Page 35 of Hunt the Dusk
“Have you called them to check?”
“You can’t call them. No number. Requests are put in via email or in person, and they haven’t replied to my email yet.” She sighed. “I’ll have to go over there tonight.”
“How far is it? Can we pop in on the way to the stables?”
“It’s only a few blocks away, so yeah, we could. You best drop Hemlock and Ordell a text and let them know you might be a few minutes late to the stables.”
Shit. “Good call.” They were, after all, my ride back to misery castle.
“I don’t want Holly knowing about my…condition,” Padma said.
“We’ll tell her we need the books for Order business.”
She gave a curt nod.
I shrugged on my coat and raised my voice. “Chop, chop, people, we’ve got places to be!”
We were in the van and off into the night less than five minutes later just as a text pinged back from Ordell.
I’ll be waiting.Hemlock is busy.
Strange consideringHemlock had warned me not to be alone with Ordell. But then he probably thought a carriage ride with me inside the cabin and Ordell driving wasn’t a danger.
But a carriage ride was also the perfect time to talk to Ordell about the mate mark.
There was hardly much risk of us going into fuck buddy mode while driving a carriage, right?
The Night Librarywas a blue door on an innocuous residential street lined with terraced houses. We asked Holly and Merry to stay in the van while Padma, Edwin, and I went inside.
The door opened into a ten-by-ten room. A long counter took up the back where a clerk snored softly while sitting bolt upright. There were no books in sight, except for the large ledger parked on the counter next to the flat-screen computer.
I leaned in to speak to Padma. “Is this it?”
“I know it doesn’t look like much, but this place has access to every piece of literature ever written, not just in our world but a host of others.” She hurried to the counter, leaving me to turn over her sentence.
Host of other worlds? The multiverse? It had been mentioned in our training a few times, but I’d thought it was more of an idea, a scientific postulation, not fact. But here Padma was, speaking of it as if it was reality. That this place was a gateway or something. But surely if that was the case, then… “Shouldn’t this place be guarded? I mean, it’s a gateway, right?”
“If you’re a book,” Edwin said. “Places like this are protected. They’re called conjunctions. Some are tiny, like this one, and others are vast. The universe knows how to protect itself.”
I guess that made sense.
Padma dinged the bell, and the clerk’s eyelids snapped wide open around yellowy orange irises before falling to half mast, heavy-lidded and sleepy once more. He yawned and stretched, and for a moment I had the impression of more than one arm, but it was a trick of the light and shadow because when he folded his arms across the desk, there were only two of them.
“How may I help you?” Even his voice was slow and sleepy.
“I ordered three books that were meant to arrive today, and they haven’t,” Padma said.
He frowned. “Name.”
“Padma Choudhry.”
He tapped at his keyboard. “Ah yes, you picked them up last night.” He looked over at Padma and then tipped his head to one side. “You look…different tonight.”
“BecauseIdidn’t collect the order.”
“Ah, yes, that would make sense.”
“Didn’t you ask for ID?” Edwin demanded.
