Este’s body, and without delusion all she was going to have was a full-blown meltdown.

The spark reignited in Posy’s eyes, and where Este expected to see a journalistic curiosity, there was only concern. It must have outweighed every ounce of pent-up bitterness and frustration Posy harbored toward Este because she scrambled to grab her notebook from the coffee table. She flipped frantically through the pages in a way that made Este feel a little too much like a science experiment. She touched the tip of her ink pen to her tongue. “What are your symptoms?”

“I’m fine,” Este huffed. She needed to believe it herself. The brief lapse in her corporeal existence was nothing more than a blip in the matrix.

“Denial,” Posy said as she wrote. “What else?”

“Mild irritation.”

Posy nodded. “Like, skin, or what?”

“Something like that,” Este muttered. She darted through the apartment. Everything in her room was either fake or dried—a faux succulent, a fiddle-leaf fig formed from plastic, the fading remnants of the ivy blossoms in a Tibetan singing bowl she bought at a hippie town in Arkansas. She needed something living. She had to try again.

Posy was hot on her heels, pen scribbling. “Okay, and?”

Este sprang toward the door, favoring her left side that whined beneath its bandages, and Posy stumbled out of her path. She whipped a coat around her shoulders, swiped her cell phone from the counter, and slid her feet into slippers—all incredibly real to her—on her way out.

Posy snuck out behind her with her socked feet, one of Shepherd’s shirts skimming the skin of her thighs, and her pen pressed to the page. Este swallowed a groan. She didn’t need an audience, but there was no way Posy was going to miss this.

They tore through the Vespertine Hall doors and out onto campus. A layer of mist cloaked everything in swirling white. Este’s feet crunched leaves into pulp as she ran into the fog, but that didn’t slow the frenzied pace of her heart. Which, at least, was still beating.

The trees. The leaves were dead, but the trunks were alive, dormant as they waited for their time to bloom again.

Inhale. Eyes closed.

“Where are you—” Posy started but cut off abruptly.

Este reached her palm out, waiting for the moment where her skin scraped against the sycamore. It never came.

She opened her eyes and tried again. Her hand slipped inside the trunk, which was warm, humming, alive, but not solid. Back and forth, back and forth. Nothing. She was a shimmering mirage, a fool’s prayer for water, there and not all at once.

It’s a fluke, she reminded herself. This was fine. A side effect of the ivy. Tomorrow, or the day after, or after that, everything was going to be absolutely, 10,000 percent fine.

Her esophagus was going to earn the MVP award for somehow holding down her heaping breakfast. She held her head in her hands, counting the things she knew without a doubt—what she could and couldn’t touch, the stinging in her side, the spire dirt still under her nails, and the ivy sap that might still be coating her skin.

A glimpse of midmorning sun fought through the overcast shroud, tearing seams in the clouds. It filtered to the earth in a diaphanous sheet like soft tulle. Este leaned into its rays and measured her breaths, in and out, in and out, until she’d warmed all the way through. This, this was real. She was still real.

Posy’s footsteps tapped against the cobbled path as she surged through the fog to catch up with her. “Este?”

“I’m right here,” she said, but Posy’s head still swiveled in search of her. “Posy, I’m right here.”

“Where’d you go?” her roommate asked, stepping hesitantly forward. She pushed through the haze toward the wash of sunlight, toward the sound of Este’s voice, but her eyes were focused somewhere in the distance behind Este.

Through her.

Holy shit, through her.

The clouds stitched themselves back together, and the sun’s warming light got trapped in the stratosphere. Posy jumped when she saw Este, inches away from her own face. She must have had no idea how close she was. She was disappearing in direct light, just like Mateo did. But Mateo was a ghost. And, as far as Este knew, she didn’t have the prerequisites for that.

“Are you sure this is just from the ivy?” Posy asked. Her fingers twitched at her side like it was killing her to refrain from trying to touch Este again. “I can do some research on—”

Este forced her voice level when she said, “I don’t want your help anymore, Posy.”

The words were harsh. They needed to be. Flint strike and kerosene, enough to burn a bridge to ashes. She was protecting Posy. It never would’ve lasted anyway. If their friendship didn’t end now, it would once they graduated, disappearing beneath the shadow of their thrown commencement mortarboards once they traded Radcliffe for higher education. They had always been destined to be “friends from high school.”

It took only seconds for Posy to morph the freckled planes of her face back into stoic indignance, her mouth set with the determination of a middle child. “Then what do you want?”

“I want you to go to Paris and eat as many French vanilla macarons as you’re physically capable of.” Este’s voice caught on the jaded edge of a fragile, shattered thing inside her chest. Each ragged breath sent needles through her side. “Go and read Fitzgerald on the Left Bank of the Seine. Ride around on one of those little scooters and make a wish at Point Zero in front of Notre-Dame.”

“So, that’s it?” Posy asked, rubbing warmth along her goose-bumped arms. “You’re going to shut me out like it’s no big deal while you’re, what, dying?”

“It’s not a big deal,” Este said as calmly as possible. Which was admittedly not very calmly. Black webbed at the edges of her vision like she might pass out if she didn’t sit down soon, and some quiet part of herself wondered if that feeling would ever go away. “I can handle it on my own.”

Posy, with her face flashing between stubborn iciness and genuine concern, settled somewhere in the middle, a mask of hardened resolve despite the way her bottom lip quivered like she was a dam on the brink of spilling over. “But you don’t have to.”

Este turned, welcoming the fog as it wrapped around her shoulders like a silk robe. Her slippers scuffed along the path, and shivers crawled over her skin. She wasn’t sure if they came from the mist or from some ancient cold front swelling inside her. Posy didn’t call after her as she faded into the mist, and Este didn’t look back. Loganos never did.