Vault of Shadows (33 page)

Be strong, son. Be true.

Whatever that meant. Be true to what? Or to whom?

Milo was no philosopher. He wasn't sure what he
was. Maybe he wasn't really a kid anymore. Not completely. He felt himself changing. Not into the hero that the Witch of the World wanted him to be. Into something else, but he had no idea what label to hang on it.

Be strong.

They were searching for a ghost in a house, with dark faeries and the Huntsman at their heels.

Be strong?

Geez.

He gripped the handle. It was so cold. Much colder than it should have been. And as he touched it, the air became filled with familiar smells that made no sense. The scent of burnt toast and of orange peels.

“Do you guys smell that?” he asked.

“Smell what?” asked Shark. “I don't smell anything.”

“I do,” said Evangelyne. “Burned bread and oranges.”

“Yes!” said Milo. “What's that about?”

“People sometimes smell those things when they are in the presence of great psychic energy. Those two smells. I read about it in one of my aunt's books, but I'm not sure why it's those things.”

“Weird,” said Shark. “My list of really, really weird things is getting really, really long, you know that?”

“Welcome to my world,” said Evangelyne.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Mook,” said the rock boy, tapping Milo on the shoulder.

Milo nodded and turned the handle.

It took effort; it was as if the door was reluctant to yield. Milo put some muscle into it, and the handle shifted and then turned. There was a soft click, then the door opened and a warm light washed over them. Milo went in first. He felt strange and he realized that this place felt
important.
Not just magical. It felt special in a way that was almost like stepping inside a church, an institution Milo hadn't been to since the invasion.

The others followed. No one spoke. They were all in awe.

All these books.

Not just books, but scrolls and clay tablets, too.

Milo walked over to the closest shelf and ran his fingers along the spines. He knew them from his dreams, and he remembered what he'd written. Or rather, he recalled what he had transcribed, because in his dreams he was reading a book about the Heir of Gadfellyn Hall. The words came back to him now as if they were printed in the air.

So many books on shelves and tables or stacked by themselves in crooked towers. Books on stands or laid open on tables or facedown on the arms of chairs. . . . Books and books and books.

A long, long time ago the Heir had come to this place, and upon finding these books he had smiled for the first time in a long while.

The boy had been abandoned and lost, and when he came here he'd found his way home. Milo knew that, though he didn't
understand it. Just as he knew it wasn't required of him to understand it. Knowing it was enough.

Milo loved books too. He read every single one he could scavenge, even though many were burned and missing pages. When he read a book like that, Milo wrote his own endings. Or dreamed them.

He knew that if he looked for those damaged books, he would find whole ones here. They had to be here. Maybe every book that had ever been written was here.

It made him wonder if these were only books from his world, from the Daylighter world. Were the books of the Nightsiders here too? Maybe even the books of the Swarm? After all, the library was impossible, which probably made anything inside it possible. He almost smiled at how ridiculous that sounded, but he also knew that it was probably true.

What had he read in the Heir's story and then written down in his dream diary? In books anything was possible—even the impossible.

Shark came up beside him, his eyes fever bright as he looked at the books. “This place is insane!”

“I know,” said Milo. Despite everything that was happening, he was excited, even happy, to be in among all these thoughts, all these stories, and all this knowledge.

“Say, dude . . . when this is all over, I mean, if we get through it and stuff, any chance we can come back here and, like, never leave?”

Milo looked at him. “I—”

He never finished his reply because Evangelyne called out to them. “Here! I found something.”

When they turned, it took time to locate her because she had wandered down one of the long aisles, but Shark spotted her footprints in the dust. She was almost invisible in the shadows, crouched down and running her fingers along the floor. Mook stood over her, bending his stiff body to look.

“What is it?” asked Milo.

“Shark, give me your flashlight,” she said, holding out a hand. He passed it to her and she held it at an angle to show them. “See here, beneath the dust. Do you see it?”

They knelt and peered at some faint marks. Evangelyne bent and brushed at them, revealing the distinct shape of a child's shoe. Smaller than shoes worn by Milo, who had average feet for his age. The sole looked smooth except for a series of round nail-head marks.

“Old-fashioned shoes,” observed Shark. “But I don't get it, it looks like it's been painted there.”

“There are others, too,” said Evangelyne. “I don't think it's paint, though.”

Milo ran his fingers over the footprint. “It's not. You know what it looks like to me, Shark? Remember when we went on that two-week hike with your aunt Jenny and we scavenged that museum way over in New Iberia? Remember those pieces of fossilized wood we saw in one of the rooms? It was wood that had turned to stone. Remember how it looked? That's what this looks like to me.”

“How's that even possible?” asked Shark; then he grunted. “Okay, I heard it as I said it. Impossible Library. Got it.”

“Are these
his
footprints?” asked Evangelyne. “The Heir's, I mean?”

Milo nodded. “I think so. In my dream there was something about his footprints being the only ones in the library. But . . . they were only footprints. Not sure why these have changed like this. I mean, this library isn't
that
old.” He glanced at her. “Is it?”

“We're in a dream of a house, Milo. Who knows what's possible or not in here.”

The footprints ended at the wall, as if the Heir had simply walked through it, but Milo didn't think this was so. There were so many doorways in the place, and they had already found secret ones. He shifted closer to the wall and began feeling along it, looking for a hidden hinge or release.

“It's behind here, I think,” he said. “Help me look.”

“What's behind there?” asked Shark. “Are we looking for this Heir kid's corpse or something? I'm not sure how this actually works.”

“There's got to be a secret door,” Milo said. “There was another library inside this one. Where all the really rare and special stuff was kept.”

“The Vault of Shadows,” said Evangelyne, nodding. “It's the library of magic.”

“Oh,” said Shark dubiously, “that's not scary at all.”

