“You both go ahead,” she said. Whatever secret they had, it could wait. “I have one more thing to do here.”
Emma walked back through the stacks alone.
“Yes?” said the receptionist, without looking up from her computer.
“I—You gave me a map.” Emma wasn’t sure how to continue. “On my first visit here.”
“And do you… need another one?” The receptionist swept a hand at a box on the counter, brimming with maps.
“Oh. Thank you, no, I—I wanted to ask about someone who works here. A librarian? I met him up on the second floor?”
The receptionist didn’t say anything, but she did turn to face Emma for the first time.
“He was, um, an elderly gentleman, and he was breathing—That is… His hands were sort of…” Emma trailed off.
The receptionist had snapped back to face her computer.
“No, I don’t think anyone like that works here. Could have been a stray professor. The dons are here all the time, and some of them are quite… elderly.” She lingered on the last word, and Emma felt foolish. It occurred to her the receptionist might not be that far apart in years from the man she’d seen.
“But he said he was a librarian. No, he said he was… the Librarian,” Emma realized.
The receptionist looked unimpressed. “Sorry. Is that everything? I have to get through this catalogue,” she said, typing furiously. “It’s full of errors.”
Emma left the Library, but she couldn’t let the problem go. It whirred round in her mind. She knew she had not imagined him, her strange librarian. Warning her of dangers in the shadows, pushing his trolley of blood-inked books. But the receptionist would have no reason to lie.
“What is it?” Jasper asked, as she slid into the booth at Boddington’s.
“Nothing,” said Emma, zipping up a pocket on her bag. It had been exactly where she’d left it on her first visit to the Library. A drawing of an eye and a monster’s teeth. Proof. That her encounter had happened, just as she remembered it. That somewhere, deep in the entrails of the Library, there was an eerie old man hunting through books. And next time she came to use the photo archives, she would find him.
Then, two days later, Jasper and Richard’s mystery revealed itself.
CHAPTER 9
They were in the sunken rose garden. The sky, moonless. The smell of the river all around. Though the bushes were hunched and slimy as she remembered, this was not the black, rotting stench of the flood. Emma inhaled. It was the green, warm scent of the living river.
Jasper was facing her, still as a panther. His eyes bored into her. Sparks trailed her cheeks, her neck. Over the curve of her collarbone. Lower.
And then the first bud burst. Its insides startling pink. The rosebushes were blooming. The night air was thick with honey and musk, and still the buds split. Emma saw them straining against the black sludge of rotted stems. Heads swelling until the stems were bent and pleading. Then a snap. The first flower fallen, broken by its own weight. One by one, the roses burst and swelled and dropped, a carpet of pink and red.
Jasper knelt among the falling blooms and held one out to her. Red, deepening to purple at its heart. His eyes never leaving hers, he raised it to his mouth. A droplet of nectar clung to one thick,curving petal, there where his tongue just reached to brush it. Sweetness ran through Emma’s core.
Slowly, Jasper parted his lips until the cavern of his throat showed, hot and dark. He bit into the blossom like a man starved. Emma cried out. She felt his touch as though the petals his teeth grazed were the smooth insides of her own thighs. He bit again, and again. Honey filled her mouth.
His hands pushed her, and she fell, soft, onto the thick bed of rose heads. Flowers rained around her as Jasper fitted his mouth to hers. His kiss, his kiss that scraped her skin against the hard gold bristles of his cheeks. Thorns forced themselves from his tongue, piercing hers. Emma tasted the salt heat of her blood, rising to meet him. Falling roses brushed her face. Somewhere, a whispering began. But she ignored anything that was not this moment, this movement. Her legs clamped around Jasper. The nectar sang in her blood, a music that soared. Petals flooded over her eyes, her mouth. Emma gasped. A tide of roses flowed into her throat. She choked on their flesh, clawed for a surface that would not come. The whispers hissed all around her, sinuous and insistent and louder than ever, and her lungs burned, and—
—and Emma woke, a fold of the duvet over her mouth. She tore it from her face, heaving in grateful breaths. The room was still and silver. Outside her tower, rain beat against the window. In the dark of the night, it almost sounded like whispers.
Slowly, her breathing quieted. Four in the morning, her phone told her. Then she saw the message. It had come while she slept.
midnight tomorrow night. meet at the library
the door will be open. trust me you’ll want to be there. J
Emma fell back onto her pillow. Her last thought, before sleepclaimed her, was of her tongue. She ran it around her mouth. She tasted blood.
The next night found Emma pushing through the bushes outside the Library. A ticking pulse pounded in her ears. Jasper had said to come at midnight, and so here she was. But it could so easily be a horrible joke, leaving her alone outside a locked door in the dead of night.
But the great doors opened easily under her palm. She padded through the deserted reception, as moonlight shifted over the marble floor. Jasper wasn’t there. No one was.
