There were many things that marked Doloise different from the creatures of which she was formed, but, alas, a sense of humour was not one of them.  When I asked her if she was serious, it wasn’t even a rhetorical question, mostly a ping against the laws of my universe.

I was rescued from having to respond to her unusual requests by Nellie coming to our table with a very, very large gentleman next to her.

“Ah, my little Nellya says you are to speak with me!” the man said, in a tone slightly less loud than a bellow. 

See, this is a man-woman thing right here.   Nellie seemed to cringe at the volume.  Me, I took it in stride.  I didn’t need to match it – that would have spoken of submission. 

“That depends,” I said.  “Are you Ivan?”

Nellie’s eyes caught the light as she gave me a put-upon expression, but I ignored it.  Hey, it could have been that I wanted to compliment the cook, right?

“Indeed!  I am Ivan!  The Great and Terrible! Ha-ha!”

He really spoke like that, with capital letters and exclamation points.

Actually, I kind of liked the guy, in his over-the-top manner.  Not everyone can actually punctuate their sentences with a good “Ha-ha!”  It either came naturally, or took a lot of practice.  You couldn’t just wake up in the morning and start out saying, “Ha-ha!” with any real verisimilitude. 

His smile, though, didn’t reach his eyes.  I looked at his face for a moment and then, with a little shiver of concern, met his gaze with my own.

See, eye contact means something.  It means a lot of things, really, and all of them are somehow intimate.  It’s one of the real ways people with visual difficulties are handicapped, because it means an entire sense, another way of finding out who the people near you are is similarly left to other adaptations.  We learn about people in other ways – we can use our nose although it doesn’t paint the same kind of picture (yet another visual metaphor) outside of instinctual opinions.   And when we look into the eyes of someone else, we can’t help but project a little of ourselves into it.  We’re not just seeing the eyes, we’re focusing on every little cue in the expression.  We’re analyzing and comparing and our mood has as much to do with what we see as the subject’s.

I, for example, was in a darned good mood from the food, tempered with the concern for Doloise’s situation.  Well, and then Ivan showed up and I had to tighten that down for the moment, to put on my “work face” as it were.  So I saw joviality.  And I saw sadness.  And I saw concern.  I saw someone I could like, someone who enjoyed life.  Someone who was a darn good cook, by the way.

And I saw that he had a hole in his heart, a large gaping darkness.

Some of the heavy hitters have some tricks, they say, about meeting the eyes.  It’s a kind of identity not unlike a true name, and once they have your gaze they can work great knowings upon that.   (“Knowings” often called “seeings” for that reason.)  I knew Ivan was a sorceror, and I didn’t care.  I’m constantly being reminded of the eye contact rule with Doloise who, if she slept, would still sleep with the shades.

Of course, if she was a real girl, that would go away.  Kind of like Pinnochio’s nose, right?

Ivan smiled, and I was chilled.  Because something else was looking out at me, not from his eyes, but from his heart.  The metaphorical one.  The one we talk about when we paste that funny shaped symbol on our bumperstickers.    It tasted dry, just like the moments before the lightning bolt, like the slither of a large snake against the stones. 

“You are OK!” he said.  He thumped his fist on my arm, and then took the bill from the table.  “I get this!  You do not pay! ”  He looked at Doloise.  “You do not bring,” he used what I think were the same words Artur said meant “Lord’s House” “back here, though.  Cannot trust everything she sees.”  He said the last almost as if it were a joke.

Kinda ironic, that.

After some delicious dessert (it had raisins and honey and probably a high enough carbohydrate count to send people at nearby tables into a stupor: I shared it with Doloise) I waved at her rolled-up schematic.

“What are you planning, or is it a surprise?” I asked, trying to sound far more nonchalant than the panic the idea occasionally put into me.

She blinked at me slowly for a few minutes, which, I have to say, did not bring my heartrate down any.

“I meant on the blueprint paper,” I referenced with a finger to what she had left rolled-up and standing next to her on the booth’s bench.

