“What is this place?” I asked softly, daring to hope it might be exactly what I was thinking.
Mab fluttered near my face before moving away from the center of the room, where I’d landed in a huge beanbag-filled reading space. I followed her slowly, climbing up out of the middle of the reading pit and stepping onto a blue tiled floor.
“It’s a library,” Mab said. “The Atlantean library.”
I let out a low squeaking sound, my eyes no doubt huge and about to fall out of my head. “They hid the Atlantean library inside the Academy library?”
That was genius. Talk about hiding in plain sight.
“I’ve been keeping this secret for so many years,” Mab said, wistfully smiling at the shelves and water beyond them. “Feeding the fish. Keeping everything clean and perfect. Waiting for the Atlantean who could walk through the barrier and access these magical stories.”
I snorted, and she whipped her head around to look at me. “Oh, sorry,” I said. “I was just thinking about the fact that most of the Atlanteans I know wouldn’t step foot in the library. Axl is the only one who comes in here, and he never makes it past those first few shelves.”
I doubted I was the only one who could have stepped through the barrier. I was just the only one who’d ever walked far enough to even test it.
“Why are we surrounded by water?” I asked.
Mab’s laughter was like bells. “The water helps to preserve the books. Atlantean books require a water source nearby to keep them from turning into dust. And … it’s nice. The previous Atlanteans who used it, loved the feeling of their water around them. Like…”
“Home,” I said softly.
She nodded.
I leveled her with a sad look. “It’s barely that, let me tell you.”
She didn’t reply, both of us stuck for a moment, and I wondered if she too was remembering her lost heart. “So you’ve been here since Asher’s parents?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes. I have followed this library for eight hundred years.”
I gulped. “That’s a long time.”
She shrugged. “To an immortal, it’s barely a blink.”
I gulped even harder. “There are immortals?”
Her lips twitched—it appeared I was amusing her. “Not many left. Technically, we are not immortal. I could die if the right weapon was used on me. But I will not die from age or common illness.”
A few weeks back, I might have remarked at how awesome that was, but today … staring down my eight hundred years alone, I felt nothing but sorrow for her. “Sounds lonely,” I said simply.
Her wings flapped furiously, her face awash in pain for a brief second before she masked it. “It’s the hand I was dealt,” she replied.
Reaching out, I brushed my fingertip across her shoulder in a lame attempt at a hug. She seemed to like it though, wrapping herself inside my palm, the wings tickling across my skin.
When she moved away, I focused on the fact I was inside the freakinglibrary!
“I need to bring my friends here,” I told her, straightening. “We have to leave for Atlantis tomorrow, and there’s no doubt information here that’s important for us to know.”
“You have full and free access to this room now,” she told me. “You will simply be able to walk through the wall.”
That was easy.
I blew her a kiss, and my feet were pounding the pavement as I raced away from the books and back toward the normal library. I didn’t have a phone, so I’d have to haul ass to get out of here and find my friends. When the wall was close, I closed my eyes and tried not to think about the fact I was running headfirst for what looked like solid brick. I felt a tingle across my skin as I crossed through it and then I was sprinting along the library aisles, a sliver of guilt hitting me at all the books still scattered on the floor.
“Never mind those, I can clean them in an instant,” Mab said near my ear. Somehow she’d caught up to me. “Just keep running.”
“I’m glad I met you,” I told her truthfully.
“Me too,” Mab said, the chiming sound of her words tickling my ears. “And I promise, we will be seeing a lot more of each other. Now that the library has been freed, I am also relieved of some responsibility and could leave these walls. I might even check out Atlantis.”
