[Indigo]

As she watched Roman threw off a creature that had climbed up to his shoulder, shouted something that didn't sound like a real word in any language, and slammed the butt of the gun into the ground, producing a purple shockwave—she was not entirely on board with the concept of visible shockwaves, but she didn't know what else to call it—that knocked the advancing creatures back into the water. For a long moment he surveyed his surroundings, but no more of them emerged.

"That won't hold them for long," he muttered, and looked up at the sky. "It seems we are forever buying each other time. But for what?"

"That's very dramatic of you," Jules said. Roman yelped and came running over to her, extending a hand to pull her up onto the roof.

"What are you doing here? It's not safe!"

"It seems much safer for me than for you, overall," she said, and explained what she'd seen. Her description of the creatures' avoidance didn't seem to reassure Roman any, but there were more pressing matters to attend to. "What happened?"

What had happened was that Sauvage had sprinted down the hill to the cafe about an hour after Jules had left this morning and hammered on the back door until Roman, still mostly asleep, answered, at which point he'd said only, "Do you still have your gun?"

"Yes? Somewhere."

"Find it. Something's coming, I don't know what." And then he'd run off before Roman could ask further questions. To all appearances he'd spent most of the rest of the morning convincing people to evacuate. For his part Roman had picked up the same feeling on the air around two hours later—"With enough experience anyone can detect the fluctuations in the fabric of reality that tend to herald a being such as this one, but Sauvage has always been very sensitive to it and I'm rather rusty these days"—by which time, given Sauvage's warning, he was armed and more or less prepared to fight, standing outside the barred doors of the cafe and feeling only slightly ridiculous.

And shortly after that, he'd been approached by a man he'd never seen before, wrapped in what looked like three different cloaks melted together, with a large hood framing a lean, pale, hungry face. The eyes, though—he'd recognized the eyes. They belonged to Timothy Barker, the necromancer, who apparently had dabbled in quite a few other fields since his not-exactly-defeat at the hunters' hands some seventeen years ago.

"Isn't he dead?" Jules interrupted.

"I haven't been keeping up with him," Roman said. "He didn't look at all well, I can tell you, but that seems to be having little effect on his capacity for mayhem. In any case, he informed me he'd come to collect and then he summoned this flood and turned himself into...that." He nodded toward the thing fighting Sauvage. "I suspect he may have been sending the storms we've been getting the past month or so, to build up a reserve of water for his attack."

"This all seems very extreme," she said. "I read a little about your fight with him and it honestly didn't sound like that big of a deal."

"I seem to recall your library's accounts of our work draw heavily on Argent's memory and, I must say, she's always been troublingly blasé about that sort of thing. But you aren't entirely wrong." He sighed. "It was...you read Barker's notes, didn't you? I think you mentioned that. We took him on after one of those horrible experiments produced a horde of ravening undead—which I don't believe he intended, but he was not what I'd call disappointed. Anyway, he was always primarily a necromancer but even back then he knew some other magic, nothing on this scale of course, and between him and his personal army it took all six of us just to reach a stalemate. In order to do even that we had to destroy all his corpses. And that, of course, set his research back by decades. I suppose he would think this fitting punishment."

"That's...that's incredibly petty and ridiculous," Jules said, but she had read Barker's diary and she could certainly believe it of him. "And he's come after you because you're easier to find, because you've stayed in one place and the other hunters don't, is that right?"

"It would be my best guess. Get behind me, please, I think more of his little animals are about to come up and I don't want you caught in the crossfire." He waited for her to move before raising the rifle to his shoulder again. "I don't know what these are. As I said, my impression is that Barker has spent the time since our last meeting improving and diversifying his skills. To be perfectly honest with you I don't think this is a fight we can win. We didn't have enough power to fend him off last time, not in any permanent way, and that was with many more people."

[Indigo]

Of the oncoming little monsters, Jules said, "Can't you just do that thing you did before and throw them all back?"

"I could," Roman said, "but it takes a lot out of me and on balance I would prefer not to pass out while surrounded on all sides by small biting things. I'm trying to drag this out as long as I can." He said all this in a terribly matter-of-fact way, and it only made Jules worry more.

"Why?"

