Whispers in the Stacks
1377 Words
The names were burned into her memory.
Not just Emily’s—but the others.
They had stared back at her from the corkboard like ghosts waiting to be remembered. The photos didn’t scream. They didn’t bleed. They just looked normal. Ordinary people. Faces mid-laugh, caught in motion. Lives that probably ended in silence, pain, or something worse.
Bella hadn’t had time to take a picture in her flight from the building. She’d barely had time to breathe. But her mind, trained by grief and sharpened by obsession, had latched onto four names scribbled beneath the photos in harsh, frantic ink:
Rowan Hale. Clara Winslow. Jonah Reed. Arin Devaux.
At first, they were just letters. Labels under faces. But now, in the gray breath of morning, the city cold and groaning around her, Bella sat cross-legged on her apartment floor and began the work.
Her laptop flickered pale light across her tired face. Her mug of coffee had gone cold beside her. The dagger lay next to it, the strange metal still faintly warm, as though it didn’t know how to cool.
She started searching.
Rowan Hale had been a college student. Psychology major at Portland State. Vanished walking home from a late-night shift at a bookstore nine months ago. No witnesses. No suspects. A few news reports, a few vigils. Then nothing.
Clara Winslow was listed as a fatality in a warehouse fire in Detroit—two years ago. Her body had never been recovered. The fire was ruled accidental, but the article mentioned oddities: the origin point of the blaze was never determined. Investigators described it as if the fire had no cause, like it had simply woken up angry.
Jonah Reed had been marked a suicide. A rooftop plunge in Chicago. But Bella found a local news interview with his sister—tearful, insistent that he wasn’t depressed, wasn’t unstable. That he’d seemed scared, not hopeless, in the days before his death.
Arin Devaux was harder to trace. A French national, thirty-four years old. Died of “natural causes” in a New Orleans hotel room. No autopsy requested. No family to claim the body. There was a line in the file Bella found that chilled her: “No external trauma, but signs of accelerated decay at the cellular level.”
Different years. Different cities. Different supposed causes.
But something was wrong in every case.
They didn’t die like people were supposed to die.
And now Bella couldn’t stop wondering if the names on that board weren’t just targets.
They were patterns.
Like Emily.
She leaned back, staring at the ceiling, her thoughts a storm of ash and static.
The blade on her table still gleamed faintly in the low light.
The symbol etched into its side—the broken locket—had haunted her since the night she’d found it in Emily’s apartment. No weapon registry matched it. No designer label. It was too old, too intentional, too meaningful.
And now, memory stirred—faint and brittle.
Years ago, in college, she’d taken a required folklore elective. One class she mostly skipped, taught by a professor with bones like twigs and eyes like melted glass. He’d passed around books that felt too old to be handled. One had stayed in her mind—if only for a moment. A green velvet cover, etched in gold. Symbols and sketches. She remembered thinking the dagger in one of the illustrations had looked almost exactly like this.
It wasn’t much. But it was enough.
Bella closed her laptop.
She needed a library.
Not a modern one. Not one full of databases and bestseller lists.
She needed something older.
It took two train rides, a walk through ankle-deep drizzle, and a skipped breakfast. But by mid-morning, Bella stood in front of the Hartleigh Library.
It didn’t look like a place for answers. It looked like a mausoleum. All cold gray stone and black iron gates, windows narrow like watchful eyes. Ivy clung to the stone like the past refusing to let go. The gate creaked as she pushed it open, its hinges screaming with rust.
Inside, it was warm—but not comfortable.
It smelled of time. Leather bindings. Ink turned to dust. Paper so old it sounded like breath when touched.
Bella moved like a shadow between stacks, not making eye contact with the few other patrons. She knew better than to ask the librarians for help. Some questions couldn’t be trusted to strangers. Some knowledge had to be earned.
She searched the anthropology wing first. Then the cultural mythos archives. Finally, she found the stairs—thin, wrought iron, spiraling into a neglected alcove above the main stacks. There, the occult literature slept. Dust coated everything like snowfall that had never melted.
She ran her fingers across cracked spines and titles scrawled in Latin, French, Gaelic. Her breath fogged the air slightly. It was colder here.
And then she found it.
Thin. Bound in green velvet. Its title, nearly worn away:
“Heirlooms of the Hidden War: Tools of the Divide.”
Her fingers tingled as she pulled it from the shelf.
It felt warm.
Like it remembered being touched. Like it had waited for her.
She sat in the shadow of the upper alcove and opened it.
Pages turned with a soft whisper.
The book was a strange hybrid—part history, part myth, part catalog. She skimmed illustrations of weapons, masks, relics that seemed more ritual than martial.
Then, near the back—she stopped.
Her breath hitched.
There.
A full-page etching.
The dagger.
Curved hilt. Serrated spine. A blade etched with a single broken locket, its halves torn but still linked by a sliver of chain.
The caption below it read:
> "The Severing Blades of Morvana: Created to Slay the Bound."
She read. And reread.
> “Forged during the Nightfall Accord, the daggers were gifted to the human resistance by those who lived between veils—creatures known as the Bound: supernatural beings tied to mortal flesh. Immortal. Dangerous. Some fed on life. Others on memory. Others, on blood.”
Bella stared at the words, her blood turning to ice.
> “The Morvana Blades could sever the tether between spirit and flesh—killing what could not otherwise die.”
She flipped the page, her hands trembling now.
More passages followed. History of a secret war. Of treaties made and broken. Of hunters who betrayed guardians. Of monsters that wore human skin and died only when their bond to the body was cut clean.
> “Over time, most of the Bound were hunted to near extinction. But whispers persist. They remain, hidden among us—feeding slowly. Adapting. Waiting.”
And finally:
> “The locket symbol, once whole, signified protection—a pact between hunter and ally. But when broken, it becomes a mark of betrayal. The dagger becomes judgment. Death for those who crossed the line.”
Bella sat still for a long time.
Then she took out her phone and photographed the pages—every word, every symbol, every jagged diagram.
She returned the book carefully. Quietly.
And left the library with a stomach full of thunder.
Outside, the rain had thickened. People hurried by with umbrellas and plastic bags, unaware that the world had just changed shape.
Cars rolled past. Horns honked. The smell of street food curled around corners.
But to Bella, everything was wrong now.
Twisted.
Because now she knew.
There were things walking among them—Bound things. Monsters. Immortals in human skin. And someone—some group—was hunting them with these blades.
Or worse:
They weren’t just hunting monsters.
They were silencing witnesses.
Or enemies.
Or anyone who got too close to the truth.
Bella pressed a hand to her coat pocket, where the dagger rested, warm against her ribs. Not a keepsake anymore. Not just a symbol of Emily’s death.
It was a tool.
A key.
A warning.
She didn’t know yet which world Emily had died in—human or inhuman.
But she would find it.
And when she did, she’d carve it open.
Piece by piece.
Because Emily hadn’t been lost.
She had been taken.
And Bella had no intention of letting that stand.
Not anymore.
- Writer
