Chapter 10: The Person in Charge

Mike was face down on a tall table as Zel and another centaur examined the back of his scalp. He hissed in pain as they checked his wound for any other sources of infection.

After his bath with the fairies and Naia, he had eaten a light dinner and gone to bed. In the morning he woke up with a pounding headache that felt like a sinus infection. The back of his scalp was tender and swollen, and that was when he learned that the moisture from his hours long bath had kept his wound from scabbing over properly; it had opened during his sleep and bled all over his pillow. When the wound had tried to close up again, his pillow and hair had gotten caught inside, which triggered a nasty bout of swelling all along his scalp.

The wound was bad enough that the centaurs had taken him in, and were constantly opening his wound to clean it and apply medicine. Based on the light coming in through the flaps of the yurt, it was almost evening. He could hear music coming from the camp followed by the smell of freshly baked bread that made his mouth water.

“Okay, we may be in the clear,” Zel announced. “I want you to lay there until you clot. I’ll be back in an hour.”

“But I—”

“No arguments.” He could hear her tail swishing angrily. “I’m going to make sure you are in the clear before you leave, especially since you refuse to follow directions.”

He sighed, and decided not to argue. She had been guilt tripping him ever since his arrival, and not only did his head still hurt, he was bored out of his mind. Zel and her assistant left, and it occurred to him that he should have asked for a snack.

Alone in the dark with his thoughts, he went over his plan for the days ahead. He needed to find a way to cross into the Underworld without simply dying, and felt his best bet would be to speak with Death. Sulyvahn might be willing to explain it to him, but he got the feeling that the dullahan was probably under orders from the queen to keep his mouth shut.

Someone laughed outside the tent, and Mike shifted to make himself comfortable, careful not to rub the back of his head. Zel had given him a haircut to see the wound better, and now his neck was all itchy.

Between lying in the dark and doing nothing else, his mind began to wander. He didn’t want to take a nap, but he felt like one was coming, and maybe then he could just skip the next fifty or so minutes and go straight to going home.

He closed his eyes and emptied his mind, then pictured the white sand beach of the Dreamscape. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to get away to the salty shores of his mind after all and take a small vacation where Zel wasn’t there to yell at him.

The transition was swift, and he found himself on the beach, his eyes gazing along the horizon of his mind. He was getting better at entering the Dreamscape from a waking state, but it was still more common to fall into normal dreams.

“Ha!” He stood up and rubbed the back of his head. There was no sign of his wound, so he walked down to the edge of the water and pulled off his shoes, then nonchalantly tossed them over his shoulder where they burst into smoke upon impact with the sand.

The water felt cool on his feet and he started walking along the shore. Despite walking a considerable distance, anytime he looked up from the waves, the house was sitting right there, watching him. Sometimes he could circle it, other times it followed, but this little beach paradise was still plenty of fun to visit.

Out in the ocean, a cloud dropped from the sky and rolled toward him, over the waves. Curious, he stopped to watch it break apart on the shore and scatter around him, casting the world into shadows. The house disappeared from view, and all he could see was the surf beneath his feet. The waves broke somewhere to his left, and he kept walking.

“So what’s it gonna be this time?” he asked. “Your world will burn, mer mer mer.” This was most likely the shadow come to bother him, and he simply wasn’t in the mood to deal with the spirit.

The fog lifted in front of him, revealing a pier that went out into the ocean.

“Okay, I’ll bite.” He stepped onto the wooden planks of the pier and walked out into the water. The fog was thick out here, and he could only see a dozen feet in front of his face. “So when do you think you’ll—”

He froze in place at the sight of the cage that appeared from the darkness. Inside, a lone figure watched him, her hands wrapped around the bars.

“Cecilia?” he asked.

She nodded, then stretched her arms to him through the bars. He ran to meet her, and they embraced through the metal bars. Was she an illusion? Just a figment of the dream world, appearing to torment him? Or perhaps a memory of some sort to give him comfort?

“Mike. A Ghrá mo Chroí,” she said, and his shoulder became wet with her tears. “How I have longed to see you.”

