“Nasty thing, aren’t you?” Hero touched the wound at his shoulder. He slowly backed up until his back hit the cliff face. He watched as the muse grew from her crouch, a bit of clay melting in her hand. She brought the sandy remains to her lips. The pieces clicked together for him. “Or just hungry?”
Slowly, Hero reached into his vest pocket and withdrew his book. Every limb in the muse went rigid when the green cover of his book came into view. Hero held it to his chest warily. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Hungry for a good story. But the dried-up old bones in this place aren’t satisfying your appetite, are they? No, you want something juicy and fresh.”
He stepped to the left, then the right, and the muse tracked the book like it was mesmerized. It made a parched, hungry little keen. Hero sighed. “Pathetic, aren’t you? I—”
This was Hero’s revelation; it was really atrociously rude when the muse interrupted. She snarled and lunged, clearing the distance. She slammed Hero against the jagged cliff face, and claws scissored down on his throat.
The world became oblivion and black teeth as Hero grappled to keep hold of his book. Ink was filling his throat instead of air. He could smell the fast decay of leather and glue. The fight was inelegant; it was messy; it was stupid and ugly and contrary to every forgotten story that coursed, like fire, through Hero’s veins.
He wrenched the book over his head. It startled the muse just enough to loosen her grasp on his throat, and Hero gagged a breath as he swung his arm down. “Choke on it.”
He swung for her face and punched the spine of his book straight into her open teeth. The scream that filled the air was thin and felt as if it went on forever. Hero couldn’t say in the moment if it was the muse’s or his own. Her weight was off his chest as she rolled away.
Numbness crept across his skin, from shoulder to throat wound. It felt colder than blood or ink or even ice. He couldn’t move from where he fell. The Dust Wing’s stories surged and seared through his fading pulse. Lurching sounds of ripping, tearing, and ragged, wet swallows came from somewhere nearby as his book, his world, his life, his essence, was gnashed between rot-black teeth. And Hero stared, in his last moments, at his empty hands cupping the dark.
31
RAMI
What is a story without want, without need?
Moreover, what is want, what is need, without a story?
Librarian Gregor Henry, 1896 CE
RAMI HAD LOST HIS wings in the fall. They all had, all the Watchers that had been cast out. Lucifer, when he’d rebelled, had been allowed to keep his wings. Rami had never thought that was very fair. But Watchers had cast their lot in with humankind, sympathetic to their plights. It was some kind of divine justice, he supposed, that they be earthbound with them.
It felt like a sin, then, that he would trade every human on Earth for the wings he needed to reach Hero right now.
He saw them clash and saw the open way Hero welcomed the attack. He saw the struggle, hands locked over the book, before they fell beyond sight of the ledge. There were horrible ripping sounds, and then there was silence, which was even worse.
And Rami couldn’t fly, couldn’t even leap with the agility and grace that Hero had. He could only claw, one bleeding hand over the other, up a cliff of broken words with his heart held in his mouth.
He reached the outcrop in a breathless pain that had nothing to do with the air in his lungs. He made sense of the tableau he saw in pieces. The muse creature was near a crumbling ledge, hunkered over an empty space that had been a book. It raised its head sluggishly at his approach and its eyes were eerie, whiter than white. They were the white of snow on fire and made the black on her cracked lips more profane by comparison. She licked the ink off her pointed teeth with a delicate air.
The ignition of flames along his blade made her pupils shrink. Rami hadn’t been aware of the moment he’d drawn it, but he was entirely in possession of the moment he decided to use it. The muse snarled, pale eyes streaming. Fissures formed along her skin, a colorless kind of wrongness revealing her fault lines. She lurched, but a full belly made her languid and slow. The tip of his sword caught her under the collarbone. Rami drove it home. She exhaled a long, relieved breath in his face, tickling his nose with the scent of leather and new paper enough to sting his eyes.
When she fell, she’d changed from snow and bone to a paleness the consistency of spun sugar. Rami didn’t care to watch her melt away. He sheathed his sword and turned to the shadows that clumped on the opposite side of the ledge.
Hero had fallen on his side. The sight made the remaining strength in Rami’s legs fail him, and he reached the limp body on his knees. His velvet coat was torn, and the ragged edges were muddy with ink-dampened clay dust. It made a stiff kind of death shroud that cracked when Rami turned him and pulled him into his lap with shaking hands.
A well of despair narrowed his focus. For a moment he didn’t see, couldn’t see, Hero’s face. He saw ink stains on chapped, feral lips. An attack made sluggish by story. A pale concave belly that would fade and rot and take
