Page 37 of Go Luck Yourself
“We do na have other staff.” He faces forward, and I push a little faster to walk alongside him.
“Is this St. Patrick’s Day’s base of operations?”
“Mm.”
“Then… you don’t have anyone helping you bring a whole Holiday to the world?” I let my disbelief show.
Something passes over Loch’s face, a flicker of tangled emotions until he lands on derision.
“Nah, boyo.” He sneers. “That’s what the leprechauns are for.”
The toe of my shoe gets caught on a perfectly flat plane of carpet. “Lepre—excuse me?”
“Leprechauns. They’re the ones running the show.”
All Hex’s eerie Halloween shit churns against my drunkenness to severely screw with my head.
Sweat prickles on the back of my neck. “You—you’re joking. You’re joking? Shit, I’m drunk.” I squish my eyes together and suck in a deep breath like that’ll purge my veins of this gunk, but when I look back up at Loch, his grin is ripe and wild.
The hall around us is spinning, but his smile is a fixed point.
“Of course I’m joking,” he huffs. “You got elves prancing about the North Pole?”
“No. That would be ridiculous. Obviously.”Thank god.
Silence falls, and I’m reminded that I got exactlynothingout of this night, no hint at who might be behind Christmas’s stolen joy, and ah, there my self-hatred is, finally rising up through the alcohol in a shattering fragment.
I scratch my forehead as Loch takes a left. “That’s something Christmas and St. Patrick’s Day have in common, then.”
He looks at me like I’m a moron. Which is fair in this moment. “Not having legendary creatures? Rather sure that’s what all Holidays have in common.”
“Yeah. Well. I—” I’m trying to transition into whatelseChristmas and St. Patrick’s Day might share, like, I don’t know,joy—not the smoothest transition.
We pass a room, the doors thrown open. Loch heads up a staircase across from it without pausing.
I, however, come to a full stop.
My body is all limp and tingling. My brain, a fogged mess.
I step into that room, drawn like a magnet, and the breath gets vacuumed out of my lungs.
“This,” I say, not even sure if he followed me in, “is your library?”
Holy.
Actual.
Fuck.
The library in Claus Palace is my favorite room in the place, the overlap of a ski lodge during a blizzard and a lounge in a cottage.
But this room? It can’t even be called a room. It’s the Cambridge Library gone full medieval fantasy. It’s all the best elements of castle grandeur thrown into a blender with thousands,thousandsof old leather volumes and newer glistening spines organized into wrapping tiers of balcony shelves that stretch two, three,fourstories above me. Night is falling fast so the few massive iron-paneled windows I can see from here do little to light the space, but that makes it even more impressive, gothic accents hanging in the shadows and hidden corners.
“Yeah,” Loch confirms behind me.
“This is your library.” I whirl on him. “What were you doing in Cambridge’s library?”
He jerks back. “Studying. Or I was trying to.”
