No. A wild protectiveness seared the exhaustion out of her veins. Not him. Not if we got him back. She shoved against the floor, dislodging the muse off her shoulders at a moment of imbalance. She ripped her glove off as she stood and exposed her stained palm to the air. “You can’t have any of them.”
The pale creature had skidded to his knees, ripping the tangling fronds of books with his teeth. He had half turned toward the direction of Hero’s voice, but he caught sight of Claire’s arm and froze. Claire was close enough to see the way a shiver passed over the surface of his featureless face.
“You can’t have them,” Claire repeated again. “But it’s the ink that’s done that to you, isn’t it? Developed a taste for it?” Claire shakily raised the scalpel to her arm and slashed down. “There’s plenty here. Come, then.”
The blade bit into her skin, precisely severing the thin floss of blue that hemmed black in. Claire barely registered as the inspiration flaked away from her skin and fluttered to the ground. Line of inspiration tourniquet broken, a cold flooded up her arm. Claire didn’t want to see, but she looked down anyway. Bleak, inky liquid swarmed up her biceps and disappeared up her sleeve. She felt the odd kind of frost-prickled warmth slam into her ribs, ripping the breath out of her as it spread. It swept up her shoulder and chased goose bumps up her neck. Claire felt it when the ink seeped, a film of taint, into her eyes. Her vision went blurry, then dark and buzzing with multicolored serpents of shadow smothering everything.
Everything except the cold that seized her as the ink wrapped around her brain, and her heart, and she lost herself in a scream.
33
????
ONCE UPON A TIME.
No. That’s not how the story began at all.
Start again.
From the beginning?
Or the end. It matters not to us.
Who is us?
Once upon a time . . .
. . . Something is missing.
Something is missing. Once upon a time. Something is missing. Once upon a— Something is missing. Something is missing. Once upon— Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is missing. Once— Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is—
Do you want to hear a story?
34
HERO
Myrrh.
Huh. Well, that just figures, doesn’t it?
Librarian Gregor Henry, 1941 CE
HERO RAN INTO A charnel house of horrors. Books were flayed everywhere he looked, paper entrails twisting suspended in the air as if from butcher’s hooks. Many of the dead of the Dust Wing rested, content with their tombs and dust, but not here. Here was where stories had gone destructive and turned on their corpses instead.
He had hesitated at the sight when he and Rami had broken through into the clearing where they’d tracked Claire and Brevity. He’d hesitated, and that’d been enough. Claire had shouted, the scalpel had impossibly cast one sliver of light in the dark, and then the corpses around him ceased to matter.
Hero dived into the viscera of paper and gore. Bile rose in his throat every time he crushed a brittle spine under his heel, but he hurtled himself forward. He tore at the paper skins that tangled him. He would tear at his own skin next.
Ink swallowed Claire, between one breath and the next. No, “swallow” was too natural a word. It absorbed her, leaving behind a bleak Claire-shaped figure stained so dark it was impossible to make out against the darkness. The sight stopped him cold, just a step away. Her warm brown skin swallowed shadows, until even the ruffle of her uneven skirts and the small clasps at the tips of her braids turned pitiless black.
He lurched into motion again but was stopped by Rami’s hand at his hip. “It’s ink,” Rami reminded him. As if Hero could forget, forget the feeling of his own skin decaying and crumbling in on itself, the feeling of drowning in ashes, smothered and lost. As if he could forget the way Claire had screamed, which was why he needed to reach her right now—
It was a testament to how weak he was that Brevity broke past Probity first. The ink-bleached muse had fallen and struggled to get to his feet. Brevity scrambled across the bowl of shredded parchment but was still too far away when the muse zeroed in on Claire. It sniffed the air and clacked its teeth. Brevity lunged, tackling it around the ankle and dragging it to the ground with her. The muse fell, outstretched claws passing within a whisper of Claire’s unmoving obsidian face.
Brevity wrestled it back, biting back a yelp as the stained muse spun around and turned his claws on her. The sound drew the first lurch of movement, though everyone but Hero seemed too busy to notice. Only Hero saw as the black statue that was Claire twitched her limbs. Her head tilted at a sharp, mechanical angle, while the rest of her appeared to move with the sinuous nature of the ink itself. When her head turned its bleak gaze in Hero’s direction, his skin chilled surely as if a naked blade had scraped along it.
“Help us,” Hero whispered. To himself, to Claire, to gods he didn’t believe in. None, at least, would hear and answer prayers in the darkest corner of the afterlife.
The ink that had subsumed Claire appeared to shudder in its depths and gave a slow blink. She turned its attention to the feral muse wrestling with Brevity on the floor. She stretched out one arm, garnering everyone’s attention. Hero half expected the ink to drop from her fingertip, but she opened her mouth and spoke.
“You.” It was Claire’s voice,
