The problem with dying in a library was that no one found you quickly.
Lyssa Quinn had always thought she'd go out in some dramatic fashion, like getting hit by a bus while saving a cat, maybe, or in a blaze of glory, arguing with a tenured professor about the correct translation of a 14th-century manuscript. Something memorable. Something that would make her mother say, "Well, at least she died doing what she loved."
Instead, she died alone at 2:47 AM on a Tuesday, surrounded by books no one had touched in thirty years, from an aneurysm she didn't know she had.
The last thing she saw was the title page of a first-edition Gothic romance novel, the kind with heaving bosoms and brooding lords. The Vampire's Obsidian Bride. She'd pulled it from the restricted archives as a joke, a palate cleanser after six hours of translating Medieval Latin legal documents.
She remembered thinking: God, the writing is terrible.
Then: Why does my head hurt?
Then: nothing.
And then: everything.
Lyssa woke to the smell of blood and iron.
Her first coherent thought was that the library had never smelled like this before. At this moment, it smelled like an abattoir, like old coins, like something fundamental and wrong. Her second thought was that her head didn't hurt anymore, which seemed suspicious given that she was reasonably certain she'd just experienced a catastrophic brain event.
Her third thought was cut short by the realization that she couldn't move her arms.
Panic hit like a fist to the chest.
She tried to jerk upright, but she couldn't. Her arms wouldn't respond. No, worse—they were shackled, wrists locked above her head, metal biting into skin that felt raw and hypersensitive. The surface beneath her was cold stone, slick with something she didn't want to identify.
Move. Move. MOVE.
She thrashed, yanking against the restraints with every ounce of strength she had. The shackles didn't even rattle. They were bolted into something solid, immovable, and her wrists were already screaming from the friction.
This isn't the library.
Her breath came faster, too fast, shallow gasps that weren't getting enough air into her lungs. The darkness pressed in from all sides, thick and suffocating. She couldn't see. Couldn't move. Couldn't—
Breathe. You need to breathe.
But her chest wouldn't expand properly. The panic was a living thing now, clawing up her throat, and she heard herself make a sound—high and animal and terrified—that she didn't recognize.
Where am I, where am I, where am I...
She forced her eyes open—when had she closed them? And the world swam into focus through a blur of tears she hadn't realized she was crying.
Stone. Black stone. Walls that curved up into shadow.
And instruments. Metal things hanging from brackets, shapes she recognized from her research on medieval torture, except these weren't museum pieces behind glass. These were clean. Maintained. Ready for use.
"No," she whispered. Then louder: "No. No, no, no! What's happening?"
She pulled against the chains again, harder this time, feeling the skin break, feeling the warm slide of blood down her forearms. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered except getting free, getting out, getting away from whatever this place was—
Stop.
The word cut through the static in her brain like a knife.
Stop. Think. You're good at thinking.
But thinking required air, and she couldn't breathe, and her heart was hammering so hard she could feel it in her teeth.
Count. Count something.
An old trick from her undergraduate anxiety attacks. Find something to count. Ground yourself in concrete reality.
There were brackets on the walls. She could see... four. No, five. One seemed partially hidden in shadow.
Tools were hanging from them. Seven visible. Maybe more out of sight.
There were also stones in the wall. Too many. But she could count the ones in her immediate line of sight. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen—
Her breathing slowed. Fractionally. Enough.
Okay. Okay. I'm chained up. This looks like a torture chamber. This is bad. This is very, very bad.
She looked down at herself, trying to assess the damage, trying to figure out if she was injured, if she could somehow—
But then, the body she was looking at wasn't hers.
The panic slammed back in, twice as hard.
Wrong wrong wrong—
Her hands—small, pale, with long fingers and nails that had been recently manicured—were a stranger's hands. The dress she wore was silk, or something like it, the deep red of arterial blood, now torn and filthy. She could see the swell of breasts that were the wrong size, the wrong shape, attached to a torso that moved wrong when she breathed.
When she turned her head—too light, the weight distribution all wrong—dark hair slid across her shoulders. Not her choppy black bob. A cascade of auburn curls, long and heavy and not hers.
"What—" Her voice came out too high, too young, with an accent that wasn't hers. "Please, what's happening? What—"
But there was no one to answer. She was alone in the dark with a stranger's body and rising hysteria.