“It is a declaration of independence.”

It was my turn to blink.

She went on eating, covering some of her portion with heavy cream.  I decided that calories didn’t count in fairyland.

“You know what I am,” she said.

“In theory,” I hedged.

“I am not a single leaf, nor even a branch, but the tree itself.”

I tried following her analogy, if that’s what it was.  Could have been a metaphor.  I was still hazy on all of that, heck, it might have been an allegory, but really, that’s for every man to decide for himself.  

I wasn’t very good with that, because my mind kept slipping back to the idea of how to do correspondence between animal life and plant life.  Were leaves like hair, and the forests were nests made of their own pieces?  No, because hair is a dead thing.  Leaves are alive, they have function.  Limbs and branches made even less sense, even if they were sometimes used as synonyms.  (I know what synonyms are, thankyouverymuch.)   After all, a tree could regrow and thin sticks were less like arms.  Maybe leaves were like thousands of tiny fingers.  Or cilia, not that I was sure we had cilia.  I was pretty sure we didn’t have flagella. 

And roots?  Were they like earth-tongues, licking delicately at nutrients and searching for water like some kind of mole beneath the surface?  But without tastebuds?  Maybe leaves were tastebuds?  Drinking in sunlight.  I wondered what sunlight tasted like.  “Light,” probably – far fewer calories than in normal…um.  Where was I going with this again?

Doloise continued after I didn’t respond.

“I believe that there is the possibility that there are viable seeds from this tree.”

I opened my mouth without particular concern for my future and asked, “What kind of tree?  I mean, is there a period of dormancy?  Do you have to hold the seed in water and a little bit of charcoal like an avocado tree?”

“You do not take me with all due concern.”

“Seriously?”

Heh.

She didn’t respond.  In fact, she put her fork down onto the plate and continued to stare at me from behind her dark shades.

“Fine, fine.  You want independent existence.  How is that even possible?”

“All good creations have independence,” she said.  “A child is just the creation of the material and ephemeral of the parents.  Why would I be any different?”

“I don’t honestly know,” I said.  I pulled out a raisin and chewed on it for a moment, thinking.  “Everything that I do know is speculative, but it seems to me that you’re an active construct, meaning it continues to take power to keep you together, and that without the full interest and effort of those who formed you, you will dissipate.”

“This dissipate – will it hurt?” she asked.

“Well.”  I stopped.  “Realms can be made of places, too.  And they don’t go away or have volition, right?  But they have a link – they have limits to where they can go, and what they can be like, and they still cost some kind of  energy.  So maybe there’s a way to do some kind of exchange of rules.  I don’t think it would hurt, though.  You would just lack purpose until you faded away, maybe?  Or maybe it would be instantaneous, like you were unsummoned.”

She dropped her head for a moment.  “You are not made of comfort.”

I didn’t laugh.  I was going to, but I didn’t.

“I had thought perhaps you could close the connection between myself and my Family.”

I dropped my fork.  I took a moment of time to find it out from underneath the table and set it aside.  I think she was serious.

“This is not a goblin.”

“No, it’s borscht with beef and sour cream.  It’s good.” I took another spoonful and savored it.  “Really good.  It won’t kill you.”

Doloise looked at me through her sunglasses.  They looked more red than gold in this light.  She had changed her outfit somehow during the night, and was now wearing something in blue that looked (if you squinted and turned your head a little) a little like an interview shirt I have ironed and hanging in the closet.  That’s one of the neater magics they’re capable of, that I mentally subtitle, “Riffing off the note.”  It’s a similarity magic (if you’re paying attention) where they draw (well, conjure) from subtle illusion into being the fantabulous, but only if they have something real from which to start.  Seven-course royal banquets out of a kernel of corn, that sort of thing. 

(That’s another reason Thomas warned us out of trips to faerieland.  Thin and wan, remember?  They don’t eat much.  The golden arches there don’t serve hamburgers, although it would be the franchise opportunity of an immortal lifetime.)

