Free The Hidden Library by Heather Lyons Page A

anyway.
    The wind picks up, whistling and howling through the branches of the trees nearby. “Finn?” She squeezes my hand, not even seeming to care that I was just manhandling a skeleton. “Are you all right?”
    No, I want to tell her. No, I’m not all right. I’m about to tell her I am fine, though, when different words fall out.
    I tell her, “Someone I know is dying.” Someone who, no doubt, will have a grave just like one of these. But before Alice can finish her condolences, I keep going. “Katrina doesn’t have a grave.”
    The back of my eyes burn, and it’s not from exhaustion, although I’d like to claim otherwise. My adoptive mother, the only one who has ever counted in this pathetic life of mine, does not have a grave we can visit. Her life was cut short when Todd or one of his cronies destroyed the catalyst for her Timeline and there is no body to mourn over, no grave to visit, no proof outside of photographs and memories to highlight how bright she burned in my life and others.’ Brom put up a memorial to her at the Institute, but it’s a small plaque decorating some hideous statue that he thinks she would have approved of. She wouldn’t have, by the way. Her taste was way more refined than his. And the thing is, how many people walk by that thing and never think twice about the person who it’s dedicated to? Too many.
    I do, though.
    My mother deserved better than she got, and I’m going to track down the motherfucker who did that to her and exact justice, whether Katrina would have wanted that for me or not.
    “I’m so sorry,” Alice is whispering. She shifts my hand to her other, so an arm can wrap around me. “I’m so sorry, Finn.”
    Graves are funny. They’re actually incredibly selfish things. Dead people don’t give a shit whether or not they’re buried in a grave or cremated or frozen or sent into space or scattered to the winds. The dead are dead. They’re beyond caring. But we who remain, the greedy survivors, we need something like this. We selfishly take a body and put it in a plot of land that could be, I don’t know, used for a variety of other things other than letting skin and bones rot within, and we selfishly put up a slab of marble or concrete and we then use all these things to let us cling to the past.
    Katrina doesn’t have a grave, though. And that’s acid in the pit of my stomach. I loved my mother. I still love her.
    And yet, the absence of my mother’s grave isn’t the only one that cuts deeply. So does Jim’s. One of my oldest, truest friends, one of the very few who treated me with respect and as an equal when I was a kid, doesn’t have a grave, either. So, yeah. Sweeney Todd is going to pay for what he’s done to my mother and countless others. And when I’m done doling out that bit of justice, I’m finally going to go avenge Jim, just like I should have all those years ago.
    Tom Sawyer is going to pay for what’s he’s done.

F INN HAS GONE TO speak with his father, so I am the one who must deliver our latest acquisition to the Librarian. It takes me a good ten minutes to pass through all of the security measures before I enter the Museum, a cavernous yet elegant holding room buried deep beneath the Institute. Instrumental music that Finn informs me is called elevator music fills the space, and no matter how many times I’ve heard it in this room or her office upstairs in the library, I still cannot seem to succinctly draw the line connecting such peppy tones to the inscrutable woman who calls herself the heart of the Society.
    She loves it so, though.
    I find the Librarian dusting books on shelves within a small office that consists of little more than a pair of overstuffed chairs, a turquoise telephone, and a coffee table that is made from a large slab of raw rock and quartz, cut open and polished until it shines like glass. “Ah,” she says, not even bothering to turn away from her cleaning duties, “I was wondering when you’d