Hosting a party in a magical library came with certain hazards.
When the first guests came through the front doors, they were greeted with a loud hooting sound, courtesy of the topmost decoration on one of the twin Christmas trees that dominated the lobby. In place of an angel sat a giant tawny owl: Sylvester, the resident spirit of the library itself. Otherwise known as a genius loci, he spent his time masquerading as a talking owl for reasons known only to himself, and he wanted to ensure everyone paid more attention to him than they did to the regular festivities. The noise certainly got their attention. A few people jumped, startled, then laughed when the hooting turned into a jolly chant of “Ho, ho, ho!”
Fake snow began to fall from the ceiling, a veritable blizzard of sparkling flakes that blanketed everything in seconds. Luckily, the guests took the stunt in good humour and were soon laughing and singing along to the Christmas music that sprang up from the speakers my Aunt Adelaide had installed on the balconies up on the second floor.
Every year, the library’s decorations were a sight to behold. Aside from the giant glittering trees, tinsel draped the tall bookshelves, and mistletoe festooned the balconies on the three floors above. There was technically a fourth floor, too, but that wasn’t visible from this angle, and fortunately, none of our visitors had found their way up there since the mishap a few weeks before. It had been Estelle’s idea to host a solstice party so that we could take our minds thoroughly off those events, with the bonus of drawing attention to the library for a positive reason rather than a negative one.
We’d succeeded in both aspects. Aunt Candace had mostly stopped sulking in her room, though she’d stopped short of making a proper showing at the event and was instead partaking in her usual habit of lurking behind bookshelves, fishing for gossip.
Her older sister, my Aunt Adelaide, swept around, cleaning up spilled drinks, refreshing the buffet table, and moving any obstacle that the library threw into the way when one of the guests unwittingly stepped out of bounds. Her eldest daughter, my cousin Estelle, presided over the celebrations, accompanied by Spark, her pixie assistant. She wore a dress that glittered with red and silver to match her mother’s, and since they shared the same curly red hair and curvy figures, they might have been twins.
My cousin Cass was absent, but that wasn’t conspicuous by any means. She spent most of her time ensconced up on the third floor with her animals and was even less of a party animal—pun intended—than her pet manticore.
I wasn’t into parties that much myself, but my best friend, Laney, had always been able to drag me out of whichever corner I was hiding in to join in the fun. She showed up shortly after the dancing kicked off, dressed in a shimmering black-and-silver number made all the more striking given her vampire’s grace and balance. As she was most active at sundown, she was in her element, her eyes bright and her mouth stretched in a grin that exposed her pointed fangs.
Before I’d quite realised what she was doing, Laney took my hand and dragged me into a dance. Vampires’ movement made me feel like a clumsy ogre in comparison, but the darkness made any self-consciousness unnecessary. It was fun twirling around with her and laughing, forgetting all our troubles—at least until I spied a pair of eyes watching me from between the branches of the tree.
I glanced up, confirming Sylvester was still on top of the tree, not inside.
Laney noticed my line of sight and peered closer. “It’s your cousin.”
So it was. The eyes blinked then vanished, but I’d already glimpsed a piece of Cass’s red hair through the gap in the branches. “Cass, what are you doing inside Sylvester’s tree?”
“Nothing!” she said in snappish tones. “He stole my glasses.”
“I most certainly did not.” The owl’s indignant reply drifted down from above. “She’s lying.”
Cass made an irritated noise. “What does it matter? Go on, get back to partying.”
“What are you up to in there?” She hadn’t brought the manticore downstairs, had she?
No response came, and when Laney pulled the branches apart, I was unsurprised to see that Cass had vanished entirely.
“Weird.” I stepped back as the branches snapped back into place. “What’s up with her?”
“Maybe she wanted to join in the dancing but was too shy.”
“Pretty sure Cass has never been shy in her life.” More likely, she’d been curious about the party but not enough to break her habit of lurking in the background, judging everyone rather than joining in the fun. “I was worried she’d lost an animal in there, but I guess not.”
“Would the manticore even fit?” Laney asked dubiously.
“Probably best not to think too hard about that.” Sylvester would certainly object to a manticore—or any other magical monster, for that matter—sitting in his tree, but even Cass wouldn’t go as far as to smuggle in a new friend during a party with hundreds of guests present. I hoped.
“Hmm.” Laney watched the tree with a thoughtful expression on her face then shrugged. “Back to dancing?”
“Sure.” Just then, I spied someone else standing near the library’s front door, his silhouette noticeable even in the darkness outside the spotlights on the dance floor.
It was kind of embarrassing that after nearly a year of officially being together, my breath still caught whenever I set eyes on Xavier unexpectedly. He was as striking as a vampire, at least in my opinion, with blond curls tumbling over eyes a startling shade of aquamarine. His face broke into a smile when he spotted me, and my heart skipped a beat.
