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I reach up to him to take that covering hand, to pull it down.

Completely without thought, and with as little fear as I assured him I had. It doesn’t even occur to me that he’ll bite—and he doesn’t, of course not. Instead, he flinches. “No, no touching. No touching, please,” he gasps out, in so panicked a way it almost makes me laugh with delight.

To think that I’m the one comfortable with this.

And he’s the one made nervous.

I barely know what to make of it. Is he worried my hand will make it worse, make him bite? Or is it just shame at what he looks like, like this, and a plea to not expose it? It certainly seems like the latter when he finally lets the hand drop. He does it in stuttering intervals, and the mouth he reveals is closed.

It looks like he’s tried to fit too many cookies into his mouth.

After a second he has to give up the fight, and his lips part over those curved fangs—but when they do I don’t really know why he bothered holding back. And I feel fully justified in not being afraid. More than justified.

Somehow, they just aren’t the same.

They’re still large, of course, still wickedly sharp. But at the same time, for the first time, I can see this soft gleam to them. I can make out the gentle curve to each one, almost delicate seeming—not like anything that could ever savage me at all. I almost reach up and run my fingertips over them, they look so lovely. And I only stop when I realize how mad that is.

It’s not that they are really soft, it’s that his expression is, my mind informs me, and as soon as it does I see it. His mouth isn’t twisted into a snarl; his eyes aren’t filled with fury. And he’s not really baring them as if he wants to bite. Instead they simply peek out from beneath his upper lip, and said upper lip is such a gentle curve.

Like something set to kiss you, I think. Then want to kick myself for it. I dragged him out here so fast so I would stop having these kinds of thoughts. And yet they’re still apparently consuming me.

“Okay, time to go figure out what’s going on inside you,” I say, more brusquely than I intend. But it works. I go to turn away, and he follows me to the secret door in the library without question. He watches me make a key in the air—fangs gone and forgotten—and open it.

It looks like the wall swings apart.

And a much sturdier one than anything that is really there. The real library is practically made out of clapboard. This wall is as heavy as a stone as it drags along the floor. Dust kicks up, the whole thing groans and scrabbles. Like a tomb opening.

Though it’s the inside that really stuns.

I glance back at him before I step inside, and he’s peering into the impossibly vast gloom, his face full of wonderment. Then I twist the thing that turns the light on—necessary, considering magic doesn’t work in here—and that wonderment deepens. His eyes are wide when the glow reveals a room the size of a football pitch, as rich and glossy and mahogany as the place behind us is cheaply carpeted and stained and kind of collapsing. In fact, the contrast has made me try several times, over the years, to give the real-world library things. Money, resources, protection against the evils of the Committee for a Clean Town. The head of it, old man Hannigan, has tried to destroy this place several times.

It’s the least I can do.

And sometimes it sticks.

Sometimes it helps.

Tabitha usually gets to stock the books she wants, at least—something I suspected Cassie has also helped with at some point. But it’s nothing like this. This is Cambridge; this is a castle in some far-off fantasy world. There is velvet and leather in here, tables with caskets on them, and, of course, books. Books upon books upon books. Ones bigger than I could carry, open to enormous pages filled with arcane knowledge. Languages I could never hope to understand. Words that I would never dare to speak.

Though he does.

He lets his fingers trail over a sentence in a vast, open tome, on a stand just in front of us. “This is what my people speak,” he says. Then he reads a line. It curls and unfolds in the quiet air, before sinking right into me. Without any magical power, of course, but so lovely I’m struck to stillness by it.

I only follow him in when he starts to disappear between the towering shelves. “Wait for me,” I say, and trot to catch up—but he already has. He’s there, amidst the books, searching the gloom for some sight of me, as if intent on proving himself forever the reverse of everything I’m used to.

I have about a thousand memories of being left behind.

In some cases, left for dead. Abandoned, often to him and his desire to kill me. I remember the eighties, the hall of mirrors, my best friend screaming and running away once she realized that was real blood and those were real body parts. Being unable to keep up, and getting dragged into the darkness by the same man who now asks:

“Tell me which is your favorite.”

And in so genuinely curious and open a way I almost do. I let myself imagine actually sharing my love of all these magical tomes with someone, and the thrill outweighs my good sense. I step forward, face so openly happy, for once, that I think it registers as startling even to him, a man who has only three days of memories of me. “Oh,” he says, soft as a sigh. “Your smile is like sunlight.”

Then he actually reaches out, as if to touch it.

And for the first time, I don’t think, Pull away, pull away.

I think of how he once was. Cold and aloof, barely wanting to make contact even if it was to kill me. He threw me up a whole tree, and I have no memory of his hands on my body. I don’t recall him ever grabbing me—a startling realization, made even stranger by the sense of what this must mean. Of the only thing it can mean.