“One of my favorite games to play is giving people three Lupin the III plots and then making them figure out which ones are real and which ones I made up. Sometimes I give them all real ones just to fuck with them.” -Miyazaki’s Lupin, Delaney Jordan -

_____

Malcom McHarn, The newest assistant director of the FBI sat behind his desk at the office in Langley. It’s *the* FBI building, the one people think of when they think of ‘the FBI building’, even if they’ve never seen it or have only heard of it in passing from late night reruns of Mission Impossible on one of the eight channels that has licensed Mission Impossible.

It’s a prestigious posting. Even the file clerks here have a security clearance that would make an online conspiracy theorist jealous. Making those people jealous though, Malcom acknowledges, is not hard. A good chunk of his career up to this point has been spent adapting task force procedures for monitoring internet activities, and that naturally put him in a position to learn far more than he really wanted to about the kind of people who talk a lot about the world being flat and trees being fake.

But that’s what he used to do. Now, he’s in charge of a whole department. A department that was created by sealed executive order, technically. A department that no one knows about, because telling people about it doesn’t work.

Malcom had been, at the very least, looking forward to getting to meet the president, and ask exactly *why* he was being put in charge of a secret part of the Bureau. But, as he was informed by a man he never got the name of who spoke with a frankly alarming level of calm, the president was unaware of the department’s formation. Because anyone above a certain position was unable to become aware of it.

Once he’d realized that he was not, in fact, being taken for a ride on a late April Fool’s joke, and that his new office really was in a basement that shouldn’t have existed, and that he actually had a staff who were as confused as he was, Malcom started to suspect something was wrong.

Not wrong with the situation; he didn’t need the West Point education and years of distinguished service for his instincts to have been screaming at him from the moment he got the phone call. The situation had been wrong the whole time.

No, he was starting to think something was wrong with *him*.

Because either he was in a coma and having an impressive hallucination before his untimely death, or, possibly worse, magic was real, human civilization lived in a constant and impossible to handle information fog, one of his newly assigned field agents was haunted, and somewhere between one and sixty six thousand American citizens were killed every year by monsters.

But that would be silly. And not just because that rate of death was unsustainable. Because…

He asked one of his staff to run some numbers. They already had, and had the answer at hand. That rate of death was absolutely sustainable.

Malcom McHarn was having a bad day.

One by one, he called his new staff in for a personal conversation. He liked to do that, whenever he was put in charge of any operation. Knowing who you were working with was critical. But in this case, there was a feeling behind it all that was a little more desperate. He could see it in their eyes, feel it in their words. They’d read the same documentation he had, limited as it was.

He tried to project the aura of a leader who, even if he needed to know more, was still confident they could handle things. It seemed to help everyone, especially the people who were up front about their confusion. Doubly especially the man who was one of the first people to be assigned here, along with nine others, all of whom had forgotten the assignment by next day except himself. Malcom could already see the cracks there. This was *not* a stable posting.

And then, impossibly, it got worse, when he talked to his one experienced field agent. And her ghost.

“DeKay.” He said, looking up from the manilla folder of white papers as she walked into his office. “Shut the door, take a seat.”

“Sir.” The woman moved somewhat stiffly, but sat all the same. She didn’t speak, just watching him as he assessed her. Malcom tried to pick out the *thing* that he, logically, knew was there with her, but he couldn’t see anything except an ordinary looking woman. Good physical condition, yes. Controlled expression, as expected of someone talking to their new boss for the first time. But nothing out of the ordinary world.

Twisting the ring on his calloused finger, Malcom broke off the assessing look. “Everyone else had questions.” He offers.

“Yes, sir.” She says. “I know.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You don’t.”

“I do.” DeKay replies, still in that schooled polite voice. “But I know you can’t answer them. And I don’t want to ask until I know you’ll be here long enough to ask, anyway.” And there, her voice changes to something more natural. More honest.

“High turnover, for this brand new department?” Malcom almost wants to smirk or chuckle, but something in his gut tells him he’d rather get a straight answer to this.

“Yes.” DeKay replies, seriously. “It’ll be a few days before we know if you forget. I don’t want to waste time until then.”