“Is it really you?” He stepped back to get a look at her. The red stripe in her hair looked a little bigger, and her hair was a couple of inches longer. “I can’t be sure this is real.”

“Nor I,” she told him. “I have been in this cage for such a long time, but my dreams have become so real. Did you know that? I can have dreams now. Often they are lovely, and sometimes not. I only sleep every few days, and not for very long.”

“Oh.” It couldn’t be her, then. Banshees didn’t need to sleep. Even so, her presence gave him a sense of peace, and he gladly embraced it, willing the dream to stretch out so they could spend more time together.

“Please,” Cecilia begged. “You mustn’t come here, it isn’t safe. The queen is planning—”

A whiff of sulfur tickled his nostrils and his eyes popped open. The Dreamscape shattered apart and he was back on his table. The yurt had filled with the sound of roaring flames, and a dark figure fell from above, landing face down in the dirt next to him.

“Lily?” He sat up on the table and looked down at the succubus, doing his best to keep disappointment off his face. Cecilia had seemed so real, even if it was only for a few seconds, that all he wanted to do was go back to sleep.

“Hey there, Romeo,” Lily said. She was covered from head to toe in soot, and she stumbled to her feet, her face a mask of aggravation. When she shook her head, ash sprayed out in every direction. When she rubbed her eyes clean, it reminded him briefly of a coal miner.

“What on earth happened to you?” he asked.

“Well, to start, nothing happened to me on Earth.” She spat dust out of her mouth and then shape changed into Dana. However, she was still covered in soot. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, hold up a second.”

She transformed into a little girl, and then into Sofia. The sudden shift in size caused quite a bit of the soot to fall off of her, and she repeated this process a few more times, then noticed a pitcher of water next to the wash basin near Mike’s bed. She picked up the pitcher, turned into the little girl, then poured it over her head. As the water fell over her, she transformed into her original form, and most of the soot was now gone.

“That’s much better. I can probably take a dunk in the fountain, if the nymph doesn’t ... wait, where are we?” She looked around the yurt in astonishment. “Please tell me we aren’t too far from home.”

“I’m with the centaurs. They’re treating my head injury.” He frowned. “By the way, seeing you turn into a kid freaks me out a little.”

“It’s how I hunt these days. Sit on a park swing and wait for the pervs to come out of the woodwork. What did you do to your head?”

He gave her a brief version of the events that transpired. When finished, he fixed her with a look. “Wait a sec. How is it that you didn’t know about any of this? I thought you were keeping an eye on my dreams.”

“Ugh. Change in plans.” She coiled up her tail and sat on it like a stool. “The whole purpose of monitoring your dreams was to watch for your shadow buddy. I decided it would be even better to watch the shadow himself, and when I caught him skulking around your subconscious, I went after him.”

“So you’ve been following the shadow this whole time?” He looked at her with interest.

“Mmm-hmm. And let me say, it wasn’t my idea of a fun date. That piece of shit led me on quite the wild goose chase.”

“To where, though? If you’ve been gone for days, where have you been?”

“Ugh, days?” Lily scowled. “Damn. I lost track of time trying to pin that fucker down. Remember when he tossed me around so easily in the Dreamscape? He’s just as nasty outside of it, a real piece of work. He eventually lured me into a trap and sent me to Hell. I can always teleport straight to my master, which is why I’m here.” She coughed, and a fair amount of ash came out of her lungs.

“You were in Hell?”

“Only for a few minutes. The trip is always disorienting and the demons running the place don’t exactly provide a warm welcome.” She crossed her arms. “So anyway, let’s talk about this shadow of yours. He seems to be linked to your mind, but I couldn’t figure out why, and I remember you first ran into him in that tower on the other side of the wardrobe.”

“Yes, that’s right.” The shadow had found him when he was trapped in another world, trying to find his way home.

“He can jump from the tower to you, which didn’t make a lot of sense. While I was tracking him, I discovered that he hangs out somewhere else as well.”

“And where would that be?”

She lowered her head. “We demons call it purgatory, which isn’t actually a place at all. It’s the in-between of practically everywhere, kind of like a crossroads.”

