Most people couldn’t have ignored a demon sharing the library with them, but most people didn’t love books as much as I did. Thirty minutes slipped away as I browsed the shelves, finding encyclopedias, histories of every culture and country I could think of, geography and nature studies, copies of ancient classics, some modern classics, travel books, and, oddly, a single shelf in the back corner stacked with outdated romance novels, their paper covers boasting faded men with long hair and open shirts billowing in the wind.

