The Luna Queen's Rebirth (Ellie and Dominic) novel Chapter 485

Chapter 485

Ellie’s POV

The healer’s academy library hadn’t changed one bit since I was last here. I was glad for it-I’d almost forgotten how much I used to love this place, how it had become a second home for me when the world felt like it was burning around me.

It felt no different now. A sanctuary when everything else crumbled.

The mahogany shelves still ran floor to ceiling in long rows, rolling ladders hooked onto their brass rails, and the green-shaded lamps still burned on every reading table even though there wasn’t a single student left to need them. Dust motes danced in the warm shafts of sunlight, and somewhere behind the stacks, a clock ticked steadily.

It must have been very early, because there were no students hunched over the tables, studying or murmuring amongst themselves or sipping cups of coffee that they technically weren’t supposed to bring around the books. It was just me in my own little sanctuary.

I walked the aisles slowly, taking my time, trailing my fingers along the spines. Anatomy. Botany. Physiology. It was hard to believe sometimes that I used to spend whole nights wedged into some corner or another with my knees drawn up, safe from the world.

So much had happened since then. But the library always drew me back, I supposed. Back home, where I truly belonged. Not in a mountain, but between the quiet stacks, surrounded by the smell of paper and wood and coffee.

I pulled a book down. It fell open to blank pages, but I smiled anyway, plopping into an armchair that just appeared behind me, and I began to read.

Home, I thought. I was home.

“Ellie.”

I looked up.

The voice was faint, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.

“Ellie!”

“Nico?”

I slid the book back into a gap that was no longer there and followed the voice up the aisle, past the reading tables with their empty chairs, toward the front desk, where the only other presence in the entire space was standing in her usual spot. The librarian.

She was standing behind the desk with her spectacles perched on her nose and her white hair pinned up, working through a stack of returns the way she had every day for as long as I could remember. Her stamp came down on a card with a satisfying thunk. She set it aside and reached for the next.

“Hello?” I said. My voice echoed.

She looked up at me over her spectacles, one brow raised in that judgmental way. Too loud.

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“I’m sorry,” I said, “I thought I heard-”

“Ellie. Finally.”

The woman’s mouth moved, but it wasn’t her voice, nor any woman’s. It was male, young and familiar.

It was my brother’s voice.

“Nico,” I said, stepping forward. “How are you-”

“I don’t have much time!” The librarian pressed her stamp down on another card without looking at it. Thunk. Like going through the motions of a memory I’d long since buried. “You’re really hard to find, you know that? You’re so far away, and something’s wrong with your head. It keeps-“The voice crackled, faded, then came back too loud. “-SLIPPING.”

My ears rang, and I slammed my hands over them. “Ow!”

“Sorry.” The librarian closed the book and began typing at her computer, the keys click-clacking so fast it was dizzying. “Ellie, listen to me. Vivian is dead.”

My hands fell.

Rock scraped against rock. The weight on my legs shifted.

“-please, Ellie, answer me-”

Dominic. And beneath his voice, in the one place the mountain couldn’t reach, the bond was wide open and howling, his panic pouring into me so hard it hurt worse than my ribs did.

“I’m here,” I tried to send. “I’m here–”

I tried to move. My left arm was pinned beneath something. Pain lit up my side, and the scream I let out died in the dust as a wheeze. But my right hand had space around it. Cold air on my fingertips.

I pushed.

Rock bit into my knuckles and scraped the skin off the back of my hand, and then my fingers broke through into open air, and I spread them wide.

“THERE! Her hand-Bastian-”

The world came apart above me, stone by stone. Light stabbed down through the gaps, headlamp beams swinging wildly, and then hands were on my wrist, my forearm, my shoulder. Bastian was digging despite his injury, hurling rocks the size of my head like they were nothing. Dominic slipped his arms under me, his face streaked with dirt and sweat.

“I’ve got you. I’ve got you-”

He pulled, and I came out of the rubble and onto the open floor gasping, coughing up dust, every inhale like a knife in my side. But alive.

Dominic cradled my face in both hands. Blood was running into my eye. His mouth was moving, but the ringing in my ears drowned it out. Behind him, Bastian had dropped to his knees, his face ashen, lips forming my name over and over.

“Bastian,” I managed. “Your… mom.” I dragged in a breath that felt like swallowing glass. “I think she’s going… to kill me.”

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