I'm hallucinating. The aneurysm. I'm dying, and this is what dying feels like and—
No.
No, that didn't track. Hallucinations didn't have this much sensory detail. She could feel the cold of the stone seeping through the dress. Could smell the blood and iron and old fear. Could taste copper on her tongue—had she bitten it? When?
This is real.
The thought should have been impossible. It was impossible.
But the chains were real. The pain in her wrists was real. The strange body was real.
I'm in someone else's body.
Lyssa's mind, cornered by impossibility, did what it always did when confronted with the inexplicable: it reached for a framework, any framework, that could make sense of the data.
Transmigration. Body swap. Isekai. The tropes she'd rolled her eyes at during late-night reading binges, the guilty pleasure light novels she'd consumed instead of working on her dissertation.
I died in a library and woke up in someone else's body in a torture chamber.
It was absurd.
It was the only explanation that fit.
She felt herself fracture—part of her still screaming, still panicking, still pulling uselessly against chains that wouldn't break. But another part, the part that had survived six years of graduate school and a dissertation committee from hell, went cold and analytical.
If this is real—if I'm really here—then I need information.
She forced herself to stop thrashing. Forced herself to breathe slowly, deliberately, even though every instinct screamed at her to run.
The book. The last thing I saw. What was it called?
She'd been reading it when she died. A terrible Gothic romance, the kind with vampire lords and—
Oh.
Oh no.
The realization hit like ice water: The Vampire's Obsidian Bride.
She'd skimmed maybe three chapters. Enough to roll her eyes at the purple prose and the improbable worldbuilding. There had been a city—Nyx-something—ruled by vampire houses. And the heroine had been...
Lyssa.
Her heart, which had just barely started to slow, kicked back into overdrive.
"No. No, you've got to be kidding me—"
The heroine's name had been Lyssa Nightborne. Daughter of a disgraced vampire bloodline. Accused of treason. And in the prologue—the part Lyssa Quinn had skimmed because it was too melodramatic even for trash fiction—Lady Lyssa Nightborne had been executed.
In the Baron's dungeons.
For knowing too much about something called the Cipher.
Lyssa looked around the torture chamber—the black stone, the instruments of pain, the chains—and felt the bottom drop out of her stomach.
I'm not the heroine. I'm the prologue. I'm the dead sister. I'm the tragedy that starts the real story.
She was the disposable character. The inciting incident. The corpse that motivated the actual protagonist.
"I'm going to die here," she whispered, and this time her voice was steady. Numb. "I survived an aneurysm just to die in a bad romance novel. That's—that's actually impressive, in a really terrible way."
The numbness was almost a relief after the panic. At least it let her think.
Okay. Okay. If I'm in the prologue, then the execution happens... when? Soon. Has to be soon. The book started with the sister finding out about the death.
She had minutes. Maybe hours if she was lucky.
What do I do? What can I—
A door opened.
She hadn't seen it—it must have been hidden in the black stone, some kind of seamless integration—but she heard it: the whisper of metal on stone, the slight change in air pressure that meant a seal had been broken.
Footsteps. Multiple sets. Measured. Unhurried.
Guards, she thought. Or executioners. Same thing, probably.
But when they entered the ring of torchlight, she saw they weren't guards at all.
They were vampires.
She knew this the way you knew things in dreams, or in stories—it was simply evident. Something about the way they moved, too fluid and too still at once, like predators wearing human faces. Their eyes caught the light wrong, reflecting it back in shades of gold and red and cold silver.
There were three of them. Two men flanking a woman, all dressed in formal attire that belonged in a period drama: high collars, brocade waistcoats, the kind of clothes that required servants to put on. The woman stepped forward, and Lyssa recognized her from the book's description: Lady Valkorin, head of the rival bloodline, with silver hair and a smile like a knife.
"Well," Lady Valkorin said, her voice cultured and amused. "You're awake. How disappointing. I'd hoped you'd have the grace to die quietly."
Lyssa's mind raced. In the novel, this scene had been described from the outside—the sister hearing about it later, weeping over her sibling's fate. She didn't know what had actually been said. She was improvising blind.
"Sorry to inconvenience you," Lyssa heard herself say. The sarcasm was automatic, defensive. "I'll try to schedule my execution at a more convenient time."