“You mean like between here and the Underworld?” He sat up, his voice rising in excitement.

“Oh, I see where you’re going with this. Yes, technically that’s true, but let’s ignore your obsession with the screamer for now. Purgatory, or limbo, whatever you want to call it, is primarily accessed by dying and refusing to move on. In this place, spirits have physical form, and your shadow buddy is very powerful there. He passes through it on his way from the tower to your mind.”

“He lives in the tower?”

“Almost there, Romeo. You see, limbo is a lot like the living world, and you can find places in limbo that existed here. He lives in the purgatory version of that tower, which is far larger and much more impressive.” She shook her head. “The tower used to be part of a giant castle, which meant I ran across some stray spirits there that died in some giant war I’ve never heard of. I was able to talk to a few of them, and once he found out I was digging up intel, that’s when he caught me in a devil’s trap and sent me to Hell.”

“And what did you learn?”

Lily’s eyes narrowed, glowing blood red. “I’ve often wondered where your friend came from and how he found you. Especially when it came to the Dreamscape. You told me he was able to find you during one of your house visions, right? Well, it turns out there’s actually a simple answer that complicates everything and you aren’t going to like it.”

He frowned. “I have a feeling anything I learn about this guy is bad news.”

“Well buckle up, because I’m about to break it to you. The shadow is a former Caretaker. He’s trapped on the other side of the veil, feeding off the energy of all those souls.”

“I don’t understand, that’s imposs—” he started, but the more he thought about it, the quicker it sank in. There had been hints of other places like his home, and it made sense that other humans must have been involved like he was. But to what purpose?

The succubus smirked. “I can actually watch the news sinking in to that broken head of yours. They call him a bunch of different names over there, the dead are so hard to talk to. But the gist of it was that he was in charge of that castle and it was full of magic and strange beings, and he used to be in charge of taking care of the place. There was some kind of battle, and the dead don’t really know that they lost, so imagine talking to a bunch of disoriented spirits. Lot of conflicting information, but the final result of this battle was that the shadow somehow avoided moving on to the other side when he died.”

“And you can’t just have dead Caretakers wandering around,” he muttered. It explained so much about why it was important to have a banshee to escort the dead, and why the shadow was so eager for a part of Mike’s soul. “Damn, that’s scary stuff.”

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it. None of the souls in his little kingdom can move on. They live in a state of fear, constantly reliving this battle they had, and I was busy trying to fight them off before he caught me in a trap and tossed me into the fires below.” She shook her head, causing more soot to drift onto the ground. “It seems like you’ve been roped into something bigger than you expected.”

Mike laughed. “Oh man, I’ve stumbled into a bad situation that’s bigger than I understand? Must be a Wednesday, this kind of thing never happens on a Thursday.”

The succubus smiled, and stood. “Well, that’s the news I have. I’m going back to the house to wash up. Hell soot doesn’t just come off, and I need a good scrubbing, so...” She blew him a kiss. “See you in your dreams.”

He smiled and watched her go. When she stepped through the door flap, there was a brief cry of alarm when she startled someone, but words were exchanged and he heard nothing more from outside.

Eventually Zel came in, checked his wound one last time, and told him to go home and leave it alone. He thanked her for her help and gave her a big hug before departing. She muttered something to him about paying attention from now on, and he begged her for forgiveness, which caused a small smile to break across her face.

Once outside the yurt, he was a little disappointed to see that Lily hadn’t waited for him, but he had plenty of company as the centaurs escorted him home.

Over dinner, he was informed that Tink was still working on restoring power to the house. Apparently the electrical surge had damaged the panel in such a way that she wasn’t able to get power to the whole house at once, and she had to wait for some additional materials to arrive before she could rewire some of the rooms that had damaged outlets. The rats were helping her with the work, but it was taking them quite a long time.

Beth said very little to him over dinner, and he couldn’t help but notice that Kisa kept watching her with a grin on her face. The cat girl sat at the opposite side of the table and vanished once her food was done. He briefly wondered if he should track her down and see how she was adapting, but figured it might be better to wait until she was ready.