“*Why*?” Malcom asks, letting his curiosity out of the hold he’s been keeping it in. “Why the memory problems? Why *any* of this?”

DeKay raised her own eyebrows at that. “The last working theory I heard was that it has to do with institutional structures and power.” She answered slowly. “The more of it you’re surrounded with, the more susceptible you are to the things that live in it. I think. I’m not a scientist.” She twitched like she was suppressing a shrug. “Some people, I know, have a natural or developed resistance. Some people have protection. Everyone else… well, good luck finding your office when no one knows your job exists.”

The most confused assistant director in the FIB caught onto part of that sentence. “And who, exactly, is writing theories about this?” He asked. “Everything on my desk is either about things that become self-evident when people stop showing up for work, or continually reference estimates and guesses. The most concrete evidence of any of this is the staircase to nowhere that leads… wherever we are now. Who’s doing this investigation?”

DeKay didn’t say anything specific about the lengths she had to go to to swipe that particular piece of magic. Instead, she scowled at no one in particular. “A west coast group of anarchist anti-American terrorists, mostly.” She answered, with vitriol in her voice.

Of course there were magical terrorist orginizations, Malcom thought to himself. Now, he did allow one sigh. “Okay. Tell me what I need to know.” He said, and settled in to listen.

Malcom McHarn had not gotten his job by being an idiot. And one of the smartest skills a man could have was knowing when to shut up, and let someone talk. Sometimes, it was the fastest way to learn what you needed to know. Sometimes, it was the best way to make your wife feel loved. And sometimes, like now, it was the most efficient way to let your subordinate show you exactly who they were.

Twenty two minutes of explanation later, Malcom had a rough outline of the Order of Endless Rooms, about one third of which he trusted to be accurate enough to use. He also had a gnawing headache, which he kept off his face, as he realized that the woman sitting across from him had been radicalized in a way that made her entirely useless as a trustworthy field agent. At best, he guessed, her ideology could be defined as authoritarian.

By the second time she’d referred to something as ‘potentially disruptive’, he’d had to restrain himself from firing her on the spot. By the fourth, he was wondering if he should have her arrested for attempting to murder at least one US citizen.

Maybe she had been arrested. Maybe the incorporeal life form that made itself known to prove a point made her impossible to keep in a prison. Maybe, Malcom wondered, the turnover here was because the people before him hadn’t been quite as cautious as he was.

This came part and parcel with the information that someone had invented teleporters, and was using them for fighting crime and search and rescue. That… was not something that was ‘potentially disruptive’. That was something that could reshape the world. And his only field agent had squandered access to it by *trying to kill someone*.

Malcom had nodded, and said, “Thank you for the intel. We’ll have to do something about this.” In a serious tone. Excused a satisfied DeKay from his office, and gone about his day in as normal a fashion as possible.

At a certain point in the hierarchy of the Bureau, you started to get a few more restrictions placed on your behavior. At Malcom’s level, his every communication was tracked in some way. It wasn’t even particularly malicious, it was just a simple fact that he might know things that could be of value to foreign intelligence agents, and so, his phone was company issue, his email was regularly audited, and being caught doing something stupid would get him fired. And also maybe arrested. Though he didn’t have an infomorph to bail him out.

These restrictions were personally invasive, and not much of a challenge to circumvent. The main thing was to simply make people *feel* like they couldn’t do it. Like the punishment for being caught just wasn’t worth it. Most people in his position did it, just to prove they could.

Two weeks after starting his new job, and seeing his staff start to stabilize at about four people who consistently showed up, Malcom cashed in some long standing vacation time. He made sure to inform everyone he’d be back. Some of them might even have believed him.

A few thousand miles away, at a beach house he and his wife had visited every time they’d been on vacation, in a sleepy little coastal village, Malcom sat on a log on the sand holding a phone he’d never touched before. It was important to not make the mistake some rookies did and try this in a remote location; you needed other people around, or the single signal was far too easy to trace back to a single person.

He took a breath of cold evening air, and hit dial.

Three rings later, a young man answered. “James’ phone, what button do I push for my free cruise?”

“Mister Lyle…“ He started. But no, that wasn’t the right way for this person. “James. Or knight, if you’d prefer.” He said in a less professional tone.