The woman's smile widened. "Still defiant. After everything." She circled closer, her skirts whispering against stone. "Tell me, Lyssa Nightborne. Where is it?"
Where is what?
"I don't know what you're talking about," Lyssa said, which had the benefit of being completely true.
"The Cipher." Lady Valkorin's voice dropped, intimate and deadly. "The key to Nyx-Corinth's power. Your father stole it before his execution. We know you helped him hide it."
The Cipher.
The MacGuffin of the entire novel. The mystical secret that controlled the city, that let the ruling bloodline maintain power, that everyone wanted and no one could find. In the book, it had been vague and poorly explained, the kind of plot device that did whatever the author needed it to do.
But here, now, with a vampire lord's hand suddenly wrapped around her throat, it felt extremely concrete.
"I don't—" she choked out. "I don't have it—"
"You deciphered his notes." The grip tightened. Not enough to kill. Just enough to hurt. "We found your journals. Your annotations. You have your father's gift for languages, for codes. You know where it is."
Lyssa's vision was starting to blur at the edges, red and black creeping in. She had maybe ten seconds before she passed out. Ten seconds to make a choice.
The original Lyssa Nightborne died here. In this room. In this moment.
But I'm not her.
With the last of her air, Lyssa gasped: "The Archives. It's—hidden in the Archives—"
Lady Valkorin released her. Lyssa collapsed forward, coughing, dragging air into her lungs.
"The Archives." The woman's voice was thoughtful now. "How appropriately symbolic. Very well." She turned to one of her companions. "Inform the Baron. Tell him we've extracted a location. He'll want to question her himself before we—"
The door opened again.
This time, the temperature in the room dropped.
Later, Lyssa would realize that was the first warning—the way reality seemed to bend slightly around certain vampires, the old ones, the powerful ones. But in that moment, she only felt the cold and looked up, and saw him.
The Baron of Nyx-Corinth.
Kaelus Tenebris.
The hero of The Vampire's Obsidian Bride.
He was exactly as the book had described and nothing like she'd imagined. Tall, yes, and dark-haired, and beautiful in the way that dangerous things were beautiful—like a blade, like a winter storm. But the author had written him as brooding and tormented, a monster who wanted to be a man.
The person standing in the doorway looked at Lyssa with eyes the color of burnt amber, and she saw no torment there at all.
She saw calculation.
"Out," he said. One word. Quiet. Absolute.
Lady Valkorin stiffened. "My lord, we were in the middle of—"
"Out," he cut her off.
The three vampires left. They didn't argue. They didn't protest. They simply went, like shadows fleeing the sun, and the door closed behind them with a sound like a coffin sealing.
Kaelus Tenebris walked forward into the torchlight, and Lyssa forgot how to breathe.
He studied her for a long moment: chained, bloodied, shaking with adrenaline and terror and the absolute absurdity of her situation. His expression didn't change. No pity. No anger. No emotions. Just that same cold assessment, like she was a book he was considering purchasing.
Finally, he spoke.
"Lyssa Nightborne." His voice was a dark velvet thing, the kind that made you want to trust it even as your hindbrain screamed warnings. "Traitor. Code-breaker. The last of your bloodline." He tilted his head slightly. "You told Valkorin the Cipher is in the Archives."
It wasn't a question.
"Yes," Lyssa said, because what else could she say?
"You're lying."
Her heart stopped. "I—"
"The Archives burned three months ago. A convenient accident, just after your father's arrest." He took another step closer. "So either you're a fool who doesn't know your own city's recent history, or you're stalling. Which is it?"
Oh.
Oh no.
She'd forgotten. One of the early plot points—the destruction of the old Archives, the loss of historical records. It had seemed like a throwaway detail in the novel, just scene-setting.
But the original Lyssa Nightborne would have known. Would have remembered.
She'd just revealed herself as an imposter.
Kaelus watched her face change, watched her realize her mistake, and something flickered in his eyes. Not surprise, but interest.
"Who," he said softly, "are you really?"
Lyssa opened her mouth. Closed it. Every answer felt like a trap.
"I—"
He moved faster than physics should allow. One moment, he was three feet away. The next, his hand was on her chin, tilting her face up, forcing her to meet his eyes. This close, she could see that they weren't just amber—there were flecks of gold in them, like embers in ashes.
