Robots vs. Fairies(24)
The book tucked under Emily’s arm squirmed, and she let it fall. Connie shape-shifted into her humanoid form and stepped between Emily and Rudolph. “I killed your guards. Give us the book of poems, or I’ll kill you.”
“No.” Rudolph lifted the gun and fired, and though Connie moved with inhuman speed, she was still hurt from her fights with the Mist Folk, and she wasn’t fast enough. The iron shot tore through her, and she spun, changing back into a book before she hit the ground, her pages tattered and torn.
Llyfyr shrieked, but Emily just stared. Connie was one of hers, one of the volumes under her protection, and this arrogant prick had hurt her. She looked up as Rudolph took shells from his pocket and broke open the shotgun to reload. “Mellifera is fond of you,” he said, “the way my mother is fond of her cats, but she loves me, and she’ll understand if I have to kill you—”
Emily touched the locket at her throat and called the books to her.
All of them. All at once.
She held out her open hands before her, toward Rudolph. Thousands of books blinked out of existence, leaving the shelves around them bare, and then reappeared in midair. Emily and Llyfyr dove out of the way as books rained down, landing on Rudolph’s head and shoulders, knocking the gun from his hands, driving him to his knees, and burying him under a mountain of hardbound volumes that towered taller than Emily’s head.
She winced at the sight of the books piling up, but almost all of them were protected by preservative magics to keep the pages from tearing or deteriorating, which should minimize the damage.
Llyfyr laughed and leaped to her feet, spinning around and skipping. “You did it, you got him, you—”
“What is the meaning of this?” Mellifera roared. She stormed toward them, her two guards at her back. Emily winced. They’d defeated Rudolph, but not the spell he’d used to bind the fairy princess. Mellifera grew taller with each step she took, until she towered nearly eight feet high. Even knowing it was probably glamour, Emily shrank away in alarm. A hazy yellow-and-black nimbus formed around Mellifera, accompanied by an ominous buzzing. Bees drifted up from her hair and flew out of her sleeves, and a few even slipped out of her mouth when she cried, “Where is my love?” Soon a cloud of buzzing, stinging insects surrounded her: a manifestation of her temper, terrible and beautiful to behold.
One of her guards reached out for Mellifera’s arm, perhaps to hold her back from rushing into possible danger, then shrieked and stumbled away as a score of Mellifera’s bees swarmed around his head. The guard waved his arms wildly and raced down the corridor, flesh welted and swelling. Mellifera didn’t even notice.
Sela raced around and got ahead of her sister, stepping between her and Emily. “We heard a gunshot, and then this noise—”
Llyfyr stepped forward and curtsied to Mellifera, who was now nearly invisible beneath a curtain of undulating bees. “Ma’am, there was an accident, you see, all the books fell down, but Emily is going to fix it, with her . . . librarian . . . prowess. Aren’t you, Em?”
“Where. Is. Rudolph?” Mellifera’s voice thundered from beyond the cloud.
“Emily will look for him while she’s fixing the books, won’t you?” Sela called. “It’s all right, sister.” She made soothing motions.
Mellifera’s arm appeared from the cloud of bees and pointed straight at Emily. “Fix. This. Or you will feel my sting.”
“I—of course.” Emily clambered around the edge of the mountain of books piled on Rudolph and made her way deeper into the stacks. She tried to ignore the buzzing behind her. She’d called all the books from the library to her, emptied the shelves in this place, but Murmured Under the Moon wasn’t from her library. She couldn’t summon it, and that meant—
There: one book still standing on a shelf, hidden in plain sight. She climbed up the shelf like it was a ladder and snatched the book down. The cover looked right for the era, leather over wood, with raised bands across the spine, and the pages were vellum, covered in elegant handwriting and lines of poetry in Latin.
In the distance she heard Mellifera shouting and making demands, Sela arguing with her, and Llyfyr trying to keep the peace. Emily started to tear out the pages, but something in her rebelled—she was a librarian. She was supposed to take care of books, especially one-of-a-kind books, and not destroy them. She cocked her head. The shouting didn’t sound too serious, not yet, and it was a short book, so maybe she had time—
A few minutes later, content that she’d done the best she could, Emily tore out the pages. Mellifera was still yelling back there. How destroyed did the book have to be? She sighed, tore up a page, and put the pieces in her mouth, chewing and swallowing the shreds of vellum, hoping the ink wasn’t toxic.
She’d eaten only one page when the shouting stopped. Emily crept back toward the book pile and saw Sela with her arms wrapped around her sister as Mellifera wept on her shoulder. Emily made her way toward them, and Llyfyr took her hand. “Whatever you did, it worked.”
“I ate a book,” Emily said.
“Now you’re just trying to make me jealous,” Llyfyr said.
*
A week later Mellifera and Sela stood in Emily’s small office. Mellifera was beautiful, ageless, and strange, as befitted a princess of the Folk, and she wore a sea-green gown that rippled like water. Sela was her same piratical self, lounging and self-satisfied. “Is everything back in order?” Mellifera asked.