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It looked like the kind that probably opened doors that had no business being unlocked.
Este came to Radcliffe to follow in her father’s footsteps, and each one led straight to the library.
driving while the other chose their next destination. She learned how to say goodbye over and over again. It was so much easier than holding on too long. She’d seen what heartbreak could do.
“Legend says that while Dean Logano was working on a research project, he took the head librarian’s key—some say stole, some say borrowed, you decide—and snuck into the spire. Whatever he found up there, no one knows. He transferred schools, and the door was left locked.”
“I saw your scholarship announcement, Este Logano. You’ve got a legacy to fulfill.”
And ivy clawed through all of it. Vines wept over the window ledges, the bookcases, the cedar rafters. They crawled down the walls and dug deep into the stone flooring. Those petite, purple flowers speckled the greenery, opening and closing like watchful eyes.
Posy would be thrilled to see her because Posy was thrilled to see everyone. She was a human golden retriever. Este was a crab, all pinchers and an exoskeleton shell.
Running from her problems was kind of her specialty.
This book is the reason I’m a ghost, and it isn’t complete without the missing chapter. I’ve been trapped at this school for a hundred years, but if we can find those pages, I can come back to life.”
For someone who died before using a toaster, he sure thought he was the coolest thing since sliced bread.
but no one she fought to keep after her dad died. Her grip had turned slippery, and it had been so much easier to let go than to hold on.
Her grip had turned slippery, and it had been so much easier to let go than to hold on.
Letting herself get close to someone again felt like wearing a shirt with a scratchy tag. Her only options were to get used to it or cut it off.
“Those are a unique type of spirit, typically bound to something physical—jewelry or a sculpture, trapped inside a mirror, perhaps—that belongs to a person who controls them, the Heir of Fades. They’re very rare. It’s not likely we’d have any Fades on campus.”
“I’ve been trying to undo what happened a hundred years ago every moment of every day since then,”
“The Heir is only human. According to the book, without the Fades spoon-feeding them souls every ten years, the Heir would eventually grow old and pass. They only became like this because of what they summoned out of those pages, and the Fades are bound by ink to the book of their creation, so I think the missing chapter will tell us how to stop them—why else would Dean separate it from the rest of the book?”
Sometimes she felt like the only person in the world who knew the ache of losing someone who couldn’t come back, like the gaping hole it clawed out in her chest was a cavern that could never be crossed,
“‘There is life, there is death, and there is love.’” Somehow, Este knew what would come next. “‘The greatest of these is love,’” they finished together.
She’d never live it down if she died at the hands of a few velour-clad sorority girls that doubled as supernatural hit men.
“Just because I can’t touch you doesn’t mean I can’t help you.”
“For a moment, I thought I’d surely lost you. It’s a vulnerable thing to have, a body.”
“I’m tired of waiting. I want to know what it’s like to grow old, to see the world. Gray hair? The things I’d do to see myself with gray hair.”
“When you love someone, it’s like building a library and filling the shelves. It doesn’t matter how many years it’s been since Austen wrote Emma or Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise. We can still pull them from the bookcases and dive back into the words, the same as the day they were written. All the years and memories are still right here, cataloged inside us.”
He was a tether, a trail of crumbs to lead her home. She hadn’t realized how long she’d been lost.
They weren’t that different, he and the rivean ivy. Both of them held tight to what few threads of life they had left, and both were bound to land her in an awful lot of trouble if she wasn’t careful.
“You’re catastrophizing,” he said gently. “It is, by definition, a catastrophe.”
“Life and death together,” Mateo read, “create the complete human experience—no one without the other. What, then, perseveres? Like an oath sworn in blood, love ties the living to the dead, for you cannot know darkness without first knowing light.”
Este loved the archives about as much as she loved dog-eared pages. Not exactly a compliment.
the afterlife companions he didn’t choose and didn’t ask for. They’d become friends, and they’d become family.
“But have you considered, Este dear, that just once you might try to live a little while you’re actually alive?”
“It’s me. The Fades came back because I’m here, a piece of my dad’s bloodline to complete the ritual, like the book said. It’s why they attacked me but no one else.”
“They might not be protecting the Heir,” Posy said. “Maybe they’re protecting something else. Everyone has something they can’t stand to lose.”
Posy thinks she knows who the Heir is.” They drifted into a grove of hemlocks, a pocket of darkness between streetlamps, and Mateo was cut in such sharp contrast that she could see every detail, every muscle, as his spine went rigid. “She does?”
My hypothesis is that the heir is Ives who is actually Mateo's sister
“Not a bad hypothesis, but as long as we find the pages, it doesn’t matter who the Heir is. Let’s grab our books and get to work.”
“I’ve noticed the company you keep,” she pressed as if searching for the weak spot, the tender bruise that would make Este squeal. Este’s mind flared with images of the ghosts, laughing as they sailed through the stacks on the ladders. Was having fun cause for expulsion? “You have?” “You don’t want to get too close to the Fades,” Ives said, sharp and cold as an ice pick. “Not while The Book of Fades is still missing.”
You know, Este, some things are inevitable. There is life, and there is death. Within the walls of the Lilith, all of eternity resides on these shelves. The Heir of Fades is also inevitable and will stop at nothing to stay as immortal as these books.”
“Is it already time for next period? I always wish we had more time together. And with every hour that I don’t have The Book of Fades in my hands, it is more dangerous for everyone.”
Its not a warning. Its a threat.
“But don’t be late for your shift tonight. This library needs you, Este.”
If i didn't already think Ives was the heir, i definitely would now. Red herring? No, i think the herring is the doubt about Mareo.
October 15, 1917: the night that the fire started in the spire, when a spark erased some of the most precious Radcliffe memories, including Robin’s letters. Any sage wisdom he might have left in those pages had cindered.
With Mateo’s blood on the pages, a match in his hands, and a moonless sky, the Fades must have been summoned that night, drawn out of the shadows created in that blaze.
I want to reach in the book and shake her until she realizes how wrong she is.
I hate it when you know something the MC doesn't know.
The look of something lost. Maybe sepia-toned nostalgia was its own type of haunting. The ache of missing something you could never have again.
Este wondered if he could tell the scabs kept chipping off, leaving the skin angry and vulnerable. Not unlike herself.
They were planets revolving around each other, just like the ghosts in the senior lounge—a solar system anchored by each other’s gravitational pull. They’d found their place and fit into it perfectly. Este was an asteroid, blazing through their quiet harmony.
today her priority list was preoccupied with things like regain corporeality if at all possible and try not to have an entire mental collapse in front of my classmates.
they didn’t spare a second glance for the girl almost gone.
Her words lifted, and Este knew she wore a faint smile, lost in memories. She used to think her mom was sad when she looked like that, mourning for what she couldn’t have. She never imagined she wasn’t running away from something but toward.
Which meant that Mateo wasn’t the Heir of Fades. Lilith was. And Ives was Lilith Radcliffe.
Winner winner chicken diinner.
Life, too, wasn’t the harsh beam of a fluorescent bulb, on or off. It was a dimmer switch, a candlewick burning down to the quick. Fading and fading away.
“On a scale of one to ten, how dead are you?”
His hands skimmed down the length of her waist, and when she tore herself away, she could feel the heat of her blood humming beneath her skin: on
Wouldn't one of his hands touch her wound? Ans make her scream in pain? Just saying