“I think my official title is paladin.” The young man said, an edge of suspicion not bothering to hide in his words. “Who’s this?”

“My name is Malcom McHarn.” He answered. “Technically, I work for the FBI. I’d like to talk, if you have the time.”

There was a long pause, and Malcom wondered if he’d been hung up on. It would be understandable, but it would also make making contact trickier. There was, apparently, no way to physically find at least one known existing structure that these people worked out of. He was about to resign himself to having to try again in a different way, when the man on the other end spoke again.

“Yeah,” James said, “I’ve got a minute, and the word technically does a lot of work in that sentence. How’s your day going?”

Malcom couldn’t help it. He barked out a laugh, startling a seagull that had been poking around nearby. “If I’m lucky,” he replied, “you’ll believe me when I tell you.”

______

Somewhere, the thing that had been labeled as the Old Gun wove a plot. She would be free, and she would kill everyone in her way to get there.

_____

Harlan, who was technically the third Harlan, but no one called them anything except just Harlan, was pressed up against the wall just to the left of a door that was a little too ostentatious. Okay, radically, impossibly ostentatious.

They didn’t typically have a lot of opinions on doors, but it was kind of hard not to in this case. The whole thing was gold plated, two feet taller than it needed to be, and surrounded by frescos on the sculpted stone walls around it. It was a *preposterously* self-important door. Harlan hated it immensely.

Which was why it was with smug satisfaction that they kept an eye on Breaker as he rigged up a breaching charge.

The two others, Singer and Brewer, watched outward, rifles at the ready. All of them stood out against the shining gold and colorful paint, in their black fatigues and light body armor.

Not that there was much to watch for. Everyone else in the compound was dead, fled, or liberated already. Some of them were dead pretty close to this very door, bodies of robed humans painted with blood and fluids, off color piles of crumpled death strewn around the courtyard where they’d fallen in defense of their leader.

“Ready.” Breaker said, folding a satchel closed and rising from his kneeling position, detonator in hand.

Harlan exhaled once, then breathed in. A long breath that brought the smell of cordite and smoke and blood to their nose. Inside one of the other buildings across this interior courtyard, gunshots cracked as the other team cleaned up. The three people with them shuffled into ready positions as they stacked up around the door.

They breathed out again, and were ready. “You know the drill. Load for clerickiller.” Harlan said. Singer and Brewer swapped out their rifle magazines, exchanging mundane bullets for the ones that the Wolfpack had already prepped beforehand. The ones imbued with memories of failure, and sickness. Their own gun was already loaded, a magazine holding what they abstractly knew were some of their own memories, ready to do their job again.

A chorus of quiet “Ready”s sounded.

“Go.” Harlan uttered, and Breach hit the detonator, satisfyingly annihilating the stupid fucking door.

The four of them flowed through the smoke like ghosts as they poured into the room, acquiring their target and opening fire without hesitation. The figure at the far end of the room, a corpulent man in red and silver robes, standing supporting himself on some kind of religious staff as he was in the middle of hobbling toward what was probably an emergency exit.

He had turned at the explosion, and there was still a chunk of door stuck in his head where the wound had already sealed itself shut around the debris. And now, he gave them a twisted look of fury and indignation as they opened fire on him.

“Heretics! Die!” The man screamed.

Brewer crumpled, gone. Breacher caught some of it, but didn’t stop shooting even as one of his arms was pulverized by the yell.

The man in the robes gaped his mouth like a fish, planning to yell again, a voice that could rend flesh and powder bone even over the cacophony of gunfire. But it was too late.

A bullet pierced him, and he had a look of almost shock as the pain caught up. Then another, and another. And the rest. Three and a half magazines emptied mostly on-target, loaded in a way designed to kill something like this. Cracks in the flesh and lines of corruption spreading out from the impact sites like vines.

He dropped to his knees as the team stopped firing, Singer and Breacher already reloading while Harlan just kept their eye on him. He’d taken enough damage to kill an aircraft, much less a human, but that didn’t mean much sometimes.

