The only thing they’d done differently, it seemed, was try to kill the sterility one usually sees in small-town libraries. Tasteful sconces set into the wall lit the place, and a slightly ragtag assortment of comfortable chairs and couches were everywhere.
“You live here?” I asked. All my questions about more pressing matters—like the apparently dead woman who’d driven us to town—were lost in my excitement about people having taken over a small-town library and kept it running.
“Yeah,” Vasilis said. He led us through the main room of the library. It’s hard to walk past that many books without stopping to flip through them, but I followed him up the back stairs to the apartment above. It looked a lot more like places I was used to. The living room was still covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, but there was also a dining table and a counter that separated off a small kitchen area. A short hallway led to three other doors, presumably two bedrooms and a bathroom.
“How?” I asked.
“The county left it empty. We moved in.”
“It’s squatted, then?”
“Technically,” Vasilis said. “But even the sheriff’s wife comes here to check out books. I’m not sure anyone knows or even cares that no one legally owns the place. People assume we bought it and we don’t discourage them.”
“I’m Heather,” the woman said, and we did introductions.
“Wait,” Vasilis said, after I introduced myself as Danielle. “What’s your last name?”
“Cain.” I waited, cringing, to hear him call me Dani. He didn’t.
“You knew Clay,” he said. “He talked about you a lot, last time he was through here.”
“You know Clay?” Doomsday asked. At the same time as the ice was broken by knowledge of a mutual friend, a different sort of tension filled the room—the tension of discussing a mutual dead friend. “Knew. Knew Clay.”
None of these assholes had come to his funeral. Everywhere I traveled, people knew Clay. Everyone talked about him like he was a magical gift from the universe to its denizens. Which he was. But not one of them had made it to Denver to drink and mourn with me and his mom. Maybe I’d go out that way too. I’d live on in legend, but no one would feel obliged to actually miss me.
“Sure,” Vasilis said. “He came through a couple times a year. Always wanted to check out whatever new books we had.”
The books up here were, in fact, different from those on the shelves downstairs. A lot of them had blank spines. A lot of them were gold-embossed. Some of them looked older than some people think the Earth is.
“This is an occult library?” I asked.
“Well, what else are you all doing here?” Vasilis asked.
He and I were the only ones still standing, I realized. Everyone else had made themselves comfortable on couches and chairs. Rain lashed against the windows, and thunder rumbled across the plains.
“We, uh . . .” I tried to figure out what to tell him. I tried to figure out what was safe to tell him.
“We’re demon hunters!” Vulture blurted out. He put down a book and his phone—he’d been taking pictures of the pages. “We’re on the run because some stuff went wrong and Uliksi maybe killed a lot of people and some cops too!”
So much for a cover story.
Doomsday and Thursday shot him the same look at the same time. The combined glare would have driven lesser men to silence, or at least to show remorse on their face. Vulture did neither.
“You’re demon hunters?” Vasilis repeated, like the words didn’t make sense in his mouth, like he was speaking some language he didn’t know and was just parroting the phrase back.
“I mean, we are now, I guess.” Vulture gave his best “whoops, sorry” look to the rest of us.
“You’re here because of the disappearances, then?” That was Heather, who was sitting next to Brynn on a love seat.
“No,” Thursday said.
“Yes,” Vulture said, at the same time.
Doomsday’s ritual must have done a hell of a lot more than get us a ride safely.
“What disappearances?” I asked.
“You might want to sit down,” Heather said. “This is weird.”
* * *
I found myself in a large, comfortable chair by the window, and Vasilis brought us all tea. Heather, with a cup in her hand, told us the story.
“There used to be two more of us living here,” she started, punctuating her sentence by blowing across her tea. “Damien and Isola. Then there’s Loki.”
“I know Loki,” I said. It’s a small scene, hitchhiking weirdos. “Queer, kinda small, book thief?” I’d stayed with them (Loki didn’t like being called “he” or “she”) in Oakland for a couple weeks the summer before. They’d been planning a rare book heist. I skipped town before I found out how it went.
“Yeah,” Heather said. “Loki came through with some books for us. Real shit, they said. Then they and Damien and Isola went winter camping in Glacier, and then none of them came back.”
Heather took a tiny sip of her tea, decided that it was cool enough, and took a longer sip.
“Months go by, no word from any of them. Vasilis and I tried to track them down, but never found anything. Not their car, nothing. A record in the backcountry hiking registry at Glacier and that’s it. Then, this spring, Isola shows up in town. She won’t talk to us. Squats an empty bed-and-breakfast at the edge of town. We see her around town, sometimes, but it’s like she looks right through us. She looks right through everyone else too. She’s back, but she’s not back.”
“Where are the books Loki brought?” Doomsday asked.
“Most of them are shelved now,” Vasilis said, gesturing at the walls around us. “Most of them are the same garbage you always find, though. Ninety-nine point nine percent of ‘occult’ books are just trash. Gibberish packaged up all spooky, made to sell for as much money as possible.”
“Most of them are shelved?” Doomsday continued.
Vasilis sighed. “The three of them went to Glacier with one book, one
