I sucked air through my teeth to filter out the dust, and kept my eyes on the terrain ahead. Watching a fixed point helped slightly with the motion sickness, but if this got much worse, I was going to vomit all over my fire-spider.

Lena had no such trouble. She laughed as we climbed down the underside of a fallen wall. “If you ever get tired of the library, you could make a fortune selling tickets for spider rides.”

The pounding of the work crew had dulled, muffled by the wreckage. Occasionally, deep groans and creaks echoed through the building as it continued to settle. Water dripped from broken pipes. Rubble pattered in the distance like hailstones. Unpleasant reminders that the whole place could shift and crush us like bugs at any time. And of course, if Ted was right, there was also the fugitive vampire to deal with.

Smudge grew warmer as we worked our way down. Dust soon covered us all. My throat and nostrils were caked with it. The wreckage here was worse, and we kept having to backtrack to find our way through.

Yet there were also places that had escaped most of the damage. We passed a small study area that appeared intact. Old journals were neatly shelved, and a black L.L. Bean backpack sat abandoned beside a small desk. Only a few feet beyond, girders had smashed through the ceiling.

The first body I spotted was a girl of about twenty who had taken shelter in a doorway. Good instincts for an earthquake, but the doorway had collapsed, crushing her. From the looks of it, her death had been quick.

We passed two other bodies before reaching the elevator. The doors had crumpled open. Normally, the Porter archive in the hidden subbasement could only be accessed by entering a nine-digit code with the elevator buttons. But the assault on the library had pinned the elevator car overhead and ripped open the bottom of the shaft, exposing the archive.

The Porters kept six archives in the US, hidden rooms protected by security both magic and mundane, where locked books could be stored along with hard copies of our files and records. At last count, this archive should have held more than a thousand books, including the forty-one titles I had flagged over the past two years.

Smudge crawled upside down to the side of the shaft, then climbed down one of the thick steel cables on the wall. My legs were sweating, and I could feel Smudge shivering as we descended, as if he was fighting his own instincts. Something else was down here.