A God Amongst Wolves

1

~Alvera

"He looks like he would talk you through it, you know?"

I look sideways at my coworker, pausing my hopeless fumbling through my wallet.

"It?"

Her lips curve as she chews distractedly on her fingernail. "Sex. The good kind too, where—"

"Yeah okay, I get it," I mutter, nearly sending dollar bills scattering from my wallet as I search for my familiar green library card.

Kim walked me a couple hundred metres down the road from work, only entering the library because she caught a glimpse of this town's latest fixation.

Venn.

"Should I go talk to him?" She's not really asking me. She's staring through a gap in the nearest bookshelf, examining the man whose head is bent over a book.

It's not that I don't also fixate on him on the rare occasion he ventures into the town's very small, very dead centre...

I just know by now not to waste my time.

Some things are so pretty they can only be admired, not touched.

"Ah hah!" I snag my library card, waving it in front of Kim's face. She brushes me off irritably.

Muttering under my breath, I tilt my head to join her in looking through the shelves. On the other side, Venn sits at one of the reading tables, doing exactly as the object denotes.

"He's reading..." I break off, my eyes narrowing. "...Wait. What is he reading, exactly?"

"A really cruddy, old book," Kim mumbles.

The book is thick and large, taking up half the table. The pages are crinkled and yellow, and awfully familiar.

"You've got to be kidding me," I growl, shoving away from Kim.

"What?" She throws her hands up. "Alvera? If you walk away I'm leaving. I don't like the smell of this place!"

I swerve through the shelves and toward the librarian's desk. The woman sits there nonchalantly, tapping a dull tipped pencil on the clipboard before her.

She doesn't look up as I skid to a stop at her desk. My suddenly appearance ruffles a few loose strands of her auburn hair, but other than that, she looks entirely unbothered by me.

"I'm afraid you too late," she mutters blandly.

"Too late?" I huff out a breath, adjusting my bag onto my other shoulder. "How is that possible? You said you would have it out at 3."

She looks up, tipping her glasses down her nose a touch so she can pin me with a glare. "And it's 3:30, Alvera."

I glance at the glass box to the right of us. Sure enough it's empty for the first time in years. Decades, even.

"How could he have gotten to it before me?"

"You've been begging me to open that case for weeks. You should gotten here when I said I was opening it."

I narrow my eyes on the woman. She looks a little too pleased with my situation.

"Work ran a little later than I expected," I grit out as she stapples a pile of paper together. Even that one action seems smug. "You could have waited for me."

"The man was there, and he asked." She starts stamping some books, tarnishing the pages with that familiar red mark. "I serve everyone in this town, not just you."

I throw my hands up. "Gah!"

She's clearly going to be no help. I'm going to have to turn my attention to my next target.