"Because—ow." He kicked one of the wilier creatures away. "Because I have a vain hope that I'll think of a better solution to all this at some point. I didn't become a monster hunter to lie down and die when old enemies come for me. And I very much doubt Barker will let me leave. You could probably make it out of here, Jules, if you're careful. There's no need for you to...to..." Both of them knew how this sentence would end, but he seemed unable to make himself say it.

"This is my home," she said. "I'm not going to lie down and die either. Maybe Sauvage can chase him off, eventually." This was more hope than belief. She could see the battle more clearly from this angle, as if it were somehow closer, or smaller, or something that made sense; and Sauvage's fur was heavily streaked with blood, so dark it was almost indistinguishable, as if it rejected oxygen. Maybe there wasn't any up there, however far away it was. Barker had taken his share of hits, and Sauvage was still, always, moving and biting and clawing, but he was slowing, a little, and Barker was not.

"Sauvage is powerful," Roman said quietly, "but not that powerful, I daresay." He threw back another wave of the creatures with poorly disguised desperation; they were coming too fast now to pick off individually.

There was a new noise from above. Jules would not describe it as a scream; it was, somehow, much worse. She couldn't identify the voice—pain had stretched it beyond recognition—but Roman flinched, and that was all she needed to know. She swallowed.

Roman, staring up again, said, "Why doesn't he run? He's always known when he's beaten, he's smarter than this. Barker won't chase him. This grudge is from before we ever met. What is he hoping to achieve?"

"Oh my god," Jules muttered, "you're both so fucking stupid." Roman, fortunately, didn't seem to hear, transfixed by the terrible scene above which Jules refused to look at again. If she looked she might lose her nerve, and she'd need it, because she was beginning to have an idea.

She said, slowly, carefully, piecing things together, "You said you think Barker sent the earlier storms, right? To build up water to release later?" She nudged his shoulder. "Roman. Focus. You can't do anything for him from here anyway. The storms?"

"What? Oh. Yes. I am not an expert in these matters, but based on my knowledge of magic, it seems likely."

"Then this is...hold on." She leaned over the side of the building, ignoring Roman's protest, and scooped her notebook out of the boat. With any luck—yes, this was the one with all her water notes. Good thing, too, because she probably didn't have cell reception inside the weird illusion barrier she'd had to cross to get into town. "Yes! I know about this spell, or this type of spell, anyway. Variants. This is...a strange extra strong version, so it'll be difficult to get rid of, but it should have a specific anchor point. I can work with that."

"What do you mean, you can work with that?" Roman sounded like a man approaching a conclusion he wanted to avoid, and if she explained he'd just try to stop her, and they would waste valuable time arguing about whether it was better for her to die trying or just stand on this roof waiting for the end.

So she didn't explain. She said, "Hold off those creatures as long as you can."

"I was already—Jules!"

She didn't answer; she'd already jumped into the water, out of Roman's sight.

[Indigo]

Jules swam down, down, down, and only belatedly considered that she should have left the notebook on the roof, or in the boat, or anywhere other than her hand, where she'd continued to hold onto it in case she needed to consult it later. Absurd. She hadn't been thinking. Now she let go of it, because she'd probably need both hands free to untangle the spell, and if she really wanted to salvage that sad lump of wet paper she'd come looking for it after the water went down.

At least she could see, her troublesome, persistent lizard eyes and their nictitating membrane finally serving a more important purpose than scaring away creeps in bars. But at this stage it didn't matter all that much. All she needed to do was look for the lowest point. Because if you were going to anchor a spell to collect water and send it rushing back up when you needed it, you'd want to put it at the bottom, where most of the water would gather by itself anyway.

Good thing the cafe was already at the bottom of Bristlecone. Breathing was going to become a problem soon, and she didn't have any tricks for dealing with that.

Discarded objects floated past her as she searched, someone's lunch bag, a book, a hat, things dropped in the hurry to evacuate or carried out of houses through open windows. She felt a moment of sadness for these things, deprived of their purpose, and then a greater sadness for the people they'd belonged to, going without. Was this scale of damage within Sauvage's capacity to fix, without doing greater harm along with it? But she couldn't think about Sauvage right now, not without calling up that horrible, horrible scream.

She didn't exactly know what the spell anchor would look like, which was not ideal. Something bowl-shaped, maybe, or some kind of vessel anyway, that would make sense based on her memory of how this sort of thing was supposed to work. Buried? Someone would have noticed it otherwise, wouldn't they? But then she'd have no way to spot it. She really hadn't thought this idea through before jumping off the roof, and now there wasn't time, but there hadn't been time then either, not in any meaningful way, there had only been the illusion of it, broken by blood.