“Goblins would kill you,” she said.

“Not if they were this tasty.  If goblins were this tasty,” I slurped a little, and used my napkin to pat my lips, “they’d be endangered.”

She looked confused.

“Rarity.  Everything would be out to eat them, and so there would be few of them left.”

She shuddered.  “I know what goblins are, and you would ascribe value to them?”

I tilted my head and looked at her, resting my chin in my hand after a moment.  I’m sensitive, don’t get me wrong, but I do kind of paint everything with my white man’s brush if I don’t catch my assumptions.  Still, handling Doloise had really expanded some of my horizons.  Thomas had warned me that the fey had a certain tunnel vision when it came to…anything else.

“What are goblins?” 

Admittedly, I had run into a few goblin nests, and Ed and I had decided that extermination really had to be done with fire.  I had not actually run into any goblins.  I can’t say they struck me as the most genteel of creatures given the stench and remnants of small things they had gathered, but maybe, not being from Around Here, so to speak, they adapted poorly.  Maybe it smelled like a sweet ambrosia that reminded of their home next to the Bog of Everlasting Stench, or whatever it was called.  Doloise just made me want to question its judgments.

I thought about it, really.  Did I do that with Maggie?  Did I second-guess her because she was a woman?  No.  I don’t think so – most of the time I was happy letting her drive.  (Well, minus the actual driving part – she scared me on the road.)  I thought generally that even though we disagreed fundamentally about the practice of the esoteric arts and its moral components that we meshed really well with our worldview.

But Doloise got under my skin.  Maybe because I was never sure how much it was her as an independent being having ideas or it as a collective sharing the ideas of its controllers.   I felt like Jiminy Cricket.  “What you need is a conscience.”

They don’t, though.  They’re not native to this world-sphere.  They’re rarely here for long unless it is to make mischief, and then they don’t have to care what happens in their wake.  That’s one of the things that makes them so much trouble for the Big Guys; the responsible heavy-hitters have to hit more precisely so that the overall impact is expressed in ways that don’t ricochet off innocent bystanders.  They’re not superheroes.  Superheroes get to wear the 4-color tights and crush buildings.  They have to be surgeons, cutting at the seams of reality and excising its cancers.

Me, I’ll stick with kind of being a plumber.  I’m more a situational comedy than a medical drama.

Doloise harrumphed.  Well, at least, that’s what I think that noise was.  It was a kind of expression of disgust, but her nose actually crinkled up kind of cute until the following snort repulsed me.   She took a bite of the borscht, ignoring me.

“This is really good,” she admitted.

I silently cheered.  It wasn’t a big victory, but I won.

I got caught up in watching Mythbusters videos.  They fascinated Doloise.   I almost loved watching the Realm watching them more than I did simply watching the Mythbusters, although it would have been a difficult thing to measure.

I don’t know what the fey method of taking notes is, but whatever it is, she was doing it.  I imagined a group of a dozen or so taking turns behind her eyes in a “Being John Malkovich” kind of situation.  “No, no, I want to see the fellow with the hairy mouth tentacles do something.”  After a while, I was concerned at her glee involving the explosions.

I leaned back, put my hands behind my head, and smiled at her.  “And none of it is done with magic,” I said.

She actually stood up in an almost aggressive stance and stared at me.  After a moment, she came up with an argument that amused me.  “They are using the natural laws!”

I turned it over and over in my head, and then laughed.  I guess she had a point.

I considered letting her loose on YouTube, but then decided I actually would be saving the world in preventing it.  Yeah, it was getting kind of late, too, and my thoughts were getting muddled.

I fell asleep trying to figure out what the magical equivalent of a 404 was.  “Deity not found?”

When I awoke, I saw Doloise scribbling madly on what looked to be a conjured blue sheet of paper.  I found my towel,  walked past her into the shower, and then off to work.  Rinse, wash, repeat.  Wait, was that the right order?

