Page 3 of A Lady’s Guide to Fae Kings

Although a bit of fire would have been helpful just then.

But that was the trouble, wasn’t it? It was never just a bit.

She gritted her teeth and sorted through her options. Above her head, one of the books inched closer to the edge of the shelf. Pippa barely glanced at it, but her tone was as stern as any governess early in the morning before tea had been acquired when she said, “Don’t you dare.” Some books liked to wander. “I haven’t the time to chase you.”

Chastised, the book inched back into place.

“Now to deal with you,” Pippa said to the slithering mist. “I don’t suppose you’d care to sit quietly? I could fetch you a cup of tea and a nice gothic novel.”

A strange, unsettling hiss was her reply.

“I thought not.” Condensation grazed her shoe. She jerked back, her teeth chattering. “That was rude.”

They split apart, trying to surround her. Water dripped from one of the shelves. The air turned cold, prickling over her exposed skin. Her breath turned white, changing into swans and white horses and owls. Into a hundred hawthorn blossoms.

“This is all very vexing,” she muttered, reaching into the pouch attached to her belt. Librarians always traveled with the necessary ingredients. They were prepared. Calm.

Ruthless.

Pippa knew perfectly well how she could get in defense of the Library. Even as a child, she’d thrown a chair at a troll who had broken into the village library to eat the books. She had not been successful. The chair was considerably bigger than she was at the time. But the elderly librarian, Mr. Williams, was so impressed that he began her training the very next morning. She still used the leather pouch he had given her, embossed with a gold witch knot inside an open book. It carried the basics of witchery: salt, rowanberries, iron.

She had another pouch for a Librarian’s necessities: dagger, ink, silver needles. Salt and iron nails. A tiny vial of poisonous herbs, one of lightning water. A third of whiskey.

It was the iron nails she reached for now.

Her moth familiar broke into several smaller moths, glowing with magic, luring the serpents of mist closer.

So that Pippa might stab them through with a nail.

Her knuckles bled, but she did not desist.

The second slither of mist halted. The rest swarmed, forming into actual snakes and claws and spearpoints circled around her. Pointing straight at her. And her eyeballs.

She needed her eyeballs to read.

“This is not an improvement,” Pippa muttered.

She already knew, as she slammed another iron nail into the four-hundred-year-old floorboard, that the spell would not work. It was not strong enough. This mist was rare, forged from a spell she had not had time to research. She only knew that it was vicious. She reached for her bracelet. She could not see another way to protect the professor and the books. The mists would drain her, stabbing right through her to reach for him next.

Power sizzled through her, finally released. It was invigorating in its own way. But also painful. She smelled smoke. Lachlan moved slightly, eyelids fluttering but not lifting.

The mist licked at her knee and she saw white for a long moment, bones creaking as they froze. Lachlan made a sound of pain, twitching as mists wrapped around his ankle. He turned even paler, lips blue.

Pippa did the one thing she tried never to do. The one thing she was forbidden to do.

She summoned the fire.

It rushed through her veins, lifting her hair as though a warm breeze had also been summoned. The talent to light a candle, or a hearth for the evening meal, was a useful, enviable thing. It was controlled, skillful. Reliable.

Pippa’s fire was none of those things. Even after all of these years.

Witches of eight and twenty usually had an instinctive understanding of their natural magic born of long hours of practice. They might have families, babies, a home to call their own.

Pippa did not.

She had a bracelet that she had sold every single thing she owned to buy from a disreputable Iron Crow, and a frantic determination to subdue her powers well enough to gain the title of Head Librarian one day. All of which generally required her to avoid her magic. Fire and several buildings filled with thousands of books and grimoires and scrolls did not mix.

She could be the next destruction of the Library of Alexandria. As Mrs. Pettigrew reminded her daily in sour tones.