“No,” said the woman. “He cannot.” She gestured, and Ada was flung several feet through the air, hitting the floor with a hard thud.
“Ada!” Lenora ran to her, kneeling to place herself between Ada and the Board.
“Daddy,” whispered Ada weakly. Both girls looked toward her father.
All three Board members had clenched their hands into fists, pointed straight at the Not-Director. Beneath his suit, things began slithering, things that he struck out at desperately, landing blows all over his body. His face turned red, then purple, and though his mouth was open wide, he made no sound.
A dark portal appeared, and with a thrust of the Board’s fists, the Not-Director stumbled into it and vanished.
The portal started to close.
And too late, Lenora realized that Ada had gotten to her feet and was stumbling toward the shrinking portal, saying, “Daddy … Daddy … no…”
Lenora leapt to her feet and ran, reaching for Ada, pulling her back from the portal just before it vanished with a pop.
The Board began laughing, hideously and hysterically.
Lenora spun to face them. “Don’t you dare hurt him!” she shouted.
“Oh, don’t worry about him, little one,” said the girl in purple.
“Yes,” said the man in green, “we don’t care about him. You are the one who ruined all our careful planning, all our decades of work.”
“We have a special punishment for you,” spat the woman in red.
The girl in purple grinned her sharp grin and held out her hands. The others took them.
Lenora took several steps back, as she had seen something like this once before. The Board members were melting into one another like candles, growing larger and larger. Soon they were one hideous person, six times the height of Malachi.
The monster grinned down at Lenora with a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth. Lenora looked everywhere for a weapon, but there was none to be found. When she turned back to the creature, it had changed.
It was a grotesque thing, composed of pure darkness, black eyes glittering. Shreds of its raincoats flapped in tatters on each side, and within the tatters, within the darkness, Lenora could see images rushing past like broken bits of a movie—the entire Library in ruins, ceilings caved in, walls fallen over, weeds winding through the rubble. Here and there she could see fires, hideous blazes with a horrid scent that stung Lenora’s nose, and the Forces of Darkness rushing forward with books in their arms, hurling them into the blaze.
And all three members of the Board towered sixty feet over Lenora and Ada, standing all alone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Lenora, Fear, and Lies
The monstrous creature towered over Lenora and Ada.
And towered. And towered. After a few moments of this, Lenora realized the monster had stopped moving. The flames in the images of burning books were no longer flickering. And beside her, Ada was frozen in place, her mouth opened to scream and her arms raised halfway over her head.
Everything had stopped. Everything except Lenora. She looked at her hands and flexed her fingers, then looked back up at the Board, wondering how this had happened and what she should do. And then she felt a presence behind her and turned.
“Malachi!” she cried.
For there stood the Chief Assistant Answerer.
The giant woman bent to one knee and reached down to take Lenora by the shoulder. And, for the first time Lenora had ever seen, she smiled.
“Yes, Lenora,” said Malachi. “Now listen, for we have very little time. The Library is in full revolt. But here and now, the Forces of Darkness are many, and we are very few. I am needed elsewhere. It is up to you to defeat the Board.”
“Defeat them how?” said Lenora with despair, for she had been sure that Malachi was here to accomplish that very thing. “I’m not powerful like you!”
“Really,” said Malachi. “Was it I who found a place of safety for librarians to gather their strength? Was it I who saved Zenodotus from the depths of his sorrow, and exposed the Director, and created a rebel army that waited only for your command to strike? You are more powerful than you know, Lenora. And remember, as always—your friends are all around you. I asked one of them to lend you this, in fact.” And into Lenora’s hand she placed an object.
Lenora recognized it immediately. Rosa’s device, the one they’d used to find the koala, and Zenodotus. But whatever would she do with this?
There was no time to ask. There was a blinding flash of light, so bright that Lenora closed her eyes. And when she opened them, Malachi was gone, and it appeared that she’d taken Ada with her, for Lenora was all alone. Except for the Board, who had returned to their human forms and were looking around frantically.
“What happened?” shouted the woman in the red raincoat.
The man in the green raincoat focused his gaze as though looking at something far away. “Librarians,” he said, shocked. “Everywhere, all over the Library.”
“That’s impossible,” spat the young girl in the long purple raincoat. Her tongue flicked out between her sharp teeth. “Where have they come from?”
“We must stop them—now!” cried the woman, and with three popping sounds, the Board vanished.
I have to follow them! thought Lenora. She gripped Rosa’s location device and pictured the woman in the red raincoat.
Nothing happened.
She thought furiously. What had Rosa said? I can locate anyone once I have their image. But the image in Lenora’s mind, of a woman in red, was of course not her true image. The woman had appeared as a huge, shadowy creature, too, and then again as a colossal dark nothingness. Lenora had no idea what her, or rather its, true form was.
If it even had one …
Lenora snapped her fingers.
The creature did have a true form. And it had been revealed when Lenora first met it. In fact, she had encountered this creature a number of times in her life, long before she had ever become a librarian.
And when Lenora had stood bolted to the floor, terrified, her words coming out in a squeak, she had remembered what Malachi taught her, and the creature had hissed and flinched, giving Lenora time to escape.
She gripped Rosa’s device. She closed her eyes and remembered all the times in her life when she had been afraid, alone in the dark when she was very young, on her first day at a new school when she knew no one, and that terrible day when her parents told her that her grandmother had …
Wind nearly knocked her from her feet.
Lenora opened her eyes. She was no longer in the Board’s chamber, but standing atop some domed structure high up in the sky, with wind gusting so terribly she had to drop to her hands and knees immediately to keep it from hurling her right off the edge. Terror surged through her as she thought, I’m going to fall, and imagined the horrible plunge awaiting her, even as she looked up and saw the woman in the red raincoat standing in the center of the dome, her arms raised, laughing. Lenora struggled to support herself on her trembling limbs, knowing she oughtn’t be afraid. But the wind was still forcing her ever closer to the edge, scraping the skin off her hands and knees.
And she would fall. She was sure of it. She’d fall, and with that the Forces would take over the Library forever. She had failed. She tried to summon the strength to crawl forward, but could not. She felt one of her knees go off the edge into open air, and then—