The library was a tomb after hours, all fluorescent hum killed and the emergency strips glowing like dying embers along the carpet. Arya Allison sat cross-legged on the floor of aisle 398.7—Fantasy Romance, dog-eared paperbacks no one checked out anymore—her back against a shelf that smelled of mildew and someone's spilled latte from 2019.
She was twenty-three, wore the same gray hoodie three days running, and had the kind of face that made people look past her in grocery lines. Not ugly, just forgettable: muddy brown hair in a knot, glasses perpetually sliding down a nose that had never quite grown into the rest of her. The only thing remarkable about Arya was how unremarkable she allowed herself to be.
Tonight she cradled a hardcover she'd rescued from the return bin: Dragonbound Seduction, volume one. The cover was ridiculous—some silver-haired heroine mid-swoon in the arms of a shirtless warlock whose abs had abs—but the prose inside was crack cocaine. Every chapter, the heroine "leveled up" by coaxing magic out of powerful Givers through increasingly graphic means. Arya told herself she read it for the world-building. She was lying.
Outside, thunder rolled like the building itself was clearing its throat. The digital clock above the circulation desk blinked 11:57 p.m. Arya turned a page with a licked thumb.
"Kiss me until the dragonfire in my blood answers you," the Giver growled, pinning the heroine to the altar stone. "One climax for every rank you'll gain…"
Her cheeks burned. She shifted, thighs pressing together under the hoodie that doubled as a blanket. The library was empty; she'd checked twice. Still, she glanced over her shoulder before letting her free hand drift beneath the hem of her sweatshirt, fingertips brushing the waistband of her leggings.
11:59.
Lightning flashed hard enough to bleach the stacks white. The overhead sprinklers hissed but didn't spray. Arya's pulse skipped. Another crash—closer—and the lights flickered out entirely. For one heartbeat the aisle was pitch black except for the EXIT sign's red glow.
Then the book in her lap *moved*.
Not fell—*moved*. Pages riffled themselves, faster and faster, a paper hurricane. Gold lettering on the cover flared like molten metal. Arya tried to drop it, but her hands wouldn't obey; the spine fused to her palms as if magnetized. Words crawled off the page and up her wrists in luminous ink: TAKER PROTOCOL INITIATED.
"What the fu—"
Thunder answered, deafening. The floor lurched. Shelves tilted like a ship listing. Books avalanched around her—tomes on tax law, vampire erotica, a calculus textbook that clipped her shoulder hard enough to bruise. Arya screamed, but the sound was swallowed by a vortex of light ripping open beneath her.
She fell upward.
The last thing she felt was the book dissolving into her skin, pages folding into her bloodstream like origami cranes made of fire. The last thing she saw was the library clock frozen at 12:00:00, hands bent backward, ticking in reverse.
Then the world blinked out.