I had to admit my curiosity as she was focused enough to spend the day drafting.  I was given a good reference from my contract (the girl I had been doing the temporary labor for was being released over the weekend, so she was presumably returning on Monday) and a bonus from my employer under the table.  Not standard practice, but I wasn’t going to turn him in, and I could always report it to the IRS later.

“Let’s go have some borscht,” I suggested to Doloise as I walked.

“Is that a kind of goblin?” she asked.  She had rolled up her draft and was swinging it from side to side, reminding me of a girl in pigtails skipping down the side of the road.  Well, except she didn’t have pigtails, and she couldn’t very well skip in those heels.  But the image of a girl in pigtails skipping down the side of a road has to be one of those things Jung was getting on with the Akashic Record.  Except now I felt all dumb realizing that there may not have been a lot of Chinese girls in pigtails in more historical times, let alone, you know, Tanganyika.  Anyway, it was part of my cultural heritage, white bread as I am.

“Yes,” I told Doloise.

I was actually hoping for some chicken Kiev, maybe a pierog.  But now I not only had a good meal to look forward to, but a surprise.  Would Doloise be disgusted?  Hungry?

I know, there are days I am amused by the small tortures.  All of them, actually.

I called in a reservation for two, and drove Doloise downtown.  She stared at all the people.  There’s this corner at Colfax and Broadway which is, day or night, really kind of the reality crux of the area.  It’s not magic, and yet, at the same time, it is.  I think it’s the most active bus stop in the city, and there’s always a stream of people, in all of humanity’s variety.

I took my time driving by.  I love Colfax anyway, if only because you have this feeling that you could just walk down it and see everything.  While that particular corner was the kind of place the proverb-writers meant when they said things like, “Stay in one place and the world will come to you,” Colfax was meant to be adventured.   You needed to have a couple hundred dollars in your pockets, and two days to walk along it, and you’d come out richer for the experience than almost anywhere else in the region, despite the majestic Rockies as a backdrop.  A little slice of life, the universe, and, well everything.

Yeah, I’m an urbanite.  Someday I’ll tell you how I feel about camping.  How I really feel about camping.

“Thirty days, or just over the cycle of the moon,” I said, looking at Nellie.  I looked for signs on her face that it meant something, a flaring of the nostrils, a widening of the eyes.  I am not trained at that sort of thing, but you do pick up a little here and there just by being a real person talking to other real people.

“Three times ten,” she agreed.  She shrugged.  “It is a hard burden, carrying a piece of death in your heart.”

I was about to say, “I can imagine,” but put the kibosh on it pretty quickly.  Yes, I could imagine it, quite clearly, but I couldn’t really feel what she was feeling.  Imagine kissing someone with a ticker of doom, knowing that you can’t quite reach the (wo)man you are loving because they are not whole in themselves.

Of course, if I put it that way, maybe it’s easy – a lot of people aren’t “whole in themselves.”  I let my body go a little more than I ought for my intellect, and I don’t give my emotional feedback a lot of say in how I do things.  Too often I’m an observer in my own body, so I can’t even say I’m giving my all to a lot of projects.

Funny, if you’d asked me I would say that passion drives a lot of the practice, and really, it does, but that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily in touch with your emotions.  I mean, I’m the sensitive new-age nice guy your mother warned you about in spades, but most of the time I have just the same amount of trepidation and concern for what others might think of me that cripples most of us in the social arena.

On the other hand, I know more than those outside the practitioners’ knitting circles and theory sessions that hesitation can equal death.  It’s the only thing I might have in common with those in the armed forces.  It’s just a lot harder for someone like me to focus that feeling into closing a door.  That’s something the heavy hitters can do – they can make that tear for your departed father or that angst for the unreciprocated love and, well, make magic out of it.  Me, I can get excited over doughnuts, but I don’t generally know how to hold that and put it into slamming a door to the outside shut.  Maybe it’s something I can learn, but probably not from the exorcism teacher.

