I never meant to stay this late. The university library usually kicked everyone out by ten, but I’d sweet-talked Mr. Kane into letting me finish pulling books for my thesis. He was the quiet type, the one who barely looked up from his desk most days. Tall, dark hair always a little messy, glasses that made his green eyes sharper. I’d had a crush on him since freshman year. Pathetic, right? A twenty-one-year-old student crushing on the thirty-something librarian who probably saw me as just another noisy undergrad.
But here I was, down in the basement stacks at almost eleven, surrounded by dusty shelves and dim overhead lights. Mr. Kane had come down to help me find one last obscure history text. We were deep in the back when everything went black.
The lights cut out with a loud pop. The a