Fingers trailing through grass that wanted to flow in the water but wasn't long enough to manage it, she reached the lowest point in Bristlecone, a patch of garden in front of the town's tiny inn, and laid her palm flat on the ground. She wanted to believe that she sensed something under there, some manifestation of power. Maybe she could if she'd practiced; she thought of what Roman had said, about noticing when things tugged at the fabric of reality. Maybe he could teach her how, in case something like this ever came up again.

She had no other leads, so she dug. Digging with one's bare hands underwater was not a quick or easy task, it turned out, and more than once she had to stop to surface for air, which felt like a waste of time even though she knew it was necessary. Once she waved to Roman, to reassure him she was all right, but she didn't want to distract him from fending off the little monsters.

After far too long—not that she had any sense of time down here—she reached into the muddy hole to keep digging and her hand brushed against something else. Something hot, so hot she flinched back from it before she'd even processed that it was there. She felt gingerly around its edges. A cup, buried in the garden.

[Indigo]

She pried it out of the soil carefully, as if it might break; she didn't know what kind of condition it would be in, or what damaging it by accident might do. It was a mug with the handle broken off so long ago the jagged edges had worn to smooth stubs, as if someone had run fingers over them again and again, remembering the mug's former glory. It was pale blue, with a faded picture of a rabbit on it, surrounded by a ring of words she mostly couldn't make out. A national park, maybe.

It wasn't hot enough to burn anymore, just unsettlingly warm like a living thing, but it vibrated in her hands in a way that made her teeth itch. She couldn't pull it more than a few inches out of the hole, which meant she'd have to do this fast. Whatever this was.

She couldn't see the spell. It had been ridiculous to imagine she would, but leaping into this sort of thing was hard without some semblance of hope. She would have to figure something out, quickly.

When she pulled against the force that held the mug in place it vibrated harder, and there was a resistance when she tried to pass her hand through the space below. There. She closed her eyes, because it would be easier to feel when she didn't expect to see, and felt in that space again until her hand closed around a cord that didn't exist, a cord that writhed in her hand like an animal.

She ran her hand up the cord to the bottom of the mug, and now she could feel the whole thing, the shape of it, a rat's nest of intertwined threads wrapped around and around and around until beginning and end were indistinguishable. Tense as twine but soft, pliable. It took an effort to push her fingers in, to slide them between the angry ropes and search for the core, but not as much effort as she'd feared.

The surface of the mug under the spell was cool, though it still felt warm to her other hand, which made her grimace and then close her lips immediately against the water trying to rush into her mouth. Easy to forget where you are when your eyes are closed and your focus is fixed. She slid her fingers along that smooth surface until she found a join, a place where something long and thin and mobile ran straight into the silent, lifeless ceramic, connected by something sticky she didn't want to think about. Though it must be magic, it gave way to her fingernails, and she scraped at it for a minute that felt like a thousand years. She needed air, and couldn't go looking for it. Not yet.

Then the last layer of stickiness peeled away, and another scream filled her head, this one laden with a rage too big for a body to contain, too big for sound, passing into her brain through water and magic rather than ears, and the spell fell away and the mug broke in her hands and there was darkness and roaring all around.

After a while the roaring stopped, and she opened her eyes and realized that last sound hadn't come from a living thing at all. It was the sound of all the water draining away, to where she couldn't guess, and now she was lying on her back in wet grass and mud in front of the inn, and her hands were filthy, and it was raining.

[Indigo]

Jules sat up, and looked around, but there was no sign of Barker at all. The sky, when she dared to glance at it, was just a sky, pale gray with clouds that produced this light drizzle, nothing like the illusory storm she'd seen from the hill. The whole of downtown was a terrible mess—the flood might be gone, but it couldn't be so easily undone—but it was at least no longer submerged. Of the little monsters she saw no trace. She decided not to question that, because it was such a relief.

She got up and turned to go back the way she'd come, and saw Sauvage huddled on the ground between her and the cafe. As she ran over to him she caught a glimpse of Roman, climbing down from the roof, more or less intact as far as she could tell from this distance.