Dinner came to an abrupt end when Quetzalli, who had eaten enough food that her belly bulged out, inspected her knife for several moments and stood from her chair. Before anyone could react, she abruptly knelt down and shoved the utensil into the nearest outlet using her considerable strength.

Sparks blew across the floor, and Quetzalli’s eyes flickered with amusement just before the room was plunged into darkness. Tink shrieked in anger and left to check the panel. Beth quickly escorted the dragon from the room while discussing electrical safety.

When he went into the kitchen to drop off his dishes, Mike looked out the window to see Naia, Dana, and Lily at the fountain. Dana sat along the edge in a pair of shorts, her feet in the water and a drone resting next to her. Naia was summoning bubbles up around the succubus, who popped them with her tail while scrubbing herself off. Steam rose from the fountain, and he wondered if Naia had turned it into a giant hot tub.

“Hmph.” A disapproving voice came from behind him, and he turned to see Sofia illuminated in the fading light of day. She watched the trio at the fountain before turning toward the kitchen. “Looks like I’m going to have to wash everything by hand tonight,” she announced, then turned on the sink. “Must be nice to just lie around.”

There was just enough light to see by, so Mike picked up a nearby towel and started drying the dishes as she washed them.

“Dinner was good, thank you,” he told her, almost afraid to break the silence.

She grunted, then scrubbed at a large pan.

“Actually, thank you for all the meals you cook. I think I’m starting to put on a little weight, which is saying something. I was always skinny growing up, but now I’m putting on some muscle.” He patted his belly. “Maybe someday I’ll get to see my six pack.”

“Please. We both know that it’s the magic.” She handed him the pan a bit forcefully, which pushed him off balance.

“I guess. But you keep everybody fed, and I appreciate it.” He dried the pan before putting it away. “Hey, I was wondering if you could help me with something tomorrow. I need to look into how to get into the Underworld.”

The cyclops groaned and threw her hands in the air. “Of course you do. Can I expect everyone to drop by the Library after breakfast, then? Guess I should make breakfast easy to clean up after.”

“What? No, it’s just gonna be me.” He tossed the towel on the counter. “I’m grateful that everyone wants to help, but I think I need to do this on my own for now.”

“So ... it’s just going to be you tomorrow?”

“Unless Death follows me in, yeah.”

“Hmm.” She turned off the sink and dried her hands. “I expect you’ll be there all day?”

“No, just until noon. There’s still some repairs to be made, and I need to coordinate with the centaurs. I also need to check in with Quetzalli. I think Beth’s had enough of her for a bit. Might do a walk through of the house with Reggie, depending on how the afternoon goes.”

“You really are slowing things down, aren’t you?” The light was dim enough that he could just make out her face. “Not just diving right in?”

“No. Things with the queen got out of hand. If I’m going to see her again, I need to be ready for anything, and that means being thorough. That is, if you have time for me.”

The lights flickered and came back on, and he saw the small grin on Sofia’s face before it vanished.

“I suppose,” she told him with a groan. “I’ll see what I can find tonight and get you a headstart tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” he told her, then watched her go.

What had that been about?

The power flickered off and on for the remainder of the night. On his way up to his room, he saw that Dana had positioned herself in front of the locked door at the end of the hallway. The squad of rats was watching her in interest, and were splitting a plate of cheese and fruit between them.

When he went to see what Dana was doing, he walked past Yuki’s open bedroom door and happened to glance inside. The kitsune was standing in front of a blank canvas. Her tails hung limp behind her, so he knocked.

“Hey,” he said when she didn’t turn around. “Can I come in?”

Yuki shrugged and let out a sigh. “Yeah, sure.”

“Something wrong?” He walked into her room and looked around. He could tell where the room had been repainted, and noticed that a stack of broken canvasses sat in the corner.

She let out a grunt. “Yes. No. I don’t know. I’m feeling restless is all.” When she turned around, he saw that she wore a smock covered in different colors of paint. “Struggling to get some of these done.”

“How so?” He pulled the door shut behind him. “I noticed you weren’t at dinner.”

“Not hungry.” She sighed and sat down on her bed. “I’m struggling with some things right now.”

