The feather trembled, and light muddled off it like smoke, swirling briefly around them both before appearing to catch a breeze. Claire had focused on the feather so much, she barely registered the shuffle and shift of movement behind her until a familiar downy touch brushed her outside shoulder. Rami’s trench coat had parted to reveal—or perhaps become—an impossible fractal of gray wings that Rami certainly had not exhibited before. They arched over her head protectively, and Claire had just enough time to give one gasp of wonder before they flexed, and the solidity of the Library spiraled into smoke and light.
* * *
TRAVELING BY ANGEL WAS a quite different experience than traveling by mist, raven, or ghostlight. The roads between realms that Claire was familiar with were meandering, as all deaths were. Dying bodily was fast, fast as a snapped neck, a stopped heart, but death was a ponderous logistic of the soul. Claire had assumed all travel in the afterlife was the same.
Claire had assumed wrong.
The Library did not so much fade from around her as shatter. There was a pulling sensation, and the world—multiple worlds—appeared in fractals around her, as if she were trapped inside a giant prism, each glimpse of reality only a shard, and sharp enough to cut. Metal spires of buildings, burnished shields of longhouses, reedy beaches and sun-bleached stone, pearl whites and dried blood and silver and brass and gold. Claire didn’t have time to fear, because she was being pulled along, dragged by Rami’s presence at her side, which she felt more than she could see. They were spiraling through time and space and either one could reach out and shatter her at a moment’s notice. She was subsumed in potential. It was positively terrifying and enthralling, and the last remaining jagged edge of Claire’s reason released something in her chest that felt dangerously close to joy.
So when the fractal shard of shadows took them, it felt like being split in two. The transition from light to dark was a wallop, and threw her from Rami’s grasp. She hit the ground at a roll, surface flexing and sliding beneath her until she came to a stop. Claire sucked in a breath and came up coughing.
“Claire!” Rami’s hand landed heavily on her shoulder. “Are you all right?”
A serpent of dust and decay had coiled itself around Claire’s throat. She gagged, forehead pressed against her palm as she tried to force a breath. She finally could croak, “Nothing about that was all right, but thank you.”
“I’m just glad you held on.” When Claire looked up, she could make out the dimmest distinct blur that was Rami, against the dark. Somehow, light was seeming to drift and settle on his outline, at least enough to see that his wings were gone, folded back into his trench coat or his subconscious or wherever fallen angels kept their wardrobe these days. “Those paths aren’t made for humans.”
“So I gathered.” Claire grumbled again, in order to clear her throat. “The poets continue to get everything about Heaven and angels wrong.”
“They do.” Rami sounded infinitely relieved to be complained at. He stayed crouched by her until Claire was drawing somewhat regular lungfuls of dusty air. “We are here, though I can’t say where here is, precisely.”
“That would require being able to see,” Claire muttered.
“I’m managing,” Rami admitted mildly. Why, yes, of course an angel could see in the dark. She sniffed.
Claire finally managed to get her feet under her and try to assess their surroundings. It did not bode well that a being as old as Rami didn’t know where they were on sight. From the slip and shuffle of the material under their feet, they had landed on a great heap of something or other.
Similar monstrous bulks were just barely illuminated in the gloom. The dust floating through the air appeared to be its own light source, well dispersed but utterly insufficient for the task of lighting their surroundings. Claire held on to Rami’s offered hand for balance as she turned her attention to the ground. She reached down and ran her hand over the slippery bits beneath her feet.
Leather, scuffed and rotted at the edges enough to come away with her fingertips. And then paper, fragile as ash and torn just as easily. Claire took in a sharp breath. “It’s a library.”
She couldn’t make out Rami’s expression in the dark, but the gentle snort was unmistakable. “It’s in shambles. Who would allow a library to reach such a state?”
“No librarian or book lover, that’s for certain.” Claire was preoccupied with trying to chart the slope of the pile they were on top of. It seemed to stretch on forever, but a downward slope grew slippery until her feet hit a puddle of damp. A familiar bloom of mold and mashed pulp hit her nose and Claire gagged again. “Oh gods, the poor books.”
“Hero has made you empathetic,” Rami said quietly, and Claire was coughing too much to deny it. She shook her head until she could breathe again.
“Water, dust, mildew, time. Gods, this should be Hell’s Library. It’s torment for books.” She fished a mostly dry page out of the pile and squinted with futility. “Rami, grab the opal from my bag; it’s crusted to a finger bone—don’t ask. Catholics are weird about their relics. There you go—that’s better.”
Claire pinched the dry bone between her fingers so she could bring the gem welded to the end up to her eye. Her vision illuminated, as if someone had turned on a dim light, though everything was narrowed to the pinpoint of a single pane of cut stone she could manage to see through.
The page was like tissue in her hand, and Claire held it up, trying to make
