Sell you a Bridge chapter 248

June 3rd 2016 Prospero and Michael Scott Memorial Library, The Nightside 1:00 PM EDT

We  stepped through the door and into a room covered wall to wall with  shelves. When you hear library you think neat and ordered row, dewey  decimal systems, cheap carpet and a unique library smell that's somehow  antispectic without actually smelling like cleaner. This place was  nothing like that. While there were books wall to wall, the shelves were  packed to brim with a cluttered, disorganized jumble of random books.  Tall, short, wide, thin, and all jammed in like a game of tetris to make  sure the shelves had as many books on them as possible.

Not  all of the books had titles on the spines, and the ones that did  weren't all in english or even in languages I had seen before. It was,  overall, a fascinating place. Zee in particular seemed absolutely  spellbound by the massive collection of tomes. My girlfriend had always  been a huge magic nerd, and this place had more than a few magic books  mixed in with fiction, history, sci-fi, and even what looked like text  books containing futuristic technology principle. Wally noticed those  pretty quickly and reached for one before Artemis slapped his hand out  of the air.

He hissed and pulled his hand back, shaking it  out while looking at her with a wronged expression. My best friend just  rolled her eyes. "Haven't we seen enough in this hellhole of a city for  you to know that touching random books is a bad idea? I give it even  odds at least one of those things is cursed or booby trapped." She  turned to Taylor. "Do you know what part of the stacks we can find  Sinner in? Hell, do they even have sections here? Because this doesn't  follow a pattern that I can see."

Taylor just shrugged. "I  think this is discount book store. Some libraries have them built in.  They sell off books that they don't need or want for pennies on the  dollar as a fundraiser. I used to come here as a lad, and I know for a  fact this isn't any of the actual sections. You'll know them when you  see them." He smiled at Zee. "Sindella used to come here all the time.  You obviously inherited her love for books. She was the biggest egghead  I've ever met in my life. Particularly enjoyed the romance section."

Zee  snickered a bit, her eyes suspiciously moist. "Oh she never got over  that. We had bookshelves at home packed with harlequin romances. Daddy  had his magic books, and mom loved those, but there were about three  full shelves of trashy dime story romances with spines so cracked they  looked like a stack of cards. Near the end she would make daddy read  them to her in bed, because she was too weak to turn the pages." That  memory had started happy, I was pretty sure, but I could feel the sting  at the end of it as it reminded her of the bad times.

Zee  told me once that cancer was the most infectious disease she'd ever  seen, despite it not being communicable. She said it infected your  memories, that it would eat away at all the good times until all you had  left was pain where there should be joy. She'd broken down in tears  after she said it, and Drea and I held her until she cried herself to  sleep. Part of me couldn't help but think back to that, and worry that  letting Taylor open those old wounds wasn't the best thing for her in  the long run.

But as much as I loved her that wasn't my  decision to make. She would be the one to decide what she needed, and  all I could do was be there for her. Still, despite the pain, I could  tell that she was also genuinely enjoying hearing more about her mothers  past, and it gave me hope that somehow this would help her find peace  with her loss. She was never really allowed to grieve properly.

I  hated Giovanni Zatara sometimes, for so many reasons it was hard to  count, but one of the biggest was that he'd taken his wife's death and  made it all about him. His daughter lost her mother, but she hadn't been  allowed to lose herself in the grief. I'd seen people like that, people  so wrapped up in their own tragedy that they didn't see how much their  selfishness was hurting the people around them who might have helped  them deal with the same loss. In some ways I was pretty sure sharing  these conversations with Taylor was helping her get a bit of what her  father should have given her as a kid. Closure.

I knew she  could feel all of this through our bond. That she felt my concern and  my love, and I could feel her too, in my heart. I knew she appreciated  me giving her the space she needed to go through this on her own, and  that she knew I was here if she needed me, and so was Drea. We followed  Taylor, who had grown quiet, out of the small wooden room and through a  new door, though I saw him make a mental note of the section our exit  was in.

Once we stepped through the new door I could see  what Taylor had meant but us knowing what the sections were when we saw  them. The new room was...well...not a room. It was a graveyard. I could  even see a dark sky filled with far too many stars blanketed above us.  The books were all set into shelves on the outside of mausoleums  scattered throughout the cemetery, with thick, dewy grass surrounding  the large tombstones interspersed between them in the most haphazard way  imaginable.

I gave a low whistle."So I'm guessing this is  the horror section?" It was pretty clear what the theme here was, and  my eyes were sharp enough to pick up a few english titles on the densely  packed tomb shelves. I scanned over them, interested to see what was  here. The King in Yellow was stuffed in atop a version of the Telltale  Heart written by Mary Shelley, and a copy of Dracula labeled as being  written by Vlad Drakul himself. It there were other novels I didn't  recognize, but some were just as distinctive, and there were really too  many to count.

