Read an extract from The Library After Dark by Ande Pliego

The library blurs under the carnival of streetlights and headlights, the frantic intersection between us slowing in time. From this distance, the facade looks like rippling, knotted stone, but in my mind’s eye it’s high-definition: a tangle of writhing limbs and fangs and wings, dozens of sculptured gargoyles and cloaked skeletons twisting and reaching out, as if clawing themselves free of the rock.

I’d been so distracted, I wasn’t paying attention at all to where we were.

A car horn rips awareness through me.

Without tearing my gaze from the Daedalus, I step off the ledge. Jasper’s hands catch me around the waist and my body slides against his till my feet hit the sidewalk, but I barely register it.

“Tonight the Daedalus Library is hosting an exclusive after-dark tour,” he says, stepping up behind me. “And I have tickets.”

An exhale shivers out of my lungs. “How did you—”

“Fortunately for us, my friend who purchased them is bedridden with strep.” His breath warms the shell of my ear.

The delicate fingers of my rib cage tighten.

“It’s a private tour, with drinks in the lounge,” Jasper says, oblivious. “Just you and me.”

“We shouldn’t take them from your friend,” I say, my voice impressively smooth. “Surely there’s someone else he’d rather give—”

“Aria.” He rounds in front of me, blocking my view. His knuckle grazes my jaw. “I already have the tickets. You don’t need to worry about any of it.”

“That’s not . . .” I look away, into the oncoming headlights that bleach my vision before the car veers away in a squeal of tires on wet pavement.

There’s not exactly a date-friendly way to say I fear only one thing more than the law: Evangeline Riordan.

“I promise you a good time,” Jasper coaxes, edge of his mouth lifted in a smile that might’ve tempted me to twirl my hair a second ago. “It’s not only a library tour.” He holds up the black gift box, and my stomach squirms. For a few blissful hours I’d brushed his gift from my mind, revelling in the slight give and crunch of the snow beneath my boots, the way his thumb brushed over my knuckles.

All things I can barely remember now.

“The Dark Hearth Tales—the original, the only one the world has ever discovered—has been in restoration for two years,” he says. “Monday’s the twentieth anniversary of it being housed at the Daedalus, and the collection will be returned for public display.”

It’s Saturday. “Okay?”

“Tonight, our private tour goes upstairs to see it.”

And there it is.

Getting to see it would be like an artist scoring a private tour of the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa. If I were any other person—any other LIS student—I might’ve died and gone to heaven at the chance to see it up close and personal. It’s just my luck that Jasper happened to find the one and only person who had already seen the rare book and had no interest in seeing it ever again.

My upper arm prickles under my coat, the ghost of a hand clenching around it. They aren’t meant for you, Evangeline had hissed, tugging me away from the glass case. Little purple bruises peppered my arm for the next couple of days. I always avoided the Fairy Tales and Folklore room after that.

But Evangeline Riordan isn’t here anymore.

“Tour a haunted library with me, Aria Stokes,” Jasper says with the ghost of a smile, his hands sliding up my arms.

I want this. I want things to work out with Jasper, badly. He wouldn’t have been the first guy to delicately extricate himself from a date with a pasted-on-banana smile, but he’s still here. I’m constantly torn between playing dress-up with a pretty smile—trying to persuade everyone that there’s nothing to see here, I’m just a normal thirty-year-old—and wanting to rip off the mask and snarl, just to be able to breathe as myself.

But maybe I could be honest with him, a little bit.

Isn’t that what those therapists on social media who film themselves in their cars keep talking about? Letting go of abandonment issues and self-sabotaging your own relationships?

Today is the best day I’ve had in so long—the last four months with him the best I’ve had in years. Carmen even said it—I am into him, a lot. More than anyone else I’ve dated in the last year, and possibly more than Ethan of the year before.

The crosswalk flashes green, and the river of black-clad people around us flows across the street.

All but us, like boulders in a stream.

I’m not a child anymore. I am not helpless, and I’m certainly not afraid of a building.

And Evangeline can’t tell anyone about me anymore.