“Oh, you’ll want to dance with him instead.” Laney slipped me a wink and sashayed away, catching the arm of a passing witch and drawing her into a kind of half waltz, half foxtrot. Any kind of dance looked effortlessly elegant with a vampire at the wheel.
I ducked my head as I walked over to the door, conscious that a fair few people had turned to watch me approach Xavier. It wasn’t just his strikingness that drew attention but the scythe he carried strapped to his back, along with the fact that he could have just as easily stepped out of thin air as through the front door.
“Hey,” I said. “Glad you could make it.”
“Rory.” He took my hand and kissed me on the lips. “I can only stay an hour. I hope that’s all right.”
“Of course.” It was lucky he’d shown up at all, given how controlling his Reaper boss could be, and it was probably better that he wasn’t around when Aunt Candace inevitably got into the punch bowl and started asking all our visitors intrusive questions. “Something came up with your boss?”
“Kind of.” He brushed a few fake snowflakes off my shoulder. “I should probably explain somewhere less public.”
That figures. This time last year, Grim Reaper had gone as far as to force his apprentice to leave town altogether, with the implication that they would never return, and while he’d shown no signs of repeating that performance, it would explain why I felt a flutter of apprehension as I followed Xavier into the living room. My family’s living quarters lay down a corridor off the lobby and consisted of a small, cosy living room and kitchen with stairs leading up to our bedrooms. Though the walls weren’t soundproofed, the noise from the party was notably muted once we sat down on the sofa. Honestly, I was starting to get a little nervous at how he was going about this, as if he was about to drop some dreadful revelation on my head. We’d been through so much together already, I knew, but my nerves thrummed as I sat down to wait for him to speak.
“I already told you it’s tradition for all the local Reapers and their apprentices to meet for a summit at the end of each year, didn’t I?”
“Possibly?” Last year, he hadn’t actually been here, and he usually had to give away the bare minimum of details in order to avoid ticking off his cranky boss, the aptly named Grim Reaper. “Does that mean you’re going away?”
“No,” he said. “It means the other local Reapers and their apprentices are coming here to Ivory Beach.”
“There are other Reapers coming here?”
“Four of them,” he said. “Plus their apprentices. The boss isn’t happy that our home was volunteered, but we typically take it in turns, and Ivory Beach came up next on the list.”
“I didn’t know our town was a contender.”
Four Reapers? Aside from Xavier and his boss, the only other one I’d met had been working for the enemy. And Maura, a half-Reaper who’d given up her apprenticeship to become a freelance ghost hunter, didn’t really count either.
“That’s right,” he said. “They’ll be here until the New Year, so I figured I’d warn you in advance.”
“I’m amazed you were allowed to come to the party, then,” I remarked. “I would have thought your boss would make you stay at home to prepare.”
“He tried,” said Xavier. “The thing is, there’s not much to actually do. Reapers don’t require a welcoming committee.”
I snorted. “No, I guess not. I suppose you don’t have to worry about having enough bedrooms or food supplies in the house, given that Reapers don’t need either.”
“Exactly,” he confirmed. “Though I’ll still be expected to keep the apprentices entertained while our bosses are engaged in top-secret meetings.”
“You aren’t invited?” I blinked in surprise. “I would have thought your boss would want you to know anything that might be important and relevant to both of you.”
“He usually does,” he said. “This is secretive Council business, though, and some of the other Reapers have more traditional ideas about what they’re allowed to share with their apprentices. They also tend to disagree a lot, so we decided it would be easier just to play along.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Wait, there’s someone out there who’s even more secretive and grumpy than your boss is?”
“You’d be surprised,” he said lightly. “We’re Reapers. Secretive and grumpy kind of goes with the territory.”
“I hope the apprentices aren’t the same.”
“I don’t think they are,” he said. “Actually, I wondered if you might like to meet them. Since we’ll be shut out of half the meetings, I figured they might want to go on a tour of Ivory Beach and see the sights.”
“You want me to give a bunch of Reaper apprentices a tour of the town?” I couldn’t quite keep the scepticism from my voice. There wasn’t a great deal to do in Ivory Beach at this time of year anyway, and it seemed unlikely that they’d want me to take them to eat ice cream on the pier or to go for drinks at the local pub.
“If you want,” he said. “They’re going to be here for a few days, and it would be good to have company.”
“I guess most Reaper apprentices don’t get out much.” I’d grown so accustomed to Xavier being the only apprentice Reaper I knew that I’d forgotten there’d be others in his position, though Xavier was unique as far as Reaper apprentices went, having been abandoned by his human family and essentially adopted by the Grim Reaper as a consequence. It seemed a hell of a lonely childhood to me, and it still amazed me that Xavier had grown up as a relatively normal person—if you discounted the scythe and the ability to walk through walls, that is.