I just looked at Nellie.  “I will see what I can do.”  It was all I could promise.

She knew.  She wasn’t going to get her hopes up. She took a small card out of the purse that was under her chair.  She passed it to me, and then got up.  “I must go.”

It was the name of a restaurant, closer to downtown Denver.  Viktor said something in what I presumed was Russian, and Nellie shook her head.  She and her purse and her sorrow left the room.

Doloise stood up.  I looked at the Realm curiously.

“They are done conducting their business with you, ” she said.

I looked at Andrei.  “The,” and then he used a phrase I didn’t understand, “is not a poet,” he said with a smile.

“It translates to… lord’s house,” Artur said, unexpectedly.

Doloise smiled at him.  Artur seemed to shrink an inch in on himself.  Good boy.  Realized she wasn’t the hottie you thought she was, did you?  I didn’t ruffle his hair, but the fact that I was tempted was channeled straight from my dad.

Maybe I carried a bit of the dead inside me, too.

“It’s been a pleasure meeting the lot of you,” I said.  Adding the, “Insane sorcerors though you are,” would have almost been redundant.  Of course, none of them had actually done any magic I had noticed, but that didn’t mean anything.

I walked out with Doloise, nodding at and this time catching the name of the woman at the desk.  I wanted to talk to someone about this, maybe do some research on if there was some clue as to the afterlife I could expect contact with, but Doloise wasn’t the right person.   I didn’t want to call Maggie.  Ed would have been off work and hard to get on the cellphone.  I thought of and discarded another handful of people in the business.

I guess the internet was going to have to be my solace.  Maybe I’d sign up on a dating site.  Was there a witchy version of the ones on TV?

Jumping into the generalizations again, there is another good way to split types of practitioners: ritualists and eclectics.

I’m perverting some of Maggie’s wordage here, admittedly, so what I mean might be different than what she does by the terms.  For me, a ritualist is someone who really does the practice.  They have stability because they do the spells the way they learned them, step by step in the ritual, maybe as their grandfather taught them, maybe as per the book, and there really isn’t a lot of innovation because unless you’re very learned you do not know exactly which part of the process you can adjust without serious issues arising.  I know that if I’m dealing with hostile outsiders I’m going to find more confidence in reading the same words and making the same bargain that worked in the past.  You can find more scientific method in this, and ritualists do sometimes learn they can skip inert portions or adapt new materials and orientations, but it’s a long, slow process.  When you wrap this with belief, it’s sometimes hard to get change – a lot of times the belief itself prevents it.  It is the blessing that is said for the wine, and I can say it in Hebrew simply from repetition, not because of any l33t skillz in the language arena.

Then you have your eclectics.  They can be split into a great deal of subgroups, of course, just as ritualists can, but generally they’re like me – they’ll grab what’s magically significant and meld it into hodgepodge that gets the point across.  Which isn’t to say every eclectic is lazy and/or willing to accept shoddy results, only that they’re more likely to hear the blessing for the wine and think, “Because wine is often more flammable than water, why not used blessed wine in killing vampires?  Holy wine grenades!”  It’s not just a mindset, though, because it’s a part of the practice.  Eclectics generally never specialize because they’re too busy learning a thousand things that can be “magically significant” and in what situation that’s true.  (Is moonstone useful in the sunlight?  When folding a protective hat against the martian mind-control rays, is it more effective to use the shiny side of the aluminium foil?)

I bring this up for a moment because I generally consider myself to be one of the eclectics.   I mean, I’m a specialist, but if there was such a thing, I’d major in magical theory.  I don’t bind myself to any of the particular style of closing, just as I haven’t chosen a religion – I’ll use whatever seems to work for me.  This gives me flexibility, but I think that when it comes down to it I might be weaker than if I focused and really worked at building the ultimate doorstop.   I am too intuitive and my seals may suffer for it, although I think sometimes I’m right on the money.  I couldn’t have closed the disharmonics of the Shadow King – convincing him to leave was the right thing to do.

