Her breath stopped.

“What’s wrong?” Nathaniel asked.

She turned to him. “The grimoire Baltasar wrote—is it called the Chronicles of the Dead?”

He stiffened. His face looked spectral, his eyes dark pools in the feeble torchlight. For a moment, she thought he might not respond. Then, finally, he nodded.

Elisabeth didn’t want to tell him, but she had to. “It’s here. Here in Harrows. They transferred it in secret the night I stole the Codex.”

Nathaniel exploded to his feet. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I forgot. There was so much going on at the time.” Unhappiness wrung her heart as she watched Nathaniel turn away, pacing across the cell. She hesitated, then asked, “How much do you know about the Chronicles?”

Nathaniel drew up short, gazing out into the passageway. When he spoke, his voice sounded clipped. “It contains the spell Baltasar used to raise his army, among other necromantic rituals. As to what powers it would manifest as a Malefict, that’s a librarian’s area of study, not mine.” She sat in silence, waiting. He was holding something back. At last he leaned his forehead against the bars and went on, “My . . . my father read it. To prepare. He wasn’t quite the same when he returned. I was never able to decide exactly what was different about him. Sometimes, I thought it felt like he had brought something back with him. Other times, it was as though he had left a piece of himself behind.”

She studied Nathaniel’s face, the stark lines of his profile. “I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

Everything, she thought. “I dragged you into this,” she said. “You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for me.”

“You’re right. I would be alone in my study, utterly miserable, spending my final hours unaware that demons were about to overrun the world.” He returned and slumped beside her, tipping his head back against the stone. “I like this version better. The one with you in it.”

“Even if we die?”

Briefly, he shut his eyes. “The last month has been the happiest time of my life that I can remember since I was twelve, the fiends and the blood drinking and the imminent threat of a demonic apocalypse notwithstanding. I think—I think I was a bit dead already, before you came along.” He turned his head, taking her in. “It’s an honor to fight by your side, Elisabeth, for however long it lasts. You’ve reminded me to live. That’s worth having something to lose.”

Elisabeth swallowed. She did not have anything to say; she could only think how intolerable it seemed that she had once found his face so cruel. Impulsively, she folded herself up and tucked her head against his chest. After a pause, he rested his chin on her hair. She sat listening to his heartbeat in the dark.

The moment stretched on, the passage of time impossible to calculate, and her thoughts stretched with it, casting outward. She pictured the Great Library from above, its guttering torches and soaring black towers rising above the wilderness.

How long would it take Silas to find them? She wasn’t certain that she shared Nathaniel’s confidence. The defenses here were like nothing she had seen before. Even if Silas could scale the sheer wall encircling the building, it was clad in iron and patrolled by wardens. And that was just the beginning; next, he would have to sneak through the library and get past the countless locked iron gates leading to the dungeon.

After waiting for what felt like hours, she sat up. “You don’t think Silas has been caught, do you?” she asked.

“I should think not,” answered a whispering voice from the corridor, sounding faintly injured. “I am not an amateur.”

“Silas!” they both exclaimed, rushing to the bars.

He sighed as he stepped into view. “Not so loudly, if you please.”

Nathaniel grinned irrepressibly at the sight of him, unearthly in the torchlight, but pristine and unruffled, no different than he looked on a regular evening at home. “You weren’t hurt?”

Silas waved a hand, dismissing the question as beneath him. “I see the pair of you have wasted no time getting yourselves thrown into prison.” He bent to inspect the door, then drew a warden’s key ring from his pocket, holding the iron carefully within a wadded-up handkerchief. “What is this, master—the third time I’ve broken you out of a jail cell?”

Nathaniel coughed. “Minor misunderstandings, on both previous occasions,” he assured Elisabeth.

Silas detached one of the keys from the ring and used it to unlock Nathaniel’s shackles. While Nathaniel got to work on Elisabeth’s, Silas selected a second key and tried it on the door. He spoke mildly, his lashes shading his eyes. “At least you’re wearing clothes this time, master.”

“I’ll have you know,” Nathaniel said, “that that was an accident, and the public certainly didn’t mind. One woman even sent me flowers.” To Elisabeth, he added, “Don’t worry. She was forty years old, and her name was Mildred.”

Silas snatched his hand back as the door swung open, dropping the keys with a hiss. A tendril of steam rose from his fingers. He moved to step away, but was arrested in midstride by Elisabeth, who seized him in an embrace, followed by Nathaniel, who hugged him from the other side. He froze, completely rigid, enduring their affection in the manner of a purebred house cat being squeezed by a toddler. When he twitched, they finally released him.

“We shall never speak of that,” he warned, brushing off his sleeves. “Miss Scrivener, if you would follow me, I believe your sword has been taken to the armory.”

She scooped up the key ring. The three of them crept through the dungeon’s passageways in single file, retreating into the shadows whenever a patrol’s torch came near. Fortunately Silas knew exactly where to go, and after several minutes they reached an iron-banded door, which Elisabeth was able to open with one of the keys. She gasped at the room beyond. Torchlight flickered not just over swords, but a bristling collection of axes, spears, crossbows, and even a spiked weapon she tentatively identified as a morning star. After recovering Demonslayer from an arms rack, she seized a belt and tightened it around her waist. As Nathaniel watched, amused by her enthusiasm, she stuffed its pouches full of salt rounds.

“What now?” he asked.

Elisabeth squeezed in a final salt round. “We need to find the vault. All we have to do is stop whoever’s come here from getting inside. Silas, did you pass it on your way to the dungeon?”

Silas had been strolling through the aisles, his hands clasped behind his back, gazing at the weapons with an unreadable expression. He’d stopped in front of an ancient, cruel-looking device hanging from the ceiling, which resembled a giant cage filled with rusty spikes. Elisabeth’s heart skipped a beat, her eyes darting from the spikes to his wrists.

“No,” he said, turning away, “but I can sense the psychic emanations of the grimoires. I will take you there.”

He showed no sign of whether the device was the same variety Ashcroft had used to trap him. She cast the room another look as they left, seeing the racks of weaponry anew. For Silas, this place was a torture chamber.

When they snuck back into the passage, the ground shook with the force of a familiar-sounding howl.