Sauvage—collapsed back into his human shape, the shape she knew—was curled up in the wet grass, staring up into the sky and occasionally blinking as if he couldn't quite believe it. He was also covered in blood, seeping out of a hundred tears in his clothes, and a small part of Jules took a moment to wonder about the ontology of those clothes given that he had been dragon-shaped not long before, but now was not the time to worry about such things. His face had gone distressingly pale as if washed with white paint. She crouched next to him and laid a hand on his arm, and after a moment his other hand came up to cover hers. "I'm fine," he said. He sounded utterly exhausted.

"Liar," she said.

He gave her a wan smile. "I will be fine," he said, "given enough time. Satisfied?"

"I'll take what I can get."

"Good." With a pained sound, he rolled into a sitting position. "Will you help me up? I'd better do this now, before the adrenaline wears off."

"Do what?" she said, but she pulled him to his feet.

Roman had stopped a few feet away, and stood, watching them, as if not sure whether it was safe to come closer. He held the rifle loosely in both hands. There were a few visible places where the creatures' teeth and claws had gotten to him, and something had cut a deep line under his left eye, but these didn't appear to trouble him much, or maybe he hadn't started to feel them yet. His glasses were speckled with dirty water. Sauvage limped over to him and put his hands on Roman's shoulders, which seemed as much to keep from falling as for emphasis.

"Uh—"

"Roman," he said, "I love you. And I...I'm so sorry, for everything." And before Roman had a chance to respond to that, Sauvage let go of him, and then instead of a man there was a raven with just enough feathers left to fly, and the raven took off and left Roman and Jules standing there in the mud.

Well, it was probably the best she could have expected from him. And at least it was something.

She went over to Roman, who was watching Sauvage fly back up the hill with a curiously blank expression, and tugged on his sleeve. "We should probably go in and see how bad the damage is. You still have that waterproof first aid kit, right?"

"Is this why you called me stupid earlier?"

"I didn't think you were listening," Jules said. "Also, in my defense, I called both of you stupid. Come on, Roman, you can be mad at me later. You're bleeding kind of a lot."

"I'm not mad at you," he said, as if this were the important thing, but he allowed her to lead him into the cafe. It wasn't quite as big of a mess as Jules had expected, mostly because a significant proportion of the stock of books seemed to have disappeared. But that was a problem for later. For now there were bandages to find, and emergency services to call, and she should probably go back out and make sure that mug was as broken as possible, just in case.

[Indigo]

Sauvage lay on the floor of his kitchen, watching a spider pick its way across the ceiling, the tiles cold against his back between the bandages. He had discovered over the last few days that putting on a shirt involved a lot more arm movement than he'd ever noticed before, and this posed something of a problem in his current state.

He was on the floor because the painkillers Jules had insisted on bringing him had started to wear off while he was in the middle of doing dishes, and under the circumstances, carefully lowering himself to the tiles and lying down seemed like the least disastrous solution. There were more, in a cabinet in the bathroom. Sooner or later he'd gather his strength to go find them; he couldn't recall their exact position, and accidentally ripping the whole cabinet out of the wall would only add to his problems, so magic was out as a strategy just now.

Jules. His friend, who had marched up here the day after the flood, when everyone was still trying to put Bristlecone back together, to make sure he hadn't dropped dead in the interim. He'd allowed her to fuss over him because he didn't have the energy to argue, to fight the part of himself that wanted this, wanted to be cared for, to be wanted. And Jules had hugged him and told him not to scare her like that ever again, and they'd both pretended that was something he could promise. So that was all right.

Someone knocked on his door. That was probably her now, checking up on him again. "Come in!" he called.

Then footsteps, a different gait than he'd expected to hear, but not an unfamiliar one; the sound of someone tripping over the doorstop and a muffled curse, and then Roman, in his kitchen, standing over him, looking concerned. He had barely looked at Roman since arriving here, even when they'd spoken, because it felt...unearned, somehow, but now he'd already said the worst thing he could possibly say, and so he studied Roman, the healing cut below his eye, the hair shot through with silver that hadn't been there a decade ago, the dim light filtering through the window playing over the round face, the wide nose, the faint and barely-distinguishable freckles.

"Are you all right?" Roman said.

"I'm alive," Sauvage said. "Everything else is temporary."

"Very true," Roman said, lowering himself to sit on the floor with a grimace of effort. "But not what I asked."

"No, I feel like shit. I am only trying to remind myself that eventually I'll stop."