In this case, I knew from general theory that what the Russians were asking me to do was both completely possible and impossible at the same time.  They wanted me to close an open portal that existed within someone.

Possession is a weird subject, and again, I am going to scrape and skimp and maybe cancel my Justice League subscription (I know – harsh!) until I get those exorcism lessons.    As I understand it, there is usually a gate involved.  Sometimes it’s an item, sometimes it’s an agreement, sometimes it’s a disease, heck, sometimes it’s all three.  Sometimes it’s voluntary, or as much as it ever can be – something about allowing in those from beyond is never a consensual act for me because they’re not human and humanity only can have so much of a glimpse into their motivations.  However human those motivations (curiosity? greed? lust?) the truth is that they do not belong here, and the rules of the universe have a way of making it more and more uncomfortable for what does not belong.  Horror movies are just an easy example of this.

So’s Doloise, which is why I needed to get rid of it soon.

So, he had a gateway within him to the halls of the dead?  Or whatever place they have designed with belief and vision over the centuries.  What would you like to bet I was going to learn firsthand what they looked like?

I was tempted to quote Yoda on the “try” part, but while I think of Star Wars as a universal kind of thing, I had to realize it was another bigoted mindset.  Not everyone on the planet knows Han shot first.

“I am interested,” I said.  I looked at Viktor.  “Do you need some references?”

He waved at Doloise. “That will not be necessary.  Come, listen to our stories, and we will be in contact, yes?”

They pulled the chairs closer, and even Artur sat down.  I understood when Viktor gestured to him.

“Have you seen such a boy?  I am very proud.  Ours is a learned art.  It takes much dedication.”  Viktor glanced at Doloise.  I wouldn’t want to say too much in front of her, also, but he couldn’t well ignore her.  “We do much in the way of the folklore, the words, `And sometimes it happens so.'”

Andrei smiled.  “Do you know our poetry?” he asked.

I gave a kind of gesture I hoped show that I’d at least heard something of it.  “I looked some up,” I admitted.

“It is not so different,” he said.  “Hard work, hard life, and then we make tales of riches gained and lost with ease.  We do not spend so much time on love, because love is like everything else, something that requires a great deal of work.”

Nellie tried to hide a smile at that, which I knew because she suddenly looked down.  Artur, on the other hand, snorted.

“Andrei is a romantic,” Viktor said, taking back the reins of the conversation.  “Artur has a girlfriend, but she is not so knowledgeable about his,” he waved his hand, “responsibilities.”

I sympathised again with Sullen Boy.  Maybe I should call him something else if I was going to feel for him a bit.  Of course, that would mean he’d have to lose a little bit of the glower.

“That is the same all over, I think,” I said.  Hey, I was being diplomatic, not insular with that.  Well, so much as the practitioner’s enclave was pretty insular.  While some talents are only a matter of teaching, others are in-born, and others require sacrifices, and, well, it was kind of the wizardry conundrum.  Do you spend your time learning the spells or getting girls?  When it was put that way, I was glad I wasn’t the spellslinging type.

Of course, I wasn’t spending much time getting girls, either, but at least right now I could blame that on Doloise.

“I do not understand,” she said.  “You speak of responsibility and time, and mortality is such a fleeting breath, why not use what small powers you have to indulge in the best of your short lives?”

Fey were not known for their open minds.

Nellie opened her mouth, then closed it again.  I smiled.

“It is not just a matter of breathing,” I said.

Andrei nodded at me.  “We do not count the breaths, because we know they are numbered.”

I tried again.  “We have to work at things.  Your kind has crafters, right?  Beings that take time to further the beauty and design of their craft?”

The Realm nodded, slowly.  “You suggest that you are all crafters.”  Another nod.  “I see.  It is a clumsy description of a clumsy skill, but it will make sense to some of my family.”

