The Library After Dark: A Novel(3)

One eyebrow slides up.

“Yes,” I answer myself. We’re leaning across the counter, our faces incredibly close, his sharply cut lips a breath from mine. “If this is one of about four books, dousing will occur.”

That gets a startled laugh. “Now I have to know what those four books are.”

“Not until after I check your bookshelf for them.” I slide the velvet ribbon free, leaving it to curl against the counter while I tease the lid off the box. Nestled inside is a small pocket-size book, and I go still.

Fear slips cold fingers across my throat.

Thin gold embossing crawls across the shiny green leather, sketching out an arched door in a gnarly tree, a small girl gazing up at it with a fox at her side.

Beneath the design, filigree script reads The Dark Hearth Tales: The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition.

“It’s the Letterpress Society special edition,” Jasper says, jarring me. “Came out five years ago, but there were only two hundred made. I found this one and thought you might like it.”

Might like it? This book easily costs four, five hundred dollars, if not more. I didn’t realize architects did so well for themselves, but from Jasper’s frankly ridiculously elegant coats and the way he insists on paying for everything—which, hey, I don’t mind since this city is bleeding me dry—apparently they do.

Serif teleports to the top of the counter, and her tiny nose snuffles at the cover. The vivid green and gold are deceptively beautiful.

“Have you read it?” Jasper asks, interpreting my silence as confusion.

Because he’s watching, I tug the book free of the box and flip the cover open. Skim the table of contents, a few of the story titles inking vivid images in my mind.

Alisa and the Fox

Death the Maiden and the Heartless Queen

The Wood-Carved Rabbit

I haven’t thought of these stories in years. I’ve long since traded dark magic for dark minds, twisted fairy tales for serial killers. The danger of fairy tales is that you might start thinking of yourself as the hero in your own story, and that, I was certainly not.

“I work in a bookstore,” I say, flipping on a smile. “And I’m literally getting my master’s in library and information science. I know it well, which is why I can’t accept a gift this…special.”

“If that’s what you want.” He reaches out to take it back, but my fingers—inexplicably—twitch over the cover. As if I can protect him from it.

This should have been a perfect gift. For anyone else, it probably would be. But I’m not about to let it ruin today—what matters is that a guy I should not like as much as I do bought me an expensive present. A book, no less. That’s a bucket list item I didn’t know I had.

Maybe he was actually telling the truth last month, when he said he really wanted this and I should give us a chance.

“I can’t be bought,” I insist, most definitely being bought as I slip my things from under the counter.

Jasper’s mouth sharpens into a smirk. “What I’m hearing is ‘Try harder.’?”

“Careful of this one.” Carmen’s austere tone floats from behind him. She leans around him to give a shrewd stare. “She’ll break your heart.”

“Fortuitously, mine was surgically removed,” Jasper replies without missing a beat, and a startled snort escapes my boss.

“She’s just saying that because she can’t afford for me to quit.” I blow her a kiss, and her mouth scrunches in distaste; even mock affection is Carmen-repellent.

And as we step out of the comforting dark of the Read Albatross and into a dazzling snow globe of flurries, it’s as if I’ve somehow possessed the body of a normal girl on a picture-perfect date.

Snowflakes land on my eyelashes, and I tug up the blood-red hood of my coat, my smile faltering. Carmen hadn’t actually meant what she’d said; she’s just the resident curmudgeon. The bookstore really was shorthanded, and besides, I’d been the one to say I probably had as much love in me as she did, which had gotten the warmest laugh out of her I’d heard.

Still. It nags at me, because there has always been something…wrong with me. I think the more observant people around me get flashes of it—emotions, inhibitions that I should have. Things that keep you a healthy distance from the edge.

And people like me don’t get picture-perfect dates.



* * *





Jasper won’t tell me where we’re going for our last stop, but wherever it is, I don’t care. Dinner was a dream—roast duck has officially changed my life—and I’m holding on to this day with two clenched fists, as if at any second, it could slip like smoke through my fingers.

“If you had to name your autobiography, right now, what would it be?” I ask, flitting down a narrow cement wall in a tightrope line, giddy at Jasper’s hand in mine. Heavy velvet clouds draw over the night sky, the tall glass buildings all around us pale like bone against them.

Walking below me, he casts me an amused look. His hair’s turned dark by the melting snow, his cheekbones flushed. “Come again?”

“Your autobiography. If you had to name it right now, at this point in time.”

“I’m far more interested in yours.”

“1,001 First Dates.”