“Like?”

“To start with, your dumb ass nearly getting killed.” She said this with a slight growl that revealed her teeth. “And now that you’re back, I just know that you’re going to get into trouble again.”

“Yeah.” He sat next to her on the bed. “I’m really sorry I left you behind.”

Her ears drooped. “Well, that’s just it. Even if I had been with you, could I have made any difference? I honestly don’t know. It’s hard to put it into words.”

“Try.”

“For so many years, my only direction was to come home. I was a creature of rage. You know this.”

He nodded. Yuki had almost killed him within seconds of their first meeting.

“Well,” she continued, “after coming home, my only thought was to protect this place, and then to protect you. But right now? There’s nothing for me to do except prepare. These paintings are a manifestation of my magic and my soul, but now my soul is restless. I’ve spent so many years fighting that I’ve forgotten how to hold still, to just live and relax. So while I was angry that you got hurt, now I’m angry that I have nothing to fight.”

“I see.” He threw his arm around her and squeezed. She rested her head against his shoulder, and he lifted his hand to stroke her hair. “When I was younger, my mom suffered a psychotic break. Growing up, she turned into this hateful, spiteful being that saw fit to torment me whenever she got the chance.”

The kitsune nodded. “I’ve heard about it.”

“Well, after she died, I went through a period of elation. My abuser was dead and I was free. No longer would I get cornered, yelled at, or even smacked around. There wasn’t even any guilt on my part, I was finally free of the bitch.

“After a week or so, something changed. You see, I started hearing her in my head. She was so deeply ingrained into my life that she had left scars, not on my body, but my mind. What should have been a period of happiness and healing only served to throw me further down a hole. People told me I should be happy she was gone and to just move on, but it isn’t so simple. I had spent so long living my life in a state of terror that it was easier to be stuck there than it was to climb out.”

“So what did you do?” Yuki asked. She slid her head along his chest so that she was now in his lap, looking up at him. He moved his hand to the spot between her ears and stroked the soft fur there.

“Probably the hardest thing a person can do. I went to a therapist. Several, in fact. It certainly took me a while to find a good one. It’s a hard thing to describe, but just because my problem was gone didn’t mean that the past had faded away. I needed someone to guide me through the process of confronting my past and learning to heal from it.”

“Did it work?”

He shrugged. “With varying levels of success. Naia did more for me than any therapist could. When she used her magic, I gained a certain degree of confidence I was sorely lacking. All of those little voices in my head that told me I wasn’t good enough were drowned out by the part of her she left in me, and I’ll always be grateful for it.”

“I see.” She shifted in his lap so that she faced away from him. “Sometimes, when I’m falling asleep, I see Emily again.”

Mike rubbed Yuki’s ears, but said nothing. Yuki and Emily had been romantically involved when his great aunt had succumbed to the shadow, and the kitsune’s heart had been broken. It was a betrayal he was personally unfamiliar with, but he could almost feel the heartbreak in her voice.

“She’s her old self,” Yuki continued. “From before. And she’ll talk to me, but I can never hear what she’s saying. I try so hard to listen, to hear what she has to say. Every time I feel like I can hear her words, she changes. It’s like someone throwing a sheet over a lamp, and the whole room dims. And now that I can hear her, all I hear is hate in her voice. And then I wake up, and I’m crying, and I hate myself, because I can summon spears of ice, or command Death himself, but I’ve let this mortal cut me deeper than any blade, and I feel weak.”

“Love and compassion are never a sign of weakness,” Mike said. “It takes a brave heart to believe in either of these things.”

She trembled beneath him, but remained silent. He stroked her hair for a little while longer and continued doing so even when he could tell she had dozed off. Once he was convinced that she was out, he slowly shifted her onto her bed and carefully covered her with a blanket before leaving.

Once in the hall, he looked over at Dana, who now sat on the floor near the rats with her computer and a notebook.

“Trying to crack the code?” he asked.

“Got nothing better to do,” she replied.

“Just make sure you keep it down,” Mike told her, keeping his voice low. “Yuki really needs her sleep.”

