I squinted. “It’s up there?”
Myriam guided me back inside. “There are no windows or doors, but… I can show you where he goes in.” She gave me a conspiratorial wink. “He’s notoriously private. I can only imagine how furious he’ll be if you make it inside.”
I set my jaw. Let him be furious; this was more important than the sanctity of his library. If he wasn’t going to answer my call, he’d have to deal with me banging on the walls.
She led me up a spiral staircase tucked away in an alcove. The door leading into it was so unassuming and thin I’d have overlooked it a hundred times, but when we reached the top of the Grigori stronghold, it opened up on… nothing.
Just an empty room, and a long stretch of blank stone wall.
“Right through there.” Myriam pointed at a portion of the wall that was ever-so-slightly darker than the surrounding stone. “Good luck.”
She turned and left me, chuckling to herself.
I braced myself and strode to the ‘entrance’ of Azazel’s library. The faintest sensation of magic prickled at my hands as I ran my palms over the wall, hoping for a magical mechanism or lock that might let me through, but… for all intents and purposes, it was just a solid stone wall.
I scowled at it, reaching through my mark again, and got nothing. “Are you ignoring me on purpose?”
It wasn’t like I expected an answer, and no answer was exactly what I got.
I stepped up to the wall and pounded on it with my fist. The magic prickled at my hands, biting a little harder now, but it was like his wards recognized me and were reluctant to do any greater harm. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem inclined to open up for me, either.
I paced back and forth for a moment. If it was a stone wall, he clearly went through using magic. The only problem was that my magic wasn’t the same. I couldn’t warp space and time and teleport myself in and out of thin air.
Which meant I needed to make a door.
I summoned my dark fire and cupped it in my hand, tugging on the bond between us again. “Last warning, Azazel. We can do this the easy way, or the hard way. It’s up to you.”
Thirty seconds passed.
Silence.
“The hard way, then,” I said cheerfully, and sent the magic roaring down my arm.
I drew my arm back and flung a blast of fire at the wall, just as the air shivered around me.
My entire body jerked, and then I was standing in a room I’d never seen before, trembling with surprise and the odd sensation that I’d just stepped through a wall of solid liquid after being condensed into the size of a pinprick and reformed within a split-second. Every single hair on my body was standing upright.
“What was that?” My exclamation exploded in the silence around me, and I blinked.
I was in the library. And it was nothing like I’d expected.
From the outside, the steeple of Blackchapel looked like it’d be no larger than a typical attic.
This room… this room was hundreds of feet tall. Books lined the walls from top to bottom, stretching across the room to form spires and bridges. There were entire walls made out of books. Lights drifted between the tottering stacks, but they were few and far between, and as soon as one vanished the darkness seemed to pool like a living thing.
“Don’t touch anything.” Azazel’s acerbic voice echoed through the library, although he was nowhere in sight. “And I mean anything, love.”
I rubbed my arms to get rid of the goosebumps, my system finally getting over the shock of being ripped from one point in space to another. No fucking wonder Belial hated it so much when Azazel did that without warning.
“Anything at all?” I took a step forward, carefully moving to the side so my elbow didn’t knock against a thick tome sticking out from one of the spires.
I could almost feel Azazel giving me a deadpan stare. “Not a single thing,” his voice echoed through the library. “Follow the stars, please.”
I was about to ask what stars, because there was no light, just the shadows pawing at my ankles, and I could barely see where I was supposed to do, when a little flurry of stars drifted around a corner made of stacked books and shimmered in front of me.
They were just bright enough to see by, enough to know if I was about to run into anything or trip on an unseen step.
I followed them through the library, frowning as things shifted at the corners of my eye. Once, I could’ve sworn a hand with fingers slipped between the pages of a book on a stand, alone on its shelf.
When I looked at it directly, it was just a book. Leave it to Azazel to have a library of terrors.
The stars guided me without incident to a large open space in the center of his library, where a circular indentation was sunken into the floor. Azazel’s back was to me, but he was leaning over a massive obsidian orb, his shadows weaving around him.
“What happens if I touch them?” I asked, glancing askance at the cover of a dictionary that looked distinctly hairy.
He didn’t look away from the orb, but his voice no longer echoed eerily. “I would be very upset if you read the wrong thing and started hemorrhaging out of your eyeballs,” he said dryly.
“Only upset? Not devastated?” I wasn’t going to look up. There couldn’t possibly be a swarm of books flying overhead like bats, no matter what it had looked like.
“That’s what you’re concerned about?” he demanded, finally turning away from the orb. “Not the part where you bleed to death from your eyes, but that I said upset?”
I smiled at him. “I finally got your full attention.”
Azazel stared at me, and finally relaxed, striding up several shallow steps to meet me at the edge of the circle. His violet eyes burned in his pale face, and dark circles showed under them, stark against his skin.
He was burning the midnight oil, and although he didn’t technically need to sleep, he’d been using vast amounts of magic to search for his sister and Lucifer. I couldn’t fault him at all for not answering to my summons through the bond.
I sank into his arms when he hugged me. “You were never supposed to come in here,” he said, lips moving against my hair. “It’s a dangerous place. Not the sort of place I’d have you wandering around in.”
“Well, this is important.” I looked up at him, still remembering the dream with fresh clarity.
And I told him every last detail.
19
Melisande
By the time I was done telling Azazel everything I could remember about the dream, some of the lines of exhaustion had left his face.
Now he looked like he’d been electrocuted back into life. It was almost possible to see the questions zipping around in his head.
“So, he finally left his body,” he said. He was pacing back and forth on the middling step of the sunken floor, rubbing his chin as he walked. He’d pushed his sleeves up to his elbows, showing the corded muscles of his arms. “It was only a matter of time. He took on the dragon’s body eons ago, but… eventually he would’ve realized he was missing out. Of course he’d want something more enjoyable, even if it’s less durable…”
I sank into a leather chair that hadn’t been there minutes ago. Now that I’d done the important thing, it was starting to hit me just how tired I was. Even two weeks without flying was enough to put my muscles out of practice. “He’s going to be far more dangerous this way.”