Julia did not wait for her mind to catch up with her eyes. She ran, tugging Hugo and Venetia along the corridor with her.
“Take the mortals. Block the way here. But find the fox.” The voice behind them was a guttural rasp. Gold bandoliers stretched across broad shoulders.
The poleaxes lowered. The boots pounded forward in file.
Julia saw Hugo risk a glance over his shoulder, then snap his gaze forward. His face was a study in horror.
Behind them, thudding footsteps broke into the artillery fusillade of an all-out run.
But sound must, indeed, have traveled strangely in the Library. Because only three reading rooms away, Emma was creeping through a dense, moth’s-wing silence. She peered around each bank of desks before plunging for the safety of the next, the fox a welcome melody in her mind.
we run from the hunt
they shall not catch us
for we are quick we are clever
Together,thought Emma.
together,the fox agreed.
Somehow, once Richard’s hands no longer held her, her panic had started to dissolve. She was still too shaken to manage a full transformation. But she had been able to reshape her eyes, her ears, her nose, until her fox senses came flooding back. The dark Library was no longer a mystery. The fox’s song hummed in her blood. She felt a comforting brush against her thoughts, like warm fur.
Then a ribbon of scent hit her nose and held her rigid.Known smell. Boy smell.But it was not Richard’s acrid sweat or Jasper’s cologne. Trusting her fox instincts to keep her from hitting sharp corners, she pelted ahead blindly. Her breath came in pants, in gasps, in great chest-heaving sobs, and then he was there. She flung herself at him, letting the fox parts of her melt away until she was Emma, only Emma.
“Emma!” Nat held her tight. His owlish face was wet with tears.
She pulled back, shaking. “You can see me.”
She had once spent hours talking to a boy who could not hear her, because missing her friend had pierced a hole in her soul. She had gritted her teeth against the pain when he walked away, because pretending had been the best part of her day. And now here he was, looking at her. Actually seeing her. It felt like sunlight. It felt, just for a moment, like she was warm again. Mortal again.
“Of course I can see you. And I’m never letting you out of my sight again.” Nat seized her in a crushing hug.
“Me either.”
“There you are, Oluwole. Look what we’ve found!” A jubilant Hugo burst into the room, dragging Richard by the collar. Richard was smudged with dust and bruises. He slumped in Hugo’s grip, looking utterly defeated. Julia and Venetia followed, panting.
“My God.” Hugo stopped short. “Emma! It really is you. Alive and… well?”
He looked uncertainly at Emma’s strange, sharp beauty: clear and cold and terribly inhuman. “Er, alive and here, at least. Now, not to worry, we gave those piggy fellas the slip a ways back. I’ll be damned, they’re fast buggers. Still, not up to our tricks. They ran right by our hiding place and never a twitch.”
“More likely they lost interest in us. I would have, if it meant traipsing into that bug-infested cupboard you shoved us in,” said Venetia. “They found some nice glass cases of priceless manuscripts to smash up instead.”
“This one”—Hugo gave Richard a shake—“we found pelting out of the printing room as if the hounds of hell were on his tail. Thought he might have something to say about where you were, Emma. Didn’t we, Jules?”
Julia stepped around Hugo as though she had not heard him. Her eyes were huge. Tears trembled on her lashes. She slid her arms straight around Emma, and her voice cracked. “You’re alive.”
She straightened up, leaving behind the hunch she had worn every day of the past year and a half. “It’s time we leave. We need to get Emma somewhere safe, and those monsters are still between us and the door. And we have to deal with—”
Her glance rested uneasily on her ex-boyfriend. Richard drooped from Hugo’s hold on his collar. His encounter with the Boars seemed to have shaken him beyond words.
But before anyone could move, a marble bust fell from above. It shattered a breath away from Nat’s head. They craned their necks up to the gallery of the reading room.
It was filling with boar-men. They ran.
“They’re behind us,” Nat panted in the corridor. “We can’t get out through the south wing now.”
“Try the other way, then.” Hugo tugged Richard along grimly.
