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“She blows up a library?”

“No. She stuffs her way into a human and uses them to torch the place. She’s been doing it since her daddy snuffed her.”

Her daddy…

Beatrice never wanted to talk about how she died.

She was nuts about the library.

She’d been getting worse this week.

“Beatrice can do what?”

Cassian inhaled sharply. “You said her name before, but everything went haywire. I totally forgot.”

I frowned at him. “Forgot what?”

Lee growled at the same time, “What other libraries?”

Cassian said, “Three towns over, last year. Their public library burned down.”

Melbor gestured in his direction. “He’s right. And there was another at the end of the county. The old rubber; you kids wouldn’t know what I’m talking about.” He frowned. “Wait. Can he see me?”

“There was another one, way south of here. In Fosston, where they make tires. They had a church library that burned down. Wait. You did say Beatrice before, right? I’m not imagining that I heard that?” Cassian asked, his eyes wide and blinking rapidly. “Ohmygodohmygodohmyfuckinggod. I know. I was wrong. I said wife before. I was totally wrong. I can’t believe I was wrong, and I thought I could finally ace at being a researcher.” He was fumbling in his pockets for his phone, then tapping furiously on the screen until he shoved the screen at us. “There! There.”

Melbor leaned forward, waving a hand in front of Cassian.

I glared at him. “Stop it.”

He tucked his hand behind him. “Was just making sure, is all.”

I focused on the picture. It was an older photograph of a farmer and a little girl—woah. That was Beatrice.

I took Cassian’s phone and enlarged the screen to read the caption underneath. Roger Baskins and his daughter, Beatrice, pictured at age fourteen.

Lee had been reading over my shoulder. “Holy shit.” He plucked the phone out of my hands to inspect it closer. “Roger Baskins.” He and Cassian shared a look.

Cassian was nodding, fervently. “Uh huh. What I said.”

Lee handed me the phone again, saying quietly, “Beatrice’s father was⁠—”

Cassian cut in, his voice rising, “Roger Baskins. The local serial killer. The same guy I was dressed up as yesterday. I thought it was his wife he killed, but it wasn’t. It was her. Pretty sure, according to my research, that he killed his daughter. She was his last victim. One article said that they always thought he killed his daughter in a library, got rid of her body, but went back to torch the library to get rid of the evidence.”

“Books were her life.”

“I am at my wit’s end. I cannot keep doing this… We must save the books.”

“If she doesn’t respect the books, then I will take them away. I don’t want to be forced to do that.”

“The library must never be torn down. It’s up to us to keep it standing.”

Dread went down my spine.

She’d been projecting what she was going to do.

“Yeah. Anyway. She goes a little cuckoo every year around this time. Snaps. Her daddy killed her on Halloween. Four in the morning, exactly. I found this one wandering around a couple hours after that, but she probably ditched his body long before that.”

I was still wrapping my head around the fact that Beatrice burned libraries down. “But…how? It’s not easy to get into a human’s body.”