I turned back.  “And sometimes it happens so.  Most of the stories I’d read had multiple parts, like having to find the three special ingredients, and often, one was raised from the dead.”

Artur flinched.  “Not necromancy,” he said.

Nellie put out a hand.  “No, but there are those who speak with ghosts.”  She looked at Andrei.  “Let me tell the tale.”

Andrei nodded.  Viktor scooted back in his chair, as Nellie looked up at me.  “It is about my husband, who is not here.”

“But he would be?” I asked.

“Yes, if it were not, well.”  She smiled.  “Ivan the son of the merchant spent three days with the King of the Birds, learning the speech of those who had feathers.  In that listening he had his fortune told, and his parents, jealous of the consequences unknowingly set him on the path to his destiny.”

“The King of the Birds,” Doloise muttered.  I wondered momentarily if it was someone her ‘family’ knew.

“My husband, Ivan, spent three days in the place of the dead, learning the speech of those who would still speak to the living.  He has spent another ten times that recovering, but something of that place will not leave him.”  She looked at me, and I was drawn in to her eyes for a moment, to the sorrow.  “We believe you may be able to close that door.”

Dirty words.  Well, that *is* what I do.

I waited.

So did Viktor.  We sat in a strange silence, neither comfortable nor uncomfortable.  It was a pending silence, one that wasn’t pressing, but definitely expecting an answer.   Nellie simply sat down, as did Andrei.  Artur went back to brood against the wall, no doubt afraid that it might waver if he didn’t hold it up.

Wait.  Artur was a practitioner?  I tried to lay down my initial doubts because of his age.  I didn’t know what I was, what I could do, then.  Heck, my mom still thinks I dropped out of college to deal drugs simply because of my nickname.  I wondered if he was related to anyone there.  I looked away from Viktor and to Artur’s face for a moment.  I don’t know why – unless it’s blindingly obvious, I could never see family resemblences.

(You know, when people are cooing over a new baby trying to identify its features as if that would determine future traits, I always get it wrong. “No, no, those couldn’t be his father’s eyes.  His father was a madman who died in a fire in the penitentiary.”  So I just go with the, “Cute baby,” unless it’s a complete and total lie, at which point it’s better to just say nothing at all about the current looks, and maybe go with that she’ll be great as an astronaut…or famous chef… or whatever parents hope for their kids’ futures.)

(Don’t get me wrong, I like kids, but I don’t understand a lot of the way people behave around kids.  I don’t think you should treat them like little adults, but I think you should understand that they have feelings and goals and the only way they’re going to make it is to learn to communicate with them.  It’s about keeping the connection open for strength.  To express feelings and experiences.   And that starts from day one, to me, not dressing them up like little dolls and making them into any parts of their parents.)

Of couse, I have my own prejudices to get through.

He was looking at Doloise, again.  I was amused.  I couldn’t tell if I wanted to encourage him or to warn him away.  I was sure Doloise could take care of itself, but that was half the problem.

So I sat in silence.

I wondered about their use names.  They had taken the American version of first names, rather than surnames, but when I gave them mine, they didn’t blink an eye.   Of course, it might be common where they were from, but my parents didn’t have their accents.  I don’t know what gave me the impression that they were recent immigrants, probably prejudice I hadn’t predicted.  Then again, who decides ahead of time that they’re going to be a bigoted jerk?

I looked at their clothing.  Viktor was dressed in what could have been a suit jacket if it hadn’t been over a t-shirt and jeans. Perfectly good for dealing with uncertain Colorado weather.  Nellie had on a smart business suit, cut well with the skirt.  Andrei wore slacks and a long sleeved button-up.  Artur wore a black shirt with what I suspected was some kind of band logo, and black jeans.

“Will he do?” Nellie asked.

I was about to complain that I didn’t know the job, when Viktor shook his head.  “America has made you impatient,” he said to her. He didn’t seem entirely annoyed, but there was a bit of an edge to it.

“Viktor was still negotiