Page 1

Chapter 1

The county board thinks my library is obsolete. That’s the word they used in the letter I received yesterday. It’s all I can think about.

The letter is burning a hole in the pocket of my blazer as I unlock the front door to the library. The board is going to “consider the consolidation of the Venn’s Crossing branch” at its public hearing on the thirteenth of October. They say our service model is obsolete.

Obsolete? Maybe they’re obsolete. Or maybe they can shove this letter somewhere the sun doesn’t shine. If they had approved the funds for the modernization project I sent them three years ago, this wouldn’t even be an issue.

I’m grumbling to myself as I turn the entryway lights on, and the radiators under the windows hiss a greeting. I absentmindedly take my morning route to flip all the lights on as I stew over the letter, but I pause at the entryway to the reading room.

The anger drains out of me and is replaced by sadness. God, I love this building, quirks and all. If you asked my opinion, the reading room is the coziest place in the entire library. A steel baron donated the money to build it in 1912 because he wanted to leave something behind for his children. It has two long oak tables with green glass lamps on them and a rolling ladder on a brass rail that runs along the top of the stacks. On the ceiling, there’s a water stain shaped like Sasquatch, and the kids named it Harold.

Over the front door, cut into the stone, it says FREE TO ALL. I walk under it every morning, and I wholeheartedly believe in the sentiment. Enjoyment and knowledge should be free to all in a library, and for me, it starts in this room, whenever I read to the children.

Fran comes in at quarter to ten with her own copy of the letter and her reading glasses already on. Fran Hodge is the mayor. She also runs the hardware store, and she was doing both before I could read.

“I’m assuming you got the letter,” she says.

“I did.”

“The hearing’s the thirteenth.”

“I know.”

She sets the letter on my desk and looks at me over the glasses. I know that look. I’ve been getting it since I was nine.

“Paige, honey. For the board.” She pats the letter. “Dial it down a little.”

“Fran.”

“You know what I mean.”

I do know what she means. In fourth grade, Mrs. Albright wrote Paige has a lot to say on my report card, and my mother framed it. My father doesn’t talk at all. That left two of us making noise in the house, and I was the one told to bring it down. Two bosses in Portland said the same thing in nicer words, and two boyfriends said it in meaner ones. I talk fast and I talk a lot, and I’ve been told I’m too much my entire life.

Well, I’m not dialing it down for this public hearing. The board is going to hear my opinions loud and clear.

Fran sighs and picks up the letter. “The orc storyteller’s here, by the way. Oscar brought him in from Portland first thing this morning.”

The orcs. I’d almost managed to forget about the orcs. I was in second grade when the sky opened over San Francisco and they came through asking for mates. They have a female problem; not enough of them are being born, and we can have their babies. For twenty years, the Earth women moved to the orc planet until people started grumbling about it, so the Interworld Mate Alliance took applications from towns that wanted to host the orcs. Ruby at the diner filled out the application to save our dying town after our mill closed. Brannok came from the orc homeworld to look us over. He ended up married to Ruby instead of going home. The IMA picked Venn’s Crossing out of all the places that applied for the pilot program. Now our town is the pilot, the first real test of whether orcs can live on Earth with humans. Six more orcs arrived in April and moved into Elsie Whitaker’s inn, and supposedly we can get a new orc every quarter. The storyteller is the first new one. The program pays Oscar. It doesn’t pay the county, and the county runs my library.

“I heard. I saw Tavin on the way to work, and he’s telling everyone.” Tavin is the youngest of the six. He joined the fire department as a volunteer his first week here, and he’s been excited about the storyteller since August like it’s the Second Coming. “What’s the storyteller like?”

Fran shrugs and says, “Big,” on her way out the door.

I snort—they’re all big—and try to focus on my morning chores instead of wondering how big they are everywhere.

It’s Thursday, and story hour is at ten. The families in town have an arrangement: one grown-up stays to watch the kids so the rest can run their errands. Most of the parents drop their children off with a kiss and a wave. Whoever drew the short straw that week sits through story hour.

Today it’s Hollis Pruett. He’s eighty-one, and he has his great-granddaughter Ivy and his basset hound Moose in tow. Moose lies down under the picture-book table and stays there. Ivy is four and can’t sit still on her carpet square, so she bounces on her knees instead, and it’s adorable. There’s also Mateo, who is five and has a question for everything and a follow-up for the answer. Wes is five too, and he has never once gotten himself out of his own coat. Sadie is four and quiet, which is unusual for a Sorenson. I’ve never heard her talk before, and I’ve heard she rarely does.

There’s a low chair in the corner for the person reading. The alphabet rug is worn colorless at the B and the R from twenty-some years of small knees, but I’ve never figured out why those two letters.

I’m on the second page of Pip and the Marmalade Moon when the front door opens.

I know it’s an orc before I even look up because the doorway goes dark. He ducks under the archway into the reading room, and the space suddenly feels a lot smaller.

He’s a foot taller than the door. His skin is a warm olive, and he has brown hair in one long braid down his back. His tusks have a thin line cut around each one. He’s wearing a canvas jacket that was obviously sized for someone smaller than him. It looks ridiculously hot on him.

Four children turn around with wide eyes.