“Everything here is scary,” said Evangelyne, and she shivered. Not with cold but with obvious unease. “I don't like it here. Ghosts frighten me. I want to do what we have to do and get out. We can discuss these mysteries when we are far away from here.”

“So what do we do?” asked Shark. “Bust through the wall?”

“No!” said Evangelyne quickly. “This is the house of a ghost and the Vault of Shadows belongs to him. It would be suicide to try to force our way in, even if we managed to find it. The last thing we want to do is anger a ghost.”

“Why? I mean, okay—
ghost,
that's scary to begin with, but why should we be extra-special careful with them? We've already got the Huntsman, the queen of the dark faeries, and the entire alien race mad at us. How much deeper trouble could we get in?”

“I don't know and I don't want to find out,” she said sharply. “Ghosts have powers I don't understand and they are very, very hard to get along with. We haven't even figured out what we can afford to pay the Heir to repair the Heart of Darkness.”

Shark sighed. “Last week the worst thing I had to worry about was Stingers. Now . . . hey, I'd love to only have to worry about Stingers. I mean, Stingers—bring 'em on. I can at least make sense of them.”

They retreated from the wall and stood there for a long time, just staring at the books. Milo imagined that they were whispering to him. Calling him in, wanting to
tell their stories to him. And these were whole books, not damaged fragments. More books than he could read in a lifetime. Enough books so that he could spend forever reading them and never get to the last page of the last volume on the last shelf.

Never ever.

It was the most wonderful thing he'd ever seen. And in a way, the presence of all these books seemed to make a statement about the people of Earth. They raised a collective voice to shout, “We are here!”

We're real.

We matter.

It made Milo swell with pride.

And then a moment later he shivered in fear at the thought of how fragile this all was. Paper and parchment on wooden shelves, while outside this place the Swarm were ever ready with the blue flames of their pulse guns and their total indifference to humanity.

The fear was followed immediately by a ferocious return of Milo's resolve to smash the Bugs off the planet. To save not just the people of Earth, but everything they had built and everything they had learned.

“Hey, what's that?” asked Shark, interrupting his thoughts. Milo looked where his friend was pointing. Across the library and lit by the warm glow of the fireplace was a low table on which had been set several gleaming silver trays of food. Fresh fruit and bowls of bread, cheeses and cut vegetables, geometrical stacks of
pastries, and tall crystal carafes of clear water. They hurried over to take a look, and Milo felt his stomach do a backflip. It was all fresh and real and right there.

There was something else, too. Leaning against the side of a row of empty goblets was a stiff piece of notecard. On the outside was a single word:

WELCOME

“Was this here a minute ago?” asked Shark.

Evangelyne shook her head. “I don't think so.”

“Let's see what the card says,” Shark suggested, though he made no move toward it. Neither did anyone else; however, Mook placed a hand on Milo's back and gave him a gentle but irresistible shove forward.

“Mook,” he suggested.

“Gee, thanks,” said Milo. He gingerly reached out to take the envelope. It didn't explode and nothing nasty happened. There was a handwritten note inside, penned in a flowing script. Milo read it aloud.

I know what you want.

I know why you're here.

I will be with you when I can.

Relax. Eat. Read a book.

“Is this for real?” asked Shark as he peered over Milo's shoulder.

“I—don't know,” admitted Evangelyne.

“I mean, is this for us or are we looking at someone else's lunch?”

“I don't know.”

Milo said, “
This was left for us.”

“How d'you figure that?” asked Shark.

“It's on the card. He says he knows why we're here.”

“He? You think the ghost of a dead kid fixed us all a nice lunch? Am I the only one who thinks that's a little strange?”

“Give me a better explanation, man.”

“This is so freaky.”

Evangelyne said, “Is it really freaky or really, really freaky?”

Shark laughed. “Really, really,
really
freaky.”

Iskiel scuttled down from Mook's shoulder and crawled up onto the coffee table. He sniffed the food suspiciously. Killer leaned in to give everything a thorough sniff too.

“So do we just chow down and wait?” asked Shark, who was eyeing the baked bread with naked hunger. “'Cause I'm okay with that.”

Iskiel reached out a clawed foot, grabbed the fattest strawberry in the bowl of fruit, and ran away with it like a thief. He climbed onto the backrest of an overstuffed chair and proceeded to eat it. Very noisily and messily.

Milo and the others looked at him, at each other, and down at the food.

They fell on it like vultures.

For several minutes all they did was eat. Since the invasion, food had often been scarce. Plus everything here was fresh and incredibly delicious. Milo wasn't sure he'd ever eaten anything as good in his whole life. Shark
kept saying repeatedly that he had not. Evangelyne didn't waste any breath on conversation and instead made serious headway on the pastries.

After a while, though, Milo took a plate of food with him as he began to explore the endless rows of books. After all, the note had extended an invitation to read.

He found three books about survival in the wilderness and brought them back to the couch and settled in to read. First thing he did, though, was make sure the books were intact. No missing pages. Even though each of the books appeared to have been read—possibly many times—they were in excellent condition and complete. Milo found that deeply satisfying.

One by one the others went and found books and brought them back to the chairs by the fire. Even Mook found a heavy book and opened it on his lap. Milo expected it to be about rocks or geology, but it was an oversized hardbound copy of the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm. The rock boy sat there, chin on his chest, and read.

After a while Milo heard Shark say, “Isn't this kind of weird? Us just sitting here stuffing our faces and reading? Shouldn't we be looking for the Heir? Or hiding from the dark faeries. Or . . . something . . . ?”

But his voice seemed to be coming from far away. Between the warmth of the fire, a full belly, the comfort of the couch, and the seeming safety of the library, Milo found himself drifting. The words on the pages began to lose their anchors and drift across the page.