River of Shadows (Underworld Gods #1)(65)

Death stops and stares down at me and I can almost feel him thinking, a pause hanging between us as he takes in all my babbling.

Finally, he says, “Basic bitch?”

I wave my free hand dismissively. “It just means I’m not special. I’m no different than anyone else. Whatever complexity you see in me, it’s not there. I’m just…foreign to you.”

“Ah,” he says, slowly nodding. “I thought you meant you were not very adept at being a bitch, and I was going to say otherwise.”

I glare at him. “That’s funny. Did Death manage to make a joke at my expense?”

“Who said I was joking?” Then he starts walking again and tugs at my arm. We go up the grand staircase to the next level and turn the corner. There’s a huge iron door with an inscription on it that I can’t read.

“What does that say?” I ask.

“There was a door to which I found no key,” Death reads. “There was a Veil through which I might not see. Some talk a little while of me and thee, there was—and then no more of thee and me.”

I stare at the door. Not only does there not seem to be a lock, there doesn’t seem to be a handle either.

But Death runs his hands over the skeleton designs down the middle of the door and then something hisses and the door opens, the air sucking us in, as if we’re opening the door to an airlock.

“Welcome to the Library of the Veils,” Death says, placing his hand at my back and ushering me in.

It’s dark save for the grand windows that line the end of the room, done up in the circular petal designs you might find in a Catholic church, but then all at once the lights go on, illuminating how grand the room is.

No, grand isn’t the right word. It’s fucking magnificent. I’m such a whore for libraries in general—I once spent the majority of my Manhattan vacation inside the New York Public Library—but I’ve never seen any like this.

The library itself is at least three stories tall in places where the bookshelves reach up into the narrow circular turrets of the castle, the shelves themselves built into the iron walls. It’s the library from the Beauty and the Beast cartoon, except gothic and foreboding. It’s not just all the iron, or all the skulls and bones as décor, or the strange glass cages placed around the room with blankets draped over them, but it’s this strange sense of…I don’t even know if I can describe it. It’s a sense of life and of death, it’s ever-changing and powerful, like the atoms in the air are constantly being rewritten. It feels like there are more than the two of us in here, that instead there are hundreds of thousands of people among us, people that I can’t see. I can feel them all at once, all their energy, and I’m not surprised to feel the hair at the back of my neck standing stiff.

There’s also a large floating book in the middle of the room and a dog made of iron guarding it.

“That’s Rauta,” Death says rather proudly, gesturing to the dog. “You wore his collar for a bit. Remember?”

Rauta opens its mouth and growls at me, literal sparks shooting out.

It’s fucking terrifying, and I’m not kidding when I said it’s made of iron. Part of it looks like a normal Tuonela dog, with bone and some patches of fur, but other parts look like they’re welded on. Like a steampunk demon hound with red glowing eyes. Thank god that collar is back around the dog’s fat neck, even though it doesn’t seem to be chained to anything.

“Not a dog person?” Death asks.

“I love dogs,” I say defensively. “Just not the ones that belong to Doctor Frankenstein.”

Death chuckles and walks over to Rauta, crouching down to pet it. He strokes his gloved hand over the dog’s head and the dog visibly calms down, its metal tongue hanging out as it lies down on the rug. “There’s a good dog,” he coos to it. “You’re doing a good job guarding this place. A very good job.”

“Is he sentient?” I ask, peering at him. The iron dog totally seems at peace now.

“All animals are sentient,” Death says, straightening up. “They all experience emotions. They all have souls.”

“You know what I mean. Is it like Sarvi?”

“Oh. Thank the Creator, no. I couldn’t handle that.”

I go back to looking around the room. It really is morbidly beautiful, and the more I stare at it, the more the details surprise me. For one, the lights that came on aren’t from candles but from white lights glowing from sconces around the room. For two, the books themselves, all bound in leather and skins, seem to jostle and move on the shelves. There must be thousands and thousands of them all subtly vibrating.

For three, pretty sure I just saw a ghost glide past from one end of the library to the other.

“What?” Death asks, staring at my face.

“Is this library…haunted?”

“Oh. Yes. Very much so.”

My eyes widen. “By who?”

“By whom, you mean? And it doesn’t matter. It changes all the time. It’s haunted by the dead. I don’t see them anymore, though I did when I was a young boy.”

“But why is the library haunted, of all places?” I ask.

“It’s the Library of the Veils,” he says patiently. “You know what the Veils are, don’t you?”