Dana threw him a thumbs up and he left her behind, her unblinking eyes staring intently at her screen. Several minutes later, he was in his own bed, his eyes on the wall. How many years had he suffered as Yuki did, teetering on the edge of exhaustion only to be startled back to alertness each time his mother yelled at him across time and space? Thinking of his mother, he could hear her calling for him, her voice dripping with venom.

“Love and compassion,” he muttered, treating the words as a talisman to guide him safely to the shores of his mind.

When Mike walked into the office the next morning, he saw that Death was busy with the stereoscopes. While the grim reaper muttered something about consent, Mike let himself into the Library.

“Sofia?” he called when he noticed she wasn’t waiting for him. She hadn’t been at breakfast either, the only trace of her presence being the continental style breakfast she had clearly set up for everyone.

Curious, he crossed over to the floating globe that sat in the Library’s lobby and waited for a few minutes.

It wasn’t long before the movement of a floating carpet caught his attention and the cyclops descended from above. She wore a long cloak and carried a magic staff that glowed with a pulsating green light.

“There you are.” He smiled at her and stepped onto the carpet once it landed. “Thanks for breakfast, it was good.”

“Of course it was.” She tapped the staff on the carpet and it rose into the air. Invisible hands pressed against him, holding him in place. “Sorry I wasn’t there to greet you. I got up early to try and find the area of the Library that we needed. This place has seen a surge of activity recently, which means books aren’t always where I think they are.”

“Really? Like what?” He looked over the edge of the carpet. Down below, he saw no movement.

“The Library is constantly reorganizing itself.” Sofia turned her head and the carpet slowed. “If you could see this place from high enough up above, it would make you think of thousands of giant gears that turn constantly, albeit slowly.”

“But why?”

“Expansion. Books made in your world all end up here, and at a frightening rate. The Library was built to accommodate this, and the pillars rotate in groups so that works that fit in multiple genres at least face one another. New pillars will often form near primary pillars, and everything has to shuffle about to accommodate it.”

“Primary pillars?” It was just now occurring to him that despite spending plenty of time here, he had no idea how the place worked.

“Yes. Think of them like the purest form of any particular genre. As the pillar expands, it may blossom outward, like a fractal. The new pillars will break free as a genre is redefined, or even as a sub-genre is formed.”

“That’s ... really cool. How come I’ve never seen it move?”

She tilted her head at him and scowled. “Your trips here tend to be very goal oriented.”

“Can I see one of the pillars that’s expanding?”

Something like a smile crossed her lips. “I suppose, if we have time.”

“I think I should see it. The Library is just as much a part of the house as anything else.”

“Except it isn’t part of the house. It’s a separate place, remember?”

He shook his head. “I don’t see it that way. You’re a part of the house, and this place is a part of you. I want to know more.”

She looked away from him, her long braid bobbing in the breeze as the carpet accelerated. They were moving fast, and the pillars were moving past him so quickly that he could barely make out the shelves.

The pillars condensed momentarily, and the carpet swayed between them until they entered a large open area. At its center was a gigantic column that stretched upward into a portion of the roof that had been raised, and all he could see in it was darkness punctuated by the occasional appearance of a book. The column was easily the size of a small skyscraper, but instead of being a perfect circle, it looked more like a weathered gear with smoothed out teeth all along its perimeter.

It rotated at a slow pace, and the carpet moved alongside it for a better look. In certain places, the bookshelves looked like they were melting out of the walls and forming into organized rows along the surface of the gigantic column, and books fluttered about like tiny birds as they fell from above and drifted to their resting place.

“Wow,” he whispered. Up above, he could hear the rustling of pages and slamming of shelves as these objects shifted onto the new pillars. “What genre is this?”

“This pillar is romance.” She pointed her staff toward one of the landing zones. “These off-shoots will eventually have some category of their own, and then break away from here to become their own columns, or maybe merge with another category into a bigger column. You don’t often see this at the entrance, because those books are the more popular ones that used to get borrowed all the time.” She appraised the enormous column. “I’m rather impressed at how many books seem to be written in this category, but there seems to be a quality issue.”