I put an arm around Zee as we walked,  supporting her without getting in the way, but mostly I kept my head on a  swivel. We'd gotten to the library alright, and that was great, but the  longer we stayed here the more obvious it was that the Nightside didn't  play by the same rules. We weren't safe just because we were in a  building (not that we were exactly even in a building right now). I  wanted to bad to reach out and flip on aura sight, to finally see the  truth under the false reality around us, but despite my desire to do so I  didn't dare.

This place had shown me more than anything  else how much I depended on my eyes in my day to day life. The ability  to see to the heart of people and things was so ingrained that it was  almost an instinctive reaction, and only my perfect memory kept me from  slipping and doing it on accident. Fighting it was taking effort and  willpower I hadn't expected to need for something this innocuous. Part  of me was glad it had happened though. I might never have realized my  own dependence if it wasn't pointed out to me in sharp relief.

Still,  I wasn't just someone with aura sight. I was still a ninja ghost-devil  with a host of minor mental enhancements. Between my reflexes and my  ability to detect things moving in stealth I was more than equipped to  keep an eye out without any supernatural gifts. The major problem was  that I wasn't sure that the things I was spotting creeping through the  mist and the dark were actually threats to us, or if they just belonged  here. It would be just like the Nightside to have fucking library ghouls  or something.

Whatever was out there, I wasn't about to  draw its attention by speaking about it, so all we could do was search  for Sinner and his succubus girlfriend the old fashioned way. Since we  didn't know where they were we had to make sure that we didn't miss  anything. We stopped at each mausoleum, checking inside to find reading  areas with sturdy wooden tables lit with burning wall sconces, but we  didn't find anyone on them. Each one was mostly abandoned, aside from  occasional weird skeleton pushing a cart and reshelving books.

We  checked over a dozen of them to no avail, and aside from noting that  they were bigger on the inside than the out (which wasn't really a shock  given we were literally standing in a whole graveyard inside a room in a  building, complete with night sky) we didn't find anything out of the  ordinary. There was no trace of people, and eventually it became clear  that this wasn't the section we were looking for. Despite that we still  checked every tomb, because it would be stupid to assume and then have  to recheck bits and pieces of all the sections again.

The  only really notable incident is that Jim found his biography in the  stacks. One that he definitely didn't sign off on, and that looked like  it was written by another universe's version of him. He flipped through  the thing for about two minutes before slamming it shut and stowing it  in his coat. I expected the library to have some defensive enchantments,  but to be fair this WAS Jim. Maybe it did and he just bypassed them.  You don't get to be the worlds greatest thief by collecting bottlecaps.

Once  we finished inspecting the last tomb we all gathered near one of the  tombstones close by to discuss our next move. Zee seemed eager to keep  looking around, but the rest of us were worried we wouldn't find them  anytime soon. A reminder that we were trying to keep Kit safe was all it  took to shake my girl out of her research funk. "So, we need some way  to find them a little faster than we have been." She turned to Taylor.  "I don't suppose you have any tricks that would let you search for them  magically or something? If not we might need to split up and that seems  like a bad plan."

Bad  plan was an understatement, everyone knew you shouldn't split the  party. Taylor however, looked substantially less comfortable with the  first option than the second. He took a deep breath but nodded. "Fine.  Just this once." He closed his eyes, and something in the air  just...shifted. It wasn't exactly obvious, but I could tell something  was happening. He sat there for a minute or two, wincing before he  finally yelped and stumbled back, blood dripping from his nose. "Found  them. Also ow. Remind me never to try to spy on Sinner."

He  gestured for us to follow him and then set off across the graveyard. We  hadn't been moving in a straight line, and the room wasn't really a  defined shape. I'd expected the distance we traveled to narrow the trip  but we ended up crossing back through the graveyard at an angle to get  to the other side of the space. I noticed the shapes again, moving in  the swirling fog, and was planning to ignore them again, until the forms  slowly converged, resolving themselves from the dark into a flock of  about two dozen nondescript...things.

Average  height and painfully thin, the things wore suits and wide brimmed hats,  but that was where the resemblance to a person ended. Beneath brims of  their hats were only smooth heads. No eyes, ears, mouths or noses. Just a  flat mannequin expanse of blank smooth skin. Taylor hissed in  agitation, and John stepped back with a curse. We turned to look at the  tall PI and his face was pale and shaken, the first time I'd really seen  him afraid. He saw us looking and swallowed hard. "This could be a  problem. Ladies and gents, allow me to introduce the Harrowing. They'll  be killing us today."