"Your memories are wrong," he murmured, and it wasn't a question. "Your mannerisms. The way you speak. The accent underneath the accent." His thumb brushed across her cheekbone, and she felt the sharp edge of a claw. "You're not Lyssa Nightborne. You're someone else wearing her face."
"I don't know what you—"
"Don't." The word cracked like a whip. "I have executed a dozen people this month for lying to me. I am in no mood for another."
Lyssa's mind spun. She had no leverage. No allies. No knowledge of this world beyond what she'd skimmed from a badly-written romance novel. The only thing she had was the truth, and the truth was insane.
But he was already calling her an imposter. He already knew something was wrong.
What did she have to lose?
"My name is Lyssa Quinn," she said. "I'm from a world that doesn't have vampires or magic or whatever the hell the Cipher is. I died in a library and woke up here, in this body, ten minutes ago. I don't know how. I don't know why. But I swear to you—I have no idea where your mystical plot device is hidden."
Silence.
Kaelus stared at her. She stared back, her heart hammering so hard she was sure he could hear it.
Then, slowly, he smiled.
It was not a kind smile.
"Interesting," he said. "You're either the most creative liar I've ever met, or you're telling the truth. Either way—" his grip on her chin tightened, "—you're far too valuable to kill just yet."
"I'm sorry, valuable?" Lyssa's voice rose. "I just told you I'm a useless interdimensional accident—"
"You told me you're from a world that doesn't have the Cipher," Kaelus corrected. "Which means you see it with fresh eyes. No preconceptions. No inherited assumptions." He released her, stepped back. "Every code-breaker in Nyx-Corinth has failed to decipher my family's legacy. Perhaps what I need is someone who thinks like an outsider."
"I'm a historian, not a—"
"You broke codes for a living. Languages. Ancient texts." He was already moving toward the door. "I read Lyssa Nightborne's journals. Her annotations on her father's work. Whatever soul is wearing her face now has the same mind for patterns."
"How could you possibly know—"
He glanced back over his shoulder, and his eyes gleamed in the torchlight.
"Because you just spent thirty seconds analyzing the architecture of this chamber instead of begging for your life. You've been categorizing, even now. That's not fear. That's curiosity."
Lyssa's breath caught. He was right. Even in the middle of her panic, part of her brain had been noting details: the construction, the tool placement, the linguistic roots of "Nyx-Corinth."
She was such a nerd.
Kaelus opened the door. Torchlight from the corridor beyond spilled in, warm and golden.
"I'm going to offer you a choice, Lyssa Quinn from a world without vampires," he said. "You can die here, tonight, as Lyssa Nightborne was meant to. Quick. Painless. I'll make it a mercy."
He paused.
"Or you can live. You will decode the Cipher. You will give me the power to destroy my enemies and save this city from the prophecy that will burn it to ash." His smile was a blade. "And in exchange, I will give you freedom. Resources. Protection. Everything you need to survive in a world that will absolutely kill you the moment it realizes you don't belong."
Lyssa's throat was dry. "That's not a choice. That's extortion."
"No," Kaelus said. "Extortion would imply you have something I want. You don't. You're a dead woman wearing a corpse's face. I'm offering you the chance to become something more."
He turned fully toward her then, and the light caught him at an angle that made him look like something from a cathedral painting—beautiful and terrible and utterly inhuman.
"So what will it be, Archivist? Death, or the Cipher?"
Lyssa looked at her shackled wrists. At the blood on her dress. At the black stone chamber that was supposed to be her tomb.
She thought about dying alone in a library, unmissed and unremarked.
She thought about waking up in a new world, a new body, a new chance.
She thought about the novel she'd skimmed, and the heroine who'd wept prettily, and the ending where the broken girl was saved by the dark lord's love.
Screw that, Lyssa thought. I'm going to save myself.
She met Kaelus Tenebris's burning eyes and said:
"Get me out of these chains, and I'll help."
His smile widened.
"Excellent," he said. "Then welcome to Nyx-Corinth, Lyssa Quinn. Try not to die. I have plans for you."
The shackles opened with a click, and Lyssa collapsed forward, catching herself on hands that weren't hers, in a world that shouldn't exist.
Somewhere in the darkness, she heard the sound of distant bells.
She didn't know it yet, but they were ringing for her.