“I think they’d be excited to meet you,” he said. “Anyway, it’s up to you. I thought you might like to show them the library.”
“I’d have to ask my aunt.” The library was the town’s main attraction, the store of all the knowledge in the magical world that my family had managed to catalogue—yet for all that, there weren’t any books about Reapers hidden within its walls. While the vampires had mostly failed in their attempts to prevent the library from getting hold of their secrets, the Reapers were a different story, and any books that existed were in their hands alone.
As for our own books, after our recent narrow escape, my family members were given to caution, but they wouldn’t want visitors to the town to feel unwelcome either. I was sure my aunt would be happy to let our guests see the sights.
I rose from the sofa and spied Laney lurking outside the living room. When I beckoned, she walked in, offering a fanged smile to Xavier. “What are you doing in here? Aren’t you coming back to the party?”
“Xavier’s boss has guests coming to town,” I explained. “There’s a Reaper summit at his house. He invited me to meet the other apprentices and show them around Ivory Beach tomorrow.”
“Ooh.” Aunt Candace popped up in the doorway as if she’d been lurking there the whole time. “Do tell.”
“What’s going on?” The noise—or Aunt Candace’s general aura of trouble—had drawn Aunt Adelaide too.
It would be easier to explain to everyone together, so I gave them a brief overview of what Xavier had told me.
“They want to see the library?” Concern flickered across Aunt Adelaide’s face. “That ought to be fine as long as we take some precautions.”
“And avoid the upper floors,” I guessed. “We can do that.”
“They might not be interested in reading any of the books,” Xavier said. “It’s okay if you don’t want them in here. There’s plenty to see in the rest of Ivory Beach. I just didn’t want to involve Rory without telling you first.”
“Obviously, she wants to,” said Aunt Candace. “She’s going to bring back a full report too. In fact, I’ll send my notebook and pen along to make sure she doesn’t miss anything.”
“That’s enough,” said Aunt Adelaide. “We’ll talk about this later. Candace, stop badgering Rory and get back to the party.”
“We should do the same,” Xavier murmured to me. “Also, you really don’t have to volunteer as tour guide. I know you want to spend time with your family during the holidays.”
“I want to meet the others.” I could hardly go the entire holiday season without seeing Xavier at all, and my curiosity about the other Reapers was undiminished.
“Of course,” said Aunt Adelaide. “If they want a tour of the library, I don’t see why not. Maybe avoid going higher than the second floor, though.”
“Good call.” Cass might not react well to Reapers treading near her haven in the Magical Creatures Division, which was also entirely too close to the entrance to the fourth-floor corridor for comfort. A corridor that could grant wishes might be of little interest to most Reapers, but its mysterious guardian would certainly object to the intrusion regardless. Besides, there were plenty of curiosities on the other floors. “I’d better tell Estelle too.”
It was somewhat difficult to speak to my cousin while enveloped in the full noise of the party, but I managed to signal to her to come to the other side of the room.
“What is it?” She reached my side and raised her voice over the general clamour. “Something came up with Xavier?”
I explained, having to backtrack a couple of times due to the music drowning out my voice. “Aunt Adelaide said it’s okay if we bring them into the library to show them around, but I wanted to check with you too.”
“Of course,” she said. “Nobody who comes to Ivory Beach isn’t curious about the library.”
“I thought… you know, that the fourth floor’s guardian might object.”
“It’s never objected to Xavier coming in here,” she reminded me. “We can block that area off. It’ll be fine. If they get to have their secrets, so do we.”
True. And who knew, it might be the Grim Reaper who put his foot down. He was touchy about humans getting involved in Reaper business at the best of times, and my relationship with Xavier had put me in his crosshairs, but my family had been entangled with the Reapers before I’d even been aware the magical world existed. My dad had run into the Reapers a few times in the years he’d spent accidentally ticking off a certain group of rogue vampires in his quest to acquire rare books. That I’d stumbled into the middle of the same conflict myself was not a point in my favour, but after a great deal of turmoil, the Grim Reaper had grudgingly come to accept that Xavier and I were together for the long haul—provided, that was, I didn’t ask too many questions.
As for the other Reaper apprentices, they might be able to give me some valuable inside information that their supervisors refused to divulge, such as the nature of the history between my dad and the Grim Reaper himself, topics I generally avoided in a bid to keep the peace.
“Hey.” Xavier took my hand. “Ready to dance?”
I shoved the stack of questions back into the recesses of my mind and fixed a smile on my face. “Sure.”