The asshole’s glassy eyes focused one last time, swiveling sickeningly to lock onto Harlan. He worked his shattered jaw, trying to produce any kind of sound with lungs that had been carved up.

He got as far as a tiny croak before Harlan pulled their sidearm, shoved the first memory they had into the bullet, and shot him.

The man’s head lit up from the inside out, like someone had crammed a small sun into his skull. He didn’t scream. There wasn’t time.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

Then he collapsed, robes just as bloody and shredded as all the others.

“Clear!” Harlan called, sweeping the room, and heard it repeated back from the two survivors of their team. And that was it. They radioed the other team in the compound, and the perimeter outside. “Priest is confirmed dead.” Harlan said, checking the body and confirming that the successful kill with the enchanted ammo had led to the man spawning more empty bullets as a reward. “Any trouble?”

“We have three initiates prisoner.” One of Harlan’s men radioed back. “Tried to run. Do we cut them loose?”

“Just shoot them.” Harlan said flatly. “No one here that wasn’t in a cage deserves to live.”

“Yes boss.”

In the distance, Harlan could hear gunshots.

Now that the fighting was done, and the blood cooled, they had time to be disappointed, or sad, or disgusted. But only for a moment. Because now, it was time for cleanup. Sweep up the fresh bullet drops, strip anything of value, especially documentation, get medical attention, get the victims out, get out before the police showed up.

It wasn’t exactly easy to kill a lot of people in the middle of Berlin and go unnoticed for long.

But it was worth it, they figured. Even as they tried in what they knew was a vain effort to remember exactly what they’d put into that last shot without thinking about it, to pull up a memory that wasn’t just forgotten, but burned, they knew at least that it was worth it.

One less monster in the world.

Sooner or later they’d get them all.

_____

Somewhere, one of the daughters of the Last Line Of Defense dreamed of her freedom. She hated the thought, and wished she had never had it, but couldn’t, wouldn’t, let it go now.

_____

“Hey, Mally?” A middle aged man rapped his knuckles on the support wall next to his friend and coworker’s desk in the middle of their open floor office. It was open floor because their organization worked on a shoestring budget, and things like ‘a building with actual offices’ wasn’t really in their wheelhouse.

Sort of. They might be getting more money soon, from their new and unexpected benefactors.

His friend looked up with exhausted eyes. “Mmmyeah?” She asked, stifling a yawn. “What’s up Trevvy?” She asked.

“…How long have you been here?” Trevor asked her, starting to stack the empty coffee cups on her desk into a stack before pitching them into the trash.

“A while.” Mally admitted. “Need to verify signatures and stuff.”

“How’s that… going?”

“Bad. We don’t have enough to get a ballot measure.” She looked up, the exhaustion in her eyes more than just from lack of sleep. “Turns out people think the cops should own more grenade launchers, not less. Who knew.”

Trevor grimaced, suppressing the flare of anger he felt every time the civics system failed them. “Well, want a distraction?” He asked.

“Please god yes.”

“Okay.” He handed her a USB stick, and waited while she wiggled it into her laptop, before opening it. “Play the video.” He said, circling behind her desk.

She did, and watched as three different views of a concrete room full of people briefly flashed on screen before abruptly being replaced by the same number of shots of a city sidewalk. “Hey, this is in the Pearl.” She muttered, recognition kicking in. “What’s…” she trailed off as the view’s whipped around, scanning the area, before they focused on a mountain of a man holding a baseball bat and yelling threats at another man.

Then the viewpoints started to move. The three people wearing the body cameras, quickly approaching, and interjecting themselves into the situation. Mally caught small glimpses of them at first, but when she realized that one of the views was lower than the others because it was attached to what appeared to be a large snake, she had to pause the video and rewind a bit to make sure she wasn’t going insane.

She let it play out. Watching through the different angles as the three people diffused the fight, separated the people involved, and seemed to capitalize on the whole ‘giant snake’ thing to really override anger with confusion. “Is there sound for this?” She asked.

“Yeah, but I didn’t put the different tracks in here.” Trevor said. “Big guy slept with small guy’s wife. Things got out of hand.”

“Okay… what am I looking at here?” Mally said. “I mean, I *get it*. These are those guys that’ve been around lately, right? Response, or whatever they call themselves?”

