"You know. To have that. I grew up in foster homes. I don't know if I have any relatives at all."
She clamped her lips shut on the words, but they'd already escaped. What was it about him that made her want to pour out her life story? She couldn't even imagine what he thought of her now.
But his smile was gentle. "Maybe," he said. "I never really thought of it that way. My family's gone through a lot of ... upheaval, lately. I'm a little bit estranged from them right now."
"Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bring up anything painful."
"You didn't." He smiled again, all too briefly. It was a smile she could get lost in. She had to wrench her gaze away.
"Anyway, you're here to see the—"
"Yeah, lead on."
They spoke at the same time, and Jess couldn't help laughing, bringing out Reive's warm smile again. The moment of tension dissipated, and his gold-tinted eyes sparkled.
"It's back here, past the restrooms," she said. "I swear I'm not always this scattered."
It's just that I'm more used to helping 90-year-olds with their taxes than giving book tours to guys who look like you.
This, at least, she managed not to say out loud.
She dug in her skirt pocket for the storeroom keys and unlocked the door. "This is everything that's not currently in circulation," she explained, flicking on the light. "New books that haven't been entered in our computer system yet, damaged books, donations—it's kind of a mess, sorry." The room was crowded with plastic totes and boxes of books, books scattered on the sorting table, shelves packed with books. "And the rest of the gargoyle books are back here. Most of these are items that might not be able to stand up to being regularly handled by patrons. And some are ... well ..."
She pulled out a plastic sleeve with a newspaper inside. It was from the late 1800s, the newspaper so brittle she had to handle the plastic very carefully by the corners to avoid causing any more of it to flake off. HOAX OR MONSTER? TERROR IN PICCADILLY CIRCUS! the headline read.
"Careful," she warned, passing it to Reive. "There's more like that in here, tabloids and the like. I don't know if that's the kind of thing you're looking for."
He tilted it to the light to glance over the article. She couldn't help watching his face, distracted by the intensity of his copper gaze.
"You haven't said what you're researching," she prompted, and somewhere deep in her chest, there was a flicker of hope. He hadn't simply dismissed the article as fiction or sensationalism; he was still reading it, as if he thought he could glean useful information from it. Did he know? Somewhere out there, other people must know. Someone must have the answers she had fruitlessly sought in the books and periodicals she'd gleaned from estate and remainder sales across the country. Maybe he would be the one.
"I was actually hoping that you had some firsthand sources," he said, glancing up at her. "Journals and that kind of thing."
The tentative hope in her chest unfurled a little further. Most people who expressed interest in the gargoyle books were researching school projects or just wanted to look at the books with pictures.
Except for their mysterious visitor yesterday. She was still annoyed with Marion for not even getting the stranger's name.
"You weren't in yesterday, were you?" she asked, reaching for a box of latex-free gloves on a nearby shelf. "Marion said—"
"That someone else came in to look at the gargoyle books. No, it wasn't me."
"Oh well," she said. "Maybe he'll come back. That's really interesting, two people in two days. Normally the only people who ever ask me about it are kids doing school projects." She pulled out a pair of gloves. "Here, put these on. What I'm about to show you is fragile."
Reive dropped the backpack on the floor to free up his hands. "Is this okay?" He made a slight gesture, and she noticed that he was wearing a black glove on his right hand. Not the left one, though. He also held his right hand stiffly, struggling to pull the plastic glove onto his other hand.
"Yes, that's fine," she said. "I just want don't want to get hand oils on the pages." She wanted to ask if it was a disability or injury—he held his hand like it hurt him—but she didn't want to be rude. Anyway, it wasn't like she didn't know enough about keeping secrets of her own. "I don't know if this is what you're looking for, but I'm excited about having it in our little library. I've been thinking about getting a display case for it."
She opened a drawer under the shelves, and very carefully took out the book she considered the pride of the collection, even if it had been a personal disappointment for her. Like everything else she had acquired or read over the years, it had offered no answers for her. There was no explanation between its worn pages of what had happened to her to make her the way she was, let alone a cure for her condition.
But it was still a spectacular find. She had no idea how old it really was, but she was confident it was the oldest book she had ever personally handled. She could never have bought something like this with an ordinary small-town library's budget or her own pocket money, but she'd stumbled onto it by pure chance in a lot of books she had obtained in a batch from an estate sale. Most of the lot had simply gone into the library's book sales, but she'd made some good finds, and this was one of them.
It was only half a book. There was a front cover, but no back cover, and it looked like it had been torn down the middle. It had been a beautiful book once, before age and wear left it in this sadly bedraggled state. The flaking leather cover was embellished with gold leaf, but unlabeled with any form of title.
Jess had bound it carefully in plastic to help stop any further deterioration. She opened it now with exquisite care. Inside, the yellowed, crumbling pages were covered with cramped handwriting in faded brown ink.
And there was, bound to the first page with ancient glue and a strip of fabric, a shard of stone that could easily be the broken tip of a statue's stone claw.
Reive
This could be it, the thing he'd been searching for. Reive found that his hands were trembling slightly as he took the book from Jess.
That was definitely a gargoyle claw; he'd seen them before. The wounds on his arm, beneath his jacket sleeve, seemed to pulse as he stared at it. Shuddering, he turned the page.
The first few pages were covered with crabbed writing, mixed with diagrams and formulas he couldn't understand. The writing itself was faded but legible. Or at least, it seemed to be—but when he looked closely, he couldn't make heads or tails of the words.
"It's Latin," Jess said, leaning over his shoulder. "Well, this page is. There's also Greek and a number of pages with ancient Norse runes. But most of it is Latin."
She was so close. If her hair hadn't been braided back, it would have fallen down to brush the side of his neck. She smelled very nice, like soft and sweet vanilla sugar. He could taste it on the back of his tongue, as if he'd brushed his lips against her skin.
"Do you read Latin?" he asked, forcibly wrestling his mind back on task.
Jess nodded. "I have a degree in library science and classical literature. I mean, it's not Harvard, of course; I went to a small-town college, but ..." She trailed off, looking embarrassed.