The Orphan Witch by Paige Crutcher

Author:Paige Crutcher [Crutcher, Paige]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250797384
Google: -CUQEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Published: 2021-09-27T23:00:00+00:00

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DORIAN WAS IN the middle of scouring the stacks for a very specific book when he felt the earth shake beneath his feet. He stumbled away from the shelves and watched as they warped and curved. The Library for the Lost changed its shape, reworking the geometrically angled room into a large cylinder. Magic ripped through the air, cracked down the hall and burst toward the stacks. The book Dorian had been seeking flew off the shelf. The book wrote and rewrote itself, pages tumbling out and shredding into nothing as new words and fresh ink and parchment fluttered in.

In all his years, so very many years, as the guardian of the library, Dorian had never seen such a sight. The library was thrown to its regular fits, particularly when he challenged its wishes, but this was something else.

The rest of the books shifted and straightened. New rows appeared, others deleted, and a chandelier made of prisms and balls of white flowing light encased in water descended from the ceiling in the center of the room. Dorian knew what those glowing orbs were before the word solidified in his mind.

Aether.

How?

The walls of the building shook as rooms were rewritten. Shadows moved against the walls, slinking in as far as the edge of the stacks. They reached out, trying to grasp a way in but were propelled back by the light.

“It’s not your time, friends,” Dorian said, his voice solemn as he watched them wait and retreat. “But time is certainly trying to speed up.”

Dorian waited out the last of the aftershocks, and when the room was as silent as a prayer, he took a calm step forward. The book he’d been seeking fluttered its cover once, like a lady shaking out her skirt. Dorian reached for his stepladder, and counted the new steps in its wake. Seven more had appeared. He climbed up until he was eye to spine with the book in question.

“Ah,” he said, giving a small bow to the book with the ash tree and crescent moon on the cover. The Mayfair grimoire. “It’s as I thought.”

He stepped back down the ladder and crossed to the door. Dorian’s hand was on the knob when he heard his name cried out, heard the wound in her voice, as she tried to rip him through time and space.

Dorian leaned in. He tried like hell to hold on. He didn’t stand a chance.

Dorian crumpled to his knees as pain overtook him.

It was as though a knife slashed into his side and yanked down and up, down and up. Each time it completed its journey, the seams of his soul were reknit. Dorian was being torn apart, knitted back together, and torn apart. The layers of his soul shredded as Persephone tried and failed to yank him from the library.

He didn’t know how long it lasted, how long magic fought an impossible war to move an immovable object through time. In the space of seconds or hours or days or years, Dorian bled apart and was reknit again.

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