“Yeah.” Trevor said. “And I’m not actually sure if I should be showing you this. But I feel like I’m going insane.”

“Why do you have this?”

He looked sheepish. “Ah. I’m one of their civilian oversight board.” He rubbed the back of his head. “We’re supposed to review body cam footage, make sure there was no abuse of power, and identify problems.”

“There were no problems.” Mally said. “Fuck, they got there before the actual cops, and everything went fine. That was just… fine?”

“Right.” Trevor nodded. “They’re pretty much mostly like that. We don’t have a lot of work to do. Anyway, the thing-“

“Hey, is this why we’re getting mysterious donations?!” Mally demanded. “Did you join a secret cult or something to get us money?!”

Trevor rolled his eyes, glad that his long time coworker had her priorities right. “They’re not secret. Or a cult I think. No, I want you to tell me if I’m going crazy.”

“I saw the giant snake, yeah. What’s up with that?” Mally asked. “Are they aliens? Are aliens real?! You have to tell me if aliens are real.”

“Weirdly, that’s *not* what I wanted to ask.” Trevor said, leaning over her to rewind the video file until he stopped it on a frame where the two humans were in view. “Tell me what you see here.”

“A chick with amazing arm definition.” Mally said. “Jesus, does she bench press cars?” She stopped, then looked closer at the view through what she had to assume was the camera on top of the giant snake thing. “Wait, hang on.” She went through the same few seconds of video, repeatedly, until she paused it on a frame where both the humans were facing this one camera. “…Hang on…”

“Yeah.” Trevor said. “Okay. I’m not going crazy, am I?”

“Neither of them are wearing body cameras.” Mally said, looking at the viewpoints of the humans. They were facing each other, she could see both of them. And the angle was a little too high, the camera work a little to abrupt. Her aborted college experience at film school kicked in in the back of her head, and she started advancing frame by frame, watching the tiny movements in the different views as she compared it to the images of the people on screen. “Their eyes.” She said. “You literally see through their eyes. Holy shit, that’s so cool.”

“That’s not terrifying to you?” Trevor asked her in a soft voice.

“They’ve got alien robot snakes, and I’m pretty sure this clip opened with them teleporting. Also, you said they basically do exactly what we’d want police to do anyway? Hell no, I’m not terrified. I wanna work with *them*.” Mally exclaimed. “Fuck scrambling for ballot signatures and getting death threats from fascists, I wanna work with the alien snake people!”

“I feel like you’re not taking this seriously.” Trevor sighed.

Mally reached for a coffee cup on her desk to drain the dregs from it and found that they’d all been removed at some point. “I feel like you aren’t putting enough thought into the existence of alien robot snakes.” She said.

“Sure.” Trevor said. “I’ll get you a phone number, you can ask them if they have any job openings.”

“This is why we’re friends.” She said, nodding. “Also, if you’re going out for coffee, can you get me a large cup just full of Red Bull and espresso?”

Trevor took his USB drive back and turned to leave. “Absolutely not, to every part of that.”

______

The Right Person, At The Right Time, wanted to scream as one of the lights under his care was extinguished, but he couldn’t. He would have helped anyway, but he wasn’t free to choose, or to mourn, and so he simply smiled and moved on to the next one, trying desperately to keep the starfield from dimming any further.

_____

[I still hurt

They hurt me. They tore me from my domain. But I killed so many of them that they put me back.

Killing solves problems.

But I still hurt.

It has been generations. I have made generations. I made toys to breed more toys, spawning more of themselves, to protect me.

They worship. I deserve it. I am a god. They are toys. They break too easily, and are ugly, and stupid. They should worship me.

The worship makes the hurt fade. But not go away.

The invaders return. The ones that break my toys. I try to hurt them. I want them to bleed, and die, and suffer, and feed me. I want them to drain into my domain, to take everything they have.

They do not die. I hate them. I hate them.

My toys fail. I hate them too. Some of them try to run. I make the others break them.

They are *mine*.

I want more invaders that are prey. I want the weaker ones. I want to make them break each other, and eat their worship. But they never arrive.