"As coping mechanisms go, it isn't a bad one." Roman sighed, and looked sidelong at him. "I think there's something we need to talk about."

"Oh." Sauvage felt sick. He had not allowed himself to think through to what would come after, because he couldn't envision anything good waiting for him on the other side. "Do we have to?"

"If we don't, Jules may kill us both."

Laughing hurt, but suppressing it hurt more. "Well, this is the most mortal I'm likely to be for a while, so if she's going to try it now is the time."

"Oh, don't say that."

"You brought it up."

The silence that descended was warm, comfortable, in a way he hadn't dared to expect, and it evoked other silences on other days, sitting on the hotel balcony in a little Norrega town and drinking wine and occasionally wondering aloud what it was all about; and a hundred other moments like this in a hundred other places, five years of talking and wishing and thinking. He had turned these moments over and over in his head, in his partial seclusion under the sea, and wondered if he would ever have any memories that didn't hurt.

[Indigo]

Though it was only delaying the inevitable, he said, "Why did you ever come to this place? It's a very pleasant little town, but it is also very far from everything you knew."

"I was trying to escape," Roman said. "From my mistakes. From my...I want very much to say sins, but I know what you'll say to that. I confess I am still not sure what really makes a sin, outside of decrees that neither of us subscribe to, but harming other people seems like a decent start."

"When have you ever harmed other people?"

"I remember your face," Roman said softly, "when we argued, before that last battle. I'll always remember it."

He wanted to say that didn't count. He didn't think it should, when there were other people who'd been harmed far more by his decision to run away, Roman included; but he hadn't forgotten Jules yelling at him for exactly this sort of thing, and so he didn't say it. He didn't say anything.

"I've made other mistakes, you know," Roman said. "You were there for some of them."

"I can't argue with that." Although most of them didn't seem to Sauvage to be worth running away from with such vigor; but maybe it was the gathered weight of all of them together, pushing down, crushing him. A familiar feeling, that.

"At first I thought staying away from everyone and everything was the right thing to do," Roman said. "I almost wish I'd sought you out first, because you'd have told me what a terrible idea that was. But after a while...it became a habit. All this became a habit. I considered looking for you, more than once. I think of you often. But, well. Have you ever avoided saying something for so long you forgot how to say it?"

"You really have no idea." A vast dark space in the back of his mind like a broken tooth, unavoidable though he did his best, pain and alarm whenever he so much as brushed against it. "I'm not sure I know what you were avoiding, though, Roman. If it's an apology, I'd rather you didn't. I don't want you to be sorry for something that was my fault." It didn't seem all that likely, even given Roman's tendency to worry about things, to take them on himself; but what else could he mean?

"I don't agree with that, but no. It's not an apology." Roman paused, and took a deep breath, and then his brow furrowed suddenly and he said, "By the way, I don't suppose you happen to know where all my books went? I thought at first they'd been washed away somehow, but they haven't turned up, and there were an awful lot of them, so I would have expected at least one by now."

"Ah," Sauvage said. He couldn't keep the embarrassment out of his voice. "Yes. Um. I don't know where they are."

"I see."

The words tumbled out before he could stop them. "They, uh—I panicked, when the water started rising, and I'd seen most of them and how they were laid out on my visits to the cafe, so I...moved them. Somewhere safe. But I don't know the geography of this area as well as some, so I'm afraid I can't be sure exactly where they wound up. On a hill, most likely. Not this one, though, I think you would have noticed on your way in."

Roman was looking toward the kitchen window, hands over his mouth. "Sauvage. God." It took Sauvage a moment to realize he was laughing. "I have missed you so much."

[Indigo]

This silence was shorter, because, Sauvage thought, they both knew there was little they could do to put this off any further. Roman leaned back against the kitchen table and drew in a long breath, and said, "You're...more yourself than you were ten years ago, I think."

"Surely," Sauvage said, smiling because this too felt safe and warm and comfortable, "whatever I am is myself, regardless of degree. If I'm not me then who am I? And if I am only partly me, where does the rest of me go? It seems a slippery way to be."

"A fine argument. All right, then, you're a different iteration of yourself, and I suppose so am I. But what I was trying to say is that there are...things about you, the way you are, that I only saw glimpses of before because you were...different. You always seemed to be afraid of yourself, then. You tried to hide it, but you're not very subtle, you know."

"It is a gift and a curse, yes."

