The next morning, the mansion felt different. The air felt thick, reminiscent of the moments before a summer storm, and Dellus had vanished. He had barricaded himself in the West Wing, leaving Julia to the mercy of the dust and the silence.
"Avoid the Restricted Section," Marcus warned as he handed Julia a heavy iron key. "The Master says the books there are... unstable."
"Unstable?" Julia asked, her fingers brushing the cold metal.
"They remember too much," the butler whispered, his eyes darting to the shadows. "And in this house, memory is a dangerous thing."
The library was a cathedral of paper and leather, smelling of ancient vanilla and cedar. Most of the shelves were filled with standard histories and poetry, but at the very back, behind a velvet curtain the color of dried blood, lay the Restricted Section.
Julia didn't go there because she was curious. She went because her diary, the one hidden in her apron, began to vibrate. It pulse-throbbed against her hip, a steady heartbeat of frantic ink.
She pushed past the curtain. Here, the books weren't sitting quietly. They hummed. Some rattled against their chains. These were "Living Records" books bought by the wealthy that contained the stolen lives of others.
As Julia walked down the narrow aisle, a single book leaped from a high shelf, landing at her feet with a heavy thud.
It wasn't a record of a stranger. It was a ledger labeled: THORNE: THE PRICE OF ETERNITY.
Julia knelt, her heart racing. She opened the ledger and saw rows of neat, golden handwriting. It was a list of every memory Dellus had traded away.
Year 1: The memory of his mother's lullaby.
Year 10: The feeling of his first horse's mane.
Year 25: The color of the ribbons in a girl's hair.
But then, Julia saw something that made her blood turn to ice. There was a section at the bottom of the page titled "The Interest."
The words appeared underneath it, written in jagged, black ink that resembled claw scratches:
"The Borrower believes he pays in his own coin. He does not know the Merchant takes from the Source. To keep the Boy young, the Girl must fade."
"You shouldn't be in here."
Julia screamed, dropping the ledger. Dellus was standing in the shadows of the bookshelves. He looked disheveled, his hair messy and his eyes were bloodshot. He looked less like a noble and more like a ghost haunted by his own house.
"I... I heard a noise, sir," Julia stammered, trying to kick the ledger under a shelf.
"The books speak to you, don't they?" Dellus stepped into the light. He wasn't frustrated; he looked terrified. "They speak to me, too. They whisper names I should know. They tell me I'm a thief."
He walked toward her, and for a moment, Julia didn't move. He reached out, not to grab her, but to touch the velvet of her sleeve.
"Yesterday, when we touched..." Dellus whispered, his voice cracking. "I saw a meadow. I saw a girl laughing. She had a locket around her neck—a silver one, shaped like a shield."
Julia's hand flew to her pocket, where her locket sat.
"Why do I have your memories, Julia?" he asked, his eyes searching hers with a desperate intensity. "And why does it feel like every time I look at you, I am finally waking up from a nightmare?"
Before Julia could answer, the candles in the library flickered and died. A cold, sulfurous wind swept through the room, and the books on the shelves began to scream.
The archivist had arrived to collect his weekly payment.