I found Alice again by getting killed in a Paris library by a strange angel.

I wasn’t looking for the angel, but they have a way of showing up when they’re least expected. I hadn’t even intended to be in Paris that day, and I wasn’t certain how I’d wound up there. I’d passed out drunk the night before under a bridge in Prague, while resting my head on a discarded jacket and listening to someone sing Édith Piaf’s “Mon Dieu” from somewhere deeper in the city. Yet I woke under a different bridge in Paris. I knew it was Paris because I sat up to see tourist boats making their way down the Seine, the people on board staring at me as if puzzled by my presence. I was more than a little puzzled myself.

I had no memory of how I’d come to be there on the wet stones of the riverside walk, so I searched through my pockets for some clue. They were empty of anything but a few coins and crumpled receipts from hotels and bars I’d visited around the world while searching for Alice after she disappeared.

No, there was one thing. A simple note scrawled on a folded piece of stationery. It was from a hotel that had been destroyed in London during the Blitz some number of decades past. Even stranger, the note was in Latin: Tu es in debitum. Someone was telling me I was in their debt.

Maybe one day I would find out who had brought me to Paris and why. There’s a story to everything. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t. Often the best stories are those that never get told.

I breathed deep, letting the air clear my head as I scanned my surroundings. My gaze immediately caught on the dome of the building across the water. I knew it all too well. The Institut de France, which housed the Bibliothèque Mazarine, one of Paris’s most noted libraries and a place with a history nearly as troubled as mine.

It seemed I had been left in Paris for a reason. It was time to find out why.

I picked myself up off the ground and waved at the tourists, who all found something else more interesting to look at. I walked along the bank of the Seine until I reached some stone stairs and climbed them, making my way to the bridge, which turned out to be the Pont des Arts. The railings of the bridge had once been covered in locks that lovers had left behind to symbolize their enduring love – so many locks that the bridge had threatened to collapse under their weight. Paris’s rulers had to remove them and replace the railings with glass panels. So much for things lasting forever.

I continued on, across the bridge and to the institut. The Mazarine extended from the front of it here, directly across from the Pont des Arts. I lingered in the square outside, until a group of men and women who looked like researchers climbed the steps of the facade and queued up in one of the arched entranceways. I fell in behind them and hoped no one would take note of my dishevelled clothes. It must have worked because no one glanced twice at me.

The man in front of me was drinking coffee from a disposable cup and wearing clothes nearly as worn and dirty as mine. Likely a professor. I pointed out to him that his shoe was untied, and he bent down to retie the laces. He absently handed me his coffee to free his hands, and I drank most of it down. He didn’t seem to notice when I handed the cup back.

“Built in the seventeenth century by the Cardinal Mazarin,” he said, gazing around with the sort of wonder you typically see on the face of a child, not a grown man. “They don’t make them like this anymore.”

I’d heard people say that since the days of the Colosseum, but I just nodded politely. “It was a different age.”

“It was the largest library of its time,” he went on, slipping into lecture mode. Professors often can’t help themselves. “Until the civil war, of course, when the nobles rose up against Mazarin and looted his collection. Who knows what was lost in that time?”

“It’s just as well,” I said. “Mazarin’s librarian had acquired a collection of demonology books from an abandoned monastery in Germany that was better left forgotten. That’s what the nobles were actually after, and they divided the collection among themselves. Not that it did them any good in the end.” I figured I owed him for the coffee – maybe he’d find an interesting new area of research.

The professor frowned at me. “I’m not aware of any such scholarship. What are your sources for this?”

“Cardinal Mazarin,” I said as we made our way inside.

The professor’s eyes widened. “Have you discovered some secret correspondence or journal?”

“Something like that.” I pointed at the others, who were lining up to sign in. “Registration is that way.”

The professor shuffled after them, muttering about citations and peer review. He didn’t notice me slip away in the other direction, where I could lose myself in the stacks.

I went through the library slowly, searching for a book, any book, that was out of place. When I found one, I pulled it from the shelf and looked around. This was how I’d always found Alice before. Pull the right misshelved book out, and she will show herself like she’s been there all along. Sometimes she comes down the row like another patron searching for a book, sometimes she climbs out from amid the books themselves and yet other times she’ll make her presence known in another part of the library. The last time I’d found her in the Mazarine, she’d been wearing the bloody dress that Marie Antoinette had on at the time of her execution, and she’d been carrying a basketful of talking books. That had drawn some attention given it was the 1980s and there had been a different tour of visiting scholars from some academic conference or another going through the place.

Alice didn’t show herself this time, though, no matter how many books I pulled from the shelves. I tried to remember if I had already gone through the Mazarine looking for her, but I couldn’t be sure; it felt as if I had searched every library in the world since she’d gone missing. I was beginning to lose hope.

And then my eyes caught on a book on one of the top shelves of the row I currently wandered.

Through the Looking-Glass.

“Well, that has to be some sort of sign,” I muttered to myself and took the book down from the shelf. The cover was red morocco, with the title and motifs in gilt on the spine, and gilt edges. An illustration of a queen in profile holding a sceptre over her shoulder was on the front. It was a first edition, if I wasn’t mistaken, which meant it was worth a small fortune. It also meant it wasn’t the sort of book that should have been left in the stacks. I glanced up and down the row once more, but still there was no sign of Alice. I opened the book, hoping to find some clue inside.

That was when the angel erupted from its pages and buried a sword in my chest.