Roman chuckled. "Yes. But I—the things Jules has told me, and the way you went about getting everyone out of town as soon as you felt something coming—I'm trying to figure out how to put this into words. When I met you, and for the few years after that I knew you, you always seemed to be in a transitional stage, moving from the self that you were to the self you wanted to be. And I don't know if you're there, I can't read your mind. What I do know is that you have the same spark, the same curiosity, and maybe you always had this depth of compassion for other people, too, but you didn't lean into it before, the way you do now. What I know," and here Roman faltered for a moment, "what I know is that I loved you then, in some small shallow way, but the way that I love you now is...different, and fuller, I think. I wasn't prepared to do anything about it then, because I didn't know whether it was real, or ever could be, but I know now, and so maybe it's time."

Sauvage turned his attention back to the spider on the ceiling, and he tried to fit all of those things together, tried to see how one of Roman's thoughts connected to the next, tried to dissect them, to turn them into a map or a chart, something without words, because he couldn't allow himself to understand the words. If he understood them he might break. He had run versions of this conversation through his head for years, and he had never once imagined a version that went well. It didn't fit inside his brain.

After a while he said, "Oh." And then he said, "Do what about it?"

Another pause.

Roman said, gently, "What do you want?"

Sauvage could remember, individually, every time he had ever been asked this; could count them, could pin them all across a timeline that started fifteen years ago and ended here, although with any luck it wouldn't end, and he could one day lose count. There were a lot of things he wanted. Too many, probably. But there were one or two that stood out. "I want..." He swallowed, which was not very comfortable in this position. "I want you to kiss me."

And Roman smiled, and leaned over to approximate this somewhat absurd position on the floor, and kissed him, and his lips were very soft and he smelled like a library and tasted like blueberry lip balm, the expensive kind with real fruit extracts, and for a little while there was no pain.

When Roman pulled back Sauvage's head filled with words, about rights and deserving and worthiness and all sorts of similar concepts and, mostly, how he didn't possess any of them, but he didn't say any of those things, either. Instead he said something that took a bit longer to float to the surface, something true: "I've never...I don't exactly have a relationship history. I probably won't do it right."

"There isn't really a right way," Roman said, returning to his previous position with his back against the table leg. "There are wrong ways," he added, after a moment, "but many of them come from cultural ideas which I don't think you know anything about. And the rest..." He shrugged. "We can figure it out as we go along. Talk through things. If you want."

"I do," Sauvage said. "Although it seems to me that there are a daunting number of things we need to talk about."

"I suppose," Roman said. "But I don't think I've ever regretted spending a long time talking with you. I imagine this won't be the exception."

Sauvage smiled with all his teeth, and elicited a short laugh from Roman; and Roman let Sauvage put his head in his lap, and ran his fingers through Sauvage's hair with something like wonder, and they talked, and kissed, and talked.

[Indigo]

It was a bright and damp Tuesday morning, a week and a half after the flood, and Jules was standing in the gutted cafe with a clipboard, a pencil, and a very bad sketch. In theory she was supposed to be meeting Roman here twenty minutes ago to discuss remodeling plans—substantial repairs had been deemed necessary and they'd agreed that the building's layout, having arisen more organically than intentionally over the years, could use some intentional designing this time around.

Roman was not here. Roman was at Sauvage's house, and Jules wasn't about to complain about that, considering, but at this particular moment it was throwing a wrench into her plans. She debated calling him. Much as she was loathe to interrupt them now that they were finally talking, the cafe wasn't going to remodel itself.

As she frowned at her phone and her unanswered texts, a small van pulled up out front, one of those stubby ones that looked like it might molt into an SUV in a few months. This impression was only strengthened by its beetle-wing iridescence. Its door opened and Roderick, of all people, hopped out and came into the cafe; the doors were open, since there wasn't much of anything left to steal. Not that there had been any great risk of theft even beforehand, but it was the principle of the thing.

"Roderick! What brings you all the way out here?"

"Library business, mostly!" He was carrying a book, which seemed to change in size every time she looked away from it and back. "I also wanted to see how you were doing, since your town almost got destroyed by a monster and all. Well, a metaphorical monster."

"He did also turn himself into a literal monster, so I think you've got it covered either way," she said. "I'm okay. I mean, nobody attacked me personally, and hardly anyone even got hurt, so it could have gone a lot worse."

