Between Love Passion and Power

The Denver Public Library had emptied out hours ago. A slow Tuesday afternoon in late autumn, the kind of day when even the regulars stayed home, wrapped in blankets, watching the rain streak down their windows. Olivia Whitmore stood behind the front desk, a stack of returned books beside her, her fingers idly turning the pages of the top volume without really reading them. She was eighteen, slim, with dark hair that fell past her shoulders and eyes the color of weak tea, soft and warm. Her cardigan was a size too large, sleeves bunched at her wrists. The library uniform never quite fit her properly. Nothing did, really. She had always felt slightly out of place in her own skin, as though she were borrowing a body that belonged to someone else. The clock above the reference section read four past six. Closing time was eight. Only one patron remained. He sat at a corner table near the philosophy shelves, the same young man who had been there since just past two. Tall, even seated, with broad shoulders that filled out his dark coat. His hair was the color of wet ash, slightly mussed, falling across his forehead as he bent over an open book. Olivia had glanced at him a few times throughout the afternoon. He never looked up. Not once. Whatever he was reading held him completely. 'He has not turned a single page in twenty minutes,' she thought, frowning faintly. 'Strange.' The front door swung open. A draft of cold air swept through the lobby, lifting the corners of the bulletin board flyers. Olivia looked up. An older man stepped inside, perhaps fifty or fifty-five, dressed in a charcoal suit cut in a style that belonged to another century. The lapels were too narrow, the trousers too high at the waist, and his shoes were polished to a mirror shine. A pocket watch chain glinted at his vest. His face was pale, finely lined, with sharp grey eyes that swept the library like a man looking for something he had lost long ago. He approached the desk slowly. "Good evening, miss," he said. His voice was soft and oddly accented. "I am searching for a particular volume. A first-edition treatise on celestial inheritance, written by Aurelius Vance. I believe your library holds a copy." Olivia tilted her head. The name meant nothing to her. She typed it into the catalogue. "Vance," she murmured. "Yes, here it is. Restricted reference, third floor, west aisle, shelf marked R-47. Would you like me to take you there?" "Please." She slipped out from behind the desk and led the way toward the staircase. Her shoes made a quiet tap against the polished floor. Behind her, the older man walked with a peculiar lightness, almost as though his feet did not quite touch the ground. As they passed the philosophy shelves, Olivia glanced toward the corner table. The young man was gone. His chair was pushed back at an angle. His book lay open, abandoned. There was no coat draped over the chair, no bag, no sign that anyone had been there at all. 'He must have left,' she thought. 'Or gone to the restroom.' She did not pause. The third floor smelled of dust and old paper. The light up there was dimmer, the long aisles stretching into pools of shadow. Olivia found shelf R-47 and pointed to a narrow leather-bound book on the second tier from the top. "Here it is," she said, smiling politely. "Please be careful with it. The binding is fragile." The older man inclined his head. "You have been most kind, child." There was something in the way he said the word child that made the back of her neck prickle. Not condescending. Not affectionate. Almost reverent. She turned and started back toward the staircase. She had reached the second-floor landing when the air changed. It was not a sound. Not at first. It was a pressure, something pressing softly against her eardrums, like the moment before a thunderclap. The light in the stairwell seemed to dim by half a shade, and the temperature dropped just enough to raise the hairs on her arms. Then she heard it. A shout, sharp and short, cut off mid-breath. A scrape of something heavy across the floor. A wet, awful sound that her mind refused to name. Olivia ran. She took the stairs two at a time, her cardigan flaring behind her, her hand sliding along the rail. She rounded the corner of the third floor and burst into the west aisle. She stopped. The older man was on his knees. His head was tilted back, mouth open in a soundless gasp. A long black spear had been driven through his chest, the point emerging from between his shoulder blades, dark with blood. His pale grey eyes had already gone glassy. Standing behind him, both hands gripping the haft of the spear, was the young man from the corner table. He was looking at the dying man, not at her. His face was utterly calm. There was no rage in it, no triumph, nothing. Just a quiet, cold attention, like a surgeon completing a difficult procedure. Olivia's mouth fell open. For a long moment, no sound came out. Then she screamed. "You. You killed him. You killed him." The young man's head snapped toward her. His eyes went wide. For the first time all afternoon, he looked at her properly. They were a strange shade of grey, almost silver, and in the dim third-floor light they seemed to shine. 'Impossible,' he thought, his jaw tightening. 'I cast the veil before I drew the spear. No mortal eye should be able to pierce it. No one. Not even another wolf without effort.' Olivia took a step back. Her hand fumbled into her cardigan pocket, found her phone. "I am calling the police. I am calling the police right now." The young man said nothing. He pulled the spear free with a single clean motion. The body slumped forward. He bent, lifted the older man across his shoulder as though he weighed nothing at all, and looked at Olivia one more time. His expression was unreadable. Then he was gone.