Total pages in book: 125
Estimated words: 122030 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 610(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122030 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 610(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
Not how I usually end things between us, but who cares. It works.
Because the next thing I know, my little winter dream forest is empty.
And finally, I find a little peace in sleep.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - SYRSEE
They didn’t even let me read the books.
I’m starting to get sick of the dreamwalks.
Ten years, nothing. Last four weeks, I can’t get a moment’s peace.
It means something. Like the numbers ‘11:11.’ There was a time, years ago, when Zusi and I were teenagers, when these numbers seemed to be everywhere.
“It’s a sign,” Zusi told me at the time. Because the urban lore around eleven-eleven was something Guild kids just knew about.
They are most often seen on the clock or some kind of timestamp and they mean that you have a new beginning coming.
It was true, too. There was a new beginning coming. I graduated from the Guild school and was sent to a public college to study library science.
But so did Zusi. Not public college, of course. She went to some Guild place. Wherever Guardians go to learn to… guard. So I kinda just forgot about the numbers.
But college was a new beginning. It was the first time I’d ever been on my own. First time since I was seven that I wasn’t surrounded by Guardians. I learned things there I didn’t really need to know, and dated men, and had friends who were neither witches nor Guardians. I went to parties, and rushed a sorority—though I didn’t get in—and took tests like my life depended on the scores I got.
I loved college. I didn’t have a care in the world, either. No worries about hunters, or vampires, or witches muddying up my head at all hours of the day and night because I was under the protection of Grandma.
It’s possible that I took that for granted.
And now I am on the run from a hunter and it’s not just a possibility that I took my grandma for granted, it’s a fact.
But the reason all this stuff is presently on my mind is because my current dreamwalk has brought me to the Guild library. The haze is purple. So past, or future, or some other reality. That’s the only thing I know for sure.
To be an actual librarian in the real world you need a master’s degree. But the Guild came to collect me at undergrad graduation. Zusi and Tristin, in fact. They were already partners, but it was new to them, so they were still getting used to the idea of one another.
They took me back to the Guild headquarters and suddenly I was the newest Guild library intern. I spent my time shelving books, and answering questions, and helping Guardians do their research.
I didn’t choose to be a librarian. Hell, I didn’t even get to pick my classes at college. Every semester I’d get an email from the Guild liaison with a schedule. Everything all paid for and my textbooks waiting for me to pick up in the bookstore. All I really did was show up.
And now that I think about it, that’s still all I do.
But I loved my job at the library and I’m going to miss it. Maybe that’s why I’ve dreamwalked my way here?
It’s not a lavish library. Very… standard, actually. It’s pretty. And old. There is a lot of well-polished dark wood and some oil paintings on the walls. But the library’s grandeur has always been in the books themselves, not the décor or the architecture. That’s why it was so surprising to me that the Guardians were given access to all those Guild Lounge perks. That wasn’t the Guild I grew up with.
Or possibly, it wasn’t the Guild I was shown.
Right now, I’m standing on the top floor of the massive central hub, looking out at hundreds of thousands of books. There are nineteen floors below me—terraces, really—and on each floor the books are arranged in a particular way, as one does with library books. But there is no Dewey Decimal System here. The organization of these books is all about age, and then topics, and then, of course, titles and authors.
Older books are arranged by subject on the bottom half of the shelves because they are most often used for Guardian research. And the newer ones are all up at the top. Only accessible with ladders, because the Guild feels that the Old Ones knew much more than we do now.
The whole point of the Guild, aside from protecting people from monsters like Paul, is to uncover the secrets of the Old World.
Not Old World as in Europe. But Old World as in… something else. Some missing civilization. I’m really not quite sure on that point. And even though I had access to every book in the entire Guild library, I was forbidden from opening them up, let alone reading them. There was a shelf number on the spine and when I saw a book that needed shelving, I just put it back in order.