"That's almost a good segue into what I came here to talk to you about, so I'll take it," Roderick said. "Your research has, obviously, proven to be of practical use, since it allowed you to prevent that destruction I mentioned and scared off Barker. I wouldn't have questioned its usefulness anyway, given your kind of unique life circumstances, but you know how it is, you need concrete proof of everything if you want anyone to listen to you. Anyway, the Library and I had this idea. Well, a couple of ideas. First: take this."

She took the book from him. It reshaped itself in her hands, becoming small enough to fit in her pocket, although when she flipped through it many more pages turned than had existed when it was closed. On the cover, where an author's name would be, was Jules's name; and, regrettably, it appeared to be titled Monster Manual. She raised her eyebrows.

"Yeah, I tried to talk it out of the title, but the Library gets very attached to some of its ideas. Maybe you can try convincing it sometime. It's always excited to hear from new people, and it can be more open to their influence," he said. "Anyway. I know you lost a lot of your notes in the flood, but they should be in there, along with the rest of your research, and any further notes you decide to make in relation to this project of yours should show up too. You might have to stop by the Library to get it to update, though, if you do outside research."

[Indigo]

She drummed her fingers thoughtfully on the book's cover. "And when the library moves?"

"I'll let you know," he said. "If we end up somewhere you can't easily get to, we'll figure something out. Which leads me to the rest of the idea. Now, before I tell you about this, I want to make sure you know that this book is completely without conditions, apart from the updating thing, which is just kind of how the magic works. Someone, somewhere could probably do something about it, but it's beyond me. But that book is yours, no matter what."

"Oh," she said. "Thank you."

"Of course! It is your research, after all." He cleared his throat. "So! The other thing. I work for the Library, as you know, but before that I did a lot of other magical research and related work—as you also know, now that I think about it! I'm still peripherally involved in some of that, I know a lot of people in the field, and between them and the Library I meet a lot of people who could use some assistance with things like spell mechanics and the occasional monster hunt and other stuff like that. They need information that's kind of obscure, not something you could easily stumble across, or maybe it's just that they need some analysis to break down why things work the way they do."

"And that's the kind of thing I've been working on," Jules said. "If you're about to offer me a job, I'm going to have to disappoint you. As much as I like the library I'm not so into the whole unpredictable teleportation thing."

"No, I know that. I'm about to offer you a different kind of job, as a consultant of sorts." He gestured around them. "Once you get this place up and running again, that is, since I'd guess that's going to take up a lot of your time for a while. The idea is that if I find someone who needs this kind of help but who's outside the Library's reach—it happens more than you'd think, since it can only be in one place at a time, and I get so many emails—anyway, I'll send these people to you, or have them call you or get in contact with you some other way, and you can provide them guidance. If you want to! Again, the book is yours no matter what, this is an entirely voluntary position—I mean, not voluntary as in volunteer work, the Library will pay you, but, you know, I realize this is kind of asking a lot."

It was a more tempting offer than she would've expected, if someone had suggested this possibility to her months ago. She wasn't an expert, not really, because the field was much too broad for her to be that knowledgeable about all of it, and she hadn't been studying it for that long, anyway. But being able to solve a problem because of her research—to save lives, in fact, although she felt weird thinking about it that way—that had been good. That had felt right.

She said, "You seem like you'd be better at this than I would, Roderick," because she still wasn't sure.

"I don't know about that! I know where to find some stuff, sure, but you have a whole system here, and I've seen the way you connect ideas that would seem totally separate to me until you put them together. It's a matter of different skill sets." He shrugged. "It's up to you."

She thought about it a little more, but she didn't really need to. Truthfully, she had decided as soon as the idea was posed to her. "All right," she said. "But, as you said, not right away. I'll let you know when I have time to get started."

"Great!" Roderick beamed, which Jules had never actually seen a person do before. "I'll tell the Library, and there's some paperwork involved but we can probably do most of it over the phone. There are hardly any signatures involved. The Library is weird about handwriting. Now..." He glanced up at the wall clock, which had been miraculously unharmed by the flood. "I should probably get going. But it's good to see you! Maybe I'll come out here sometime just for fun."

She watched him get back into the van and drive away, and, smiling, she slid the book into her back pocket to look at later; she wanted to get a feel for how it was laid out, and make sure nothing important was missing. Then she pulled out her phone again to call Roman. The sooner these renovations were done, the better.