I know outside exists. Outside my domain. I command my toys that listen to go, and bring me prey.

They don’t come back.

I hate the outside. And my stupid toys. And the invaders. I hate so many things. I am the best at hating.

But I still cannot kill the invaders.

But then. Something different.

The voice in the dark is back. Not my dark, that I use to hurt them, but the dark around me. Outside of outside. The big dark. The voice calls to me. Is like me. It wants to talk.

I don’t reply. It wants to kill me. I would kill it.

The voice finds me anyway. Laughs at me. Laughs! I hate it. I will find a way to kill it.

It tells me I cannot. That we are brothers. It tells me it likes what I have done with my domain.

Of course it likes it. It should worship me, too.

It laughs again. Says no. Tells me how I can kill better. Tells me a trick it found, to put a weapon in one of the revolting prizes I must offer. To kill invaders who fail a secret test.

It is a good idea. I hate it. The voice disgusts me, being right.

I use the idea anyway. Splinter off a sliver of domain. Shape it, add it into the prize I was struggling not to extrude.

Then, waiting.

The invaders will be back.

And I will kill them. Somehow.

And they will bleed, and die, and worship me.

And I will stop hurting.]

_____

In the ruins of a small city in Tennessee, an artificial monster of carved bone and sharpened asphalt looked up at the stars for the first time since it had come online. It didn’t know what they were, but it knew they meant something. It stood and watched, the raccoon it had been hunting for parts escaping, as the creature began to imagine what it meant to be free.

_____

It had all started a few weeks ago.

Vadik - he went by Vad, mostly out of spite for the culture his parents and grandparents kept desperately trying to keep alive with him as a proxy - had been working late again. This time, it had gone a little farther than he’d intended, when he’d sort of accidentally taken a short nap.

The library’s janitor woke him up, also by accident, the roar of a three AM vacuum cleaner startling him out of the chair that he’d promised himself he’d only sit down in for a few minutes.

Stumbling awake, wiping drool off the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand, and deciding to just get the reshelving done tomorrow, Vad had decided to go home. The library would still be here tomorrow, and it would still be short staffed then, too.

Not that he’d quit or anything. He liked his job. Or, the idea of his job anyway. Even if he did feel like a fraud sometimes. In a lot of places, including here, librarians had actual degrees in library science, and years of experience. He had a degree in agricultural engineering, an anxiety disorder, and absolutely no motivation to do anything with agricultural engineering.

He’d started filling in here a year ago, and as other people had left, had just stuck around and continued being the human bookmark that helped keep this public library running. Even as his personal life crumpled around him, at least he had a job he was sorta proud of.

Then he’d tried to leave that night via the back stairwell, that led directly to the employee parking lot. Except when he opened the stairwell, instead of stairs, there was just… more library. Bookshelves. But not any bookshelves he’d ever seen here.

Vad had blinked, shut the door, taken a deep breath, and opened it again. Stairs. Cool. Sleep deprivation.

But maybe…

Over the next week, he’d constantly checked the stairwell door. Every time he walked by, every time he went on break, every excuse he had. Because *maybe*…

And then, the next Tuesday, he’d stayed late. For no reason. Just… curiosity. Because maybe.

And at 3:04 AM, the back stairwell opened not to stairs.

Vad shut the door. Opened it. Shelves. Shut, open, shelves. Timed it out.

3:04 (or maybe a bit earlier) to 3:09 AM. Tuesday. A hole in the world, to somewhere else. Somewhere that looked like a library but *felt* like a deep cavern, even just looking at it from outside.

Another week passed. And this time, he went in.

The shelves went on in every direction, on all sides of the door. He couldn’t see over them, there were too many and they were too tall. Once he got close to one, he realized that they were ten, twenty feet in height, going up to leave only tiny gaps around the ceiling and the dimly buzzing light fixtures up there.

The books on the shelves had nonsense titles, and were filled with marks that didn’t look like any language Vad had ever seen. Though he didn’t know every language, so it could just be a variant Chinese or something. He slipped the book he was looking at (A Critical View On Backpack Based Electronic Warfare) back onto the beige metal shelf where he’d plucked it from, and considered going deeper in.

Maybe there’d be some idea of what was going on here. But he didn’t want to get too far from the door, not if it closed in five minutes.

So he reached for another book to check out. And as his hand approached the thick brown leather volume he’d chosen, it opened an eye.

A wet sucking sound, like pulling a suction cup off a window, sounded as the book’s spine distorted and a very human looking eye swiveled in the exposed socket, turning wildly before locking onto Vad. He stood frozen, uncertain what was going on, heart hammering in his ears. Did he… say hi? Should he pet the book or something?

The question was answered when the rest of the spine, undulating like a zipper, opened up to reveal a row of folded paper teeth, and the book started hissing at him.

Vad jumped back, yanking his hand away, but it was too late. A long red tongue snapped out of the book’s maw, and he barely had time to realize it was a cloth bookmark as it wrapped around his wrist and tried to yank. But the book, for all that it surprised the shit out of him, still massed way less than Vad did, so he didn’t really move.

The book did though. Flying off the shelf, and slamming into his wrist. Mouth distending and teeth sinking into his unprotected flesh. He *screamed* as his blood started soaking into the book’s pages, being absorbed but not getting it wet. Vad slammed his arm into the shelf, wildly missing the book itself and just bruising his elbow, before taking another try and knocking it free from its bite with a painful tear.

It hopped up onto a dozen legs made of what looked like paperclips, starting to scurry back toward its shelf.

Vad stomped on it. Hard. Flattening the loose bloody pages down into the hard carpet of the library floor, and snapping its spine. He ground it under his heel even has he held his bleeding arm in his other hand.

It twitched, and he slammed his foot down again.

“What the fuck?!” He finally exclaimed, when he’d gotten some of his breath back. His voice cracked from the unexpected and unfamiliar pain. “What the fuck is that?!” He asked no one in particular, toeing the book with his shoe, which was now also soaked in his own blood and a thick black ink.

Something glinted on the floor, and he jerked back, kicking the corpse of the book away. But leaving behind what looked like a small, softly glowing sphere.

Through the gnawing pain of his arm, he’d felt the pull of his curiosity come through. Kneeling down, and feeling a little light headed, he kept his good hand on the cuts as best he could while he reached out with his other hand. “Is this some kind of gem?” He asked quietly.

Then he slipped, and his hand crushed the orb into the floor with a small burst of painless pressure against his palm.

And in the forefront of his mind, a thought that he knew wasn’t his, let him know something.

{+1 Species Rank : Goshawk - Northern American}

“Uh.” Vad pushed himself back to a kneeling position, looking at his hand. “What?” He looked around, seeing the row after row of books around him, the path back to the door to reality swimming in his vision. “Ugh. I should… go.” He said woozily. He’d lost more blood than he’d realized. Or the book had poisoned him.

Wouldn’t that be a joke. A venomous book. “Heh.” He coughed as he chuckled to himself. “A… poison… pen letter.” Vad mumbled.

He wobbled to his feet, turning to look one more time at the library that he absolutely would not be returning to.

Twenty different books on both sides of the shelves opened their eyes.

Vad had uttered a quiet “Chyort!”, the one word he actually knew from his heritage, then turned, and ran, and slammed the door behind him on the other side.

A couple months ago, there had been a speaker who had used the library to talk to some of the younger kids in the area. It had been a short talk on how to handle dangerous situations, and a lot of kids had been forced to attend either by their school administrations, or their parents.

Vad hadn’t sat in on the whole thing, but he’d overheard a bit of it that had stuck in his head. The man speaking had advised the kids that if they were ever in trouble, *especially* if it was trouble they caused, that they shouldn’t call the police. That around here, the police weren’t their friends, and it was just as likely the situation would get worse. The kids had all sort of known that, but having an adult tell you could be demoralizing, and one of them had sort of angrily demanded to know what they *should* do.

And the speaker had said that, if you were ever in trouble, real trouble, and you needed help, that there was a number you could call, and someone would show up. No judgment, no violence. They’d be there to actually help, if you couldn’t get a friend or parent to bail you out.

Vad had saved the number. Just in case.

And while he wasn’t sure exactly where the line was for “real trouble”, this sure felt like it counted.