In Which Our Story Picks Up
If Glory was surprised that I came around knocking on her door in the middle of the night, she returned the favor when she answered it herself.
“Funny, I figured you would have had enough of me for a while,” she said, her porcelain mask of a face melting into a smile.
“It was more like not enough of everyone else,” I said. “But right now, I kind of feel the need for some space and distance.”
“Is anything wrong?”
“Not wrong, per se,” I said. “Just… weird. A weird thing happened, and everyone’s being weird about it, and I don’t know what to think, and more than that I don’t want to think. I just want some time and space to be alone.”
“Ah,” she said, going very still. “So, you’ve come for one of my abundant rooms, then, rather than my abundant charms.”
“Sorry,” I said, giving what I hoped was an apologetic smile but what felt more like a grimace/cringe.
“You know, one of the reasons I like you is that I never understand what you’re doing with your face,” she said. “It’s kind of refreshing compared to the average human.”
“I don’t either,” I admitted. “It’s one of my many faults, okay? Along with my lack of tact and the total underabundance of any discernible charms. If it makes you feel any better, I had nowhere else to go and I thought of you.”
“Well, it is nice to feel needed,” she said, stepping aside and holding open the door. “I’ll even temper my desire to demand more details, since I’m getting the sense that a whole ‘don’t want to talk about it’ vibe is what brought you here in the first place.”
“Thanks, that means a lot.”
“Are you sleeping here tonight?”
“Staying, maybe,” I said. “Not sure about sleeping.”
“When I replay this conversation in my room later, alone, there are going to be entirely different inflections in those sentences,” she said. “Well, maybe not alone. I might grab someone.”
“I’m really sorry, Glory, I’m just not…”
“You know, if you’re going to apologize for something, it should be your utter inability to be properly jealous,” she said.
“What?”
“Nothing. Goodnight, Mackenzie. You know your way around here as well as anyone, I’m sure you can find a quiet corner somewhere. Stay as long as you like.”
She glided away a little more quickly than usual, which after a few stunned moments I put together was what a foot-stomping retreat looked like on elven perfection.
So I’d managed to tick her off. So be it. I’d rather have her be a little pissed that I’d put m foot in my mouth again somehow than be looking at me all… expectant/horrified, like everyone else had been.
I didn’t know what any of them expected me to say, or do, about the wild idea that someone had tampered with my memory and also somehow conditioned me to think the idea was ridiculous… which in fairness to the plausibility of the theory, wouldn’t take much of a psychic nudge since the idea was ridiculous.
It was… unthinkable.
But I couldn’t think about anything else. I felt like I had been too quick to pass on Glory’s company… whether we’d talked or did something else, it would have at least given me something to occupy myself.
Instead, I stalked her halls for a short time and then headed for the other place I knew I could go on campus at any time and be welcome: the library.
The existence of the school library had been one of the greatest revelations of my early life at university. Bigger than any library I’d seen before… bigger than most buildings I’d been in, at that point… and open twenty-four hours a day when school was in session. Best of all, the staff was a mix of professionals and students about my age, not a bunch of blue-haired old ladies who were either friends with or afraid of my grandmother.
Nothing in the university library was off-limits or out of bounds, officially or unofficially.
During my first year, it had been a regular weekend haunt for me. As time went on, my casual visits to it had grown more irregular, though I still got what I assumed was a smile on my face every time I found an excuse to go there.
The number of times it had served as a late night refuge for me I could probably have counted on one hand if I’d bothered to keep count of them in the first place. I didn’t like being out and about after dark. It wasn’t actually against the rules, just disclaimered to hell and back. Certain facilities like the library and the fitness center remained open all night regardless, but more to accommodate students pulling all-nighters than nocturnal visitors.
This early in the semester, there wouldn’t be much reason for anyone to be haunting the library beyond a skeleton staff… a figure of speech, though I suspected Steff had at least floated a proposal. No one was behind the desk when I got in, but I could hear the sound of a drawer sliding in or out in the office beyond.
Beside that, the silence in the library was almost complete… almost. I heard a shuffling of paper from somewhere up on one of the higher floors, and beyond that the almost indefinable background noise that signified people to my somewhat better than human senses.
Still, it said something about how empty the place was that I could pick that up. In a building full of people or even the library on an average Sunday afternoon, there was too much going on to really notice anything beyond the obvious.
It wasn’t like I needed the whole building to myself, anyway. Whatever had brought the other late-night stragglers out, it was a damn good bet that none of them were looking for company or feeling talkative. Probably they couldn’t sleep, either.
As much of a sanctuary as the library had been, the one thing I had done surprisingly little of was actually checking out and reading books. Part of it was the still slightly novel lure of unrestricted crystal ball access, part of it was simply not knowing where to start with such a vast collection, and part of it was having so much required reading to do.
Well, it was a new semester. I had no huge projects, nothing else vying for my time, and there was no time like the present. I decided to just hit the fiction section and drift through it until something caught my eye.
Or my hands. I’d always been kind of a tactile person when it came to books, so I ran my fingers along the protruding spines of the books as I passed them. It was kind of pleasing, the way that no matter how neatly and orderly they were shelved they all still stuck out varying degrees. They were all different sizes. Some of the spines were straight and new, some bulged out and some bowed in.
I was walking at a fairly leisurely pace, but I found myself reliving the memory of a time when my legs had been much shorter but had carried me much faster around a much smaller library. I’d always enjoyed running my hands across the books, taking in through feeling the wealth of words they represented. I must have spent hours running around the shelves of our small-town library, chasing after myself until my mother or the librarian got me to stop.
I smiled at the memory. I’d had a good childhood, up until a point… maybe the others couldn’t understand how I’d been happy by myself because they’d never known that kind of peaceful solitude. Their loss.
Loneliness had come later, when it wasn’t so much that I was alone as I was surrounded by kids who either despised me or had clearly been warned not to associate with me, and often a confusing combination of both.
As a small child left to my own devices I’d been perfectly happy, needing no one but my mother. As an older child boxed in by fear and spite, I’d been miserable. That was the difference.
That, and the lack of a mother. I had still needed her, but she was gone.
I realized I’d stopped in my tracks, my fingers on the back of a paperback romance novel whose title was illegible, between the floridness of the font and the state of the spine. I started moving again at a slightly more measured pace, looking up from the floor just in time to notice I was running into my own personal mystery man, Rowan fucking Hartley himself.
“So, you still like the library,” he said. “I guess you haven’t changed that much, no matter what the trendy haricut says.”
“Rowan Hartley,” I said.
“You remembered my name.”
“It’s a hard name to forget,” I said. “And you did just tell me it, so…”
He was staring at me. I stared back.
“What’s your deal, dude?” I said. “You said you knew me from the TV. What do you think that makes me to you?”
“I said I saw you there,” he said. “But I know you, Mackenzie… I’d know you anywhere. We used to run around the stacks, playing our own version of hide and seek with no turns and no rules. We used to climb trees together, while your mom would tell us about dryads and stuff. You used to come over to my house when she was working after school.”
“Nice story, but I was a latchkey kid,” I said. “I don’t think my mom could afford a babysitter.”
“She couldn’t, but she was friends with my mom,” he said. “And she returned the favor sometimes. We spent so many nights at each other’s houses, Mackenzie.”
“Yeah, sorry, but I’m not really the sleepover type,” I said. “The bit about the dryads was nice, though… shockingly close. I guess you looked at the company I’m known to keep and made an educated guess?”
“You used to say you wanted to be a nymph when you grew up,” he said. “Around when you were in kindergarten, your mom had to chase you around the apple tree in your backyard to get you to put your…”
“…okay, that’s enough,” I said. I hadn’t thought about that in years, but I remembered enough of it to know it had happened, though I doubt I could have pinned down when. I didn’t remember it so much as I remembered my mom endlessly reminding me of it. “Where’d you get this from?”
“I was there,” he said. “I was a ranger.”
“You were a ranger. What were you, four?”
“I was a ranger in the sense that you were a dryad,” he said. “I.e., it was a game the two of us played together.”
“That’s a great line, Rowan. ‘We used to play ranger and nymph together.’ Seriously, though, how the fuck do you know about the apple tree? Did… did he send you?”
“He who?”
“My father,” I said. I was trying to drop my voice, but though I managed a whispered tone I’m pretty sure the actual volume rose. The strangled shout that came out was enough to rock him back on his heels.
“Your father? I didn’t know your father, Mackenzie. I didn’t think… oh, shit. He’d be the… the…”
“Demon,” I said.
“I’m sorry, I’d heard that, obviously, but it’s still… I never knew, you know? None of us did. We all thought you had died.”
“Who all?”
“…everybody,” he said. “Nobody actually told us anything, I mean… just there was a fire, and you weren’t around anymore, and your mother, and all anybody would say is that you were gone, and we all knew what that meant, you know? But there wasn’t any funeral.”
“Because I wasn’t dead,” I said. “And I don’t know what ‘everybody’ you mean.”
“Us,” he said.
“You and me?”
“Me and the rest of your class,” he said. “Your friends, Mackenzie, your friends!”
“Fuck, were you listening outside my door?” I said, though I knew it was absurd as soon as I said it. No human could have eavesdropped on a room with Dee and Steff in it without one of them knowing it. Still, though, how else could he have picked up the exact same ridiculous idea that my nearest and dearest had collectively come up with?
…why would he be coming up with an idea at all?
It didn’t make any sense… but… but…
With a sensation that felt exactly like the crack of breaking wood sounds, something bright exploded far behind my eyes. The world fell away in front of me like someone had kicked over a set, and then Rowan was standing over me, and suddenly the unthinkable was… thinkable.
“Mackenzie? Mackenzie?”
“Rowan?” I said.
“Shit, do you know who I am?”
“I have no worldly clue, but I want you to tell me everything.”