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sharply and then returned a gaze of new wonder on Aisling.  “Is it so, aye?  Is it?  Thee raised it to hatching?  Thee and kin?”
    “ Just me,” said Taryn.  “No one else knew.  And now I’m so scared.”  Tears that had been building since the previous night finally came to a head and poured out of her.  “You’ve got to help me, please!  I don’t know what to do!  He’s a miracle and I’m going to kill him!”
    “ Nay, nay.  Peace.  Be still.”  Romany contemplated the sleeping griffin, her thin fingers folded beneath her chin.  All around them was the emptiness of the abandoned library, but somewhere, Taryn could hear cars driving, people shouting, children laughing.  Somewhere.
    “ What would thee do?” Romany asked at last.  Her eyes were hooded and grave.  “If thee had thy will of it, what would thee do?”
    “ I need to help him,” Taryn said at once.  “I have to.  He’s got no one else.  But I don’t know what to do.  I thought…you might know things.”
    The gypsy looked startled, and then delighted.  “Aye,” she said, long fingers brushing imaginary flecks of dust from the folds of her skirt.  “Many things and many more things does Romany know.  But for thee…mmm…For thee, the best that I can know is to tell thee where to look for knowledge.” 
    Romany stood, a cloud of dragons whirling out and then back to nest in their eerily-orchestrated dance.  She began to move up the concrete stair to the library, beckoning with one slender hand as she passed Taryn.
    Taryn’s legs gathered under her almost of their own accord, but she didn’t immediately move to follow.  She looked again at the library and saw the dead, black eyes of its many empty windows, the dead, cracked flesh of its abandoned walls.  “It’s closed,” she said, hugging Aisling just a little tighter to her chest.
    Romany never paused.  The sparkling threads sewn into her garments dulled as she passed into the shadow of the overhang, but that was all.
    Taryn took two steps up the ramp and stopped again, her heart hurting.  “It’s empty!” she called, and flinched when the library’s hollows threw back her words in broken shivers.  She looked bleakly at it again, the playgrounds of her youth, and said, “It’s dead.”
    “ Nay.”  Romany turned just enough to show Taryn the edges of her smile.  “Tis sleeping, aye.  Tis sleeping only.  But it will wake for me and thee.  Come.  Follow.”  Humming, the gypsy put her hands on the heavy, dungeon doors and pulled.
    For just a moment, Taryn thought she saw a shimmer rising in the shadows before the library, the way that heat waves will rise off a sun-baked street if you squint at it just right.  And for that instant, it seemed there were two sets of doors, one that remained fixed and shut and one that opened soundlessly, almost gleefully, under Romany ’s slender hands.  Taryn blinked, and then there was only Romany, holding wide the dungeon doors of the Redmond library, smiling back over her round shoulder with that sly and knowing smile.
    Taryn drew back, nervously searching the empty parking lot behind her, half-expecting a host of cops to descend on them with lights and sirens and billy-clubs flying.  “We shouldn’t be here,” she said.
    “ Nay,” agreed her companion, utterly without shame.  “Therefore, swiftly go, before the waking of this place brings attention thee might do better to avoid.”
    It was hard to argue with that.
     

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    8.  The Sleeping Library
     
    T aryn’s feet took her up under the overhang.  Every step brought her a little further back in time.  There, she could see the drinking fountain, her childhood favorite now impossibly short, and the little carpet-covered concrete stair that bucked out before it.  There, she could see the door to the conference room, dark and still, just a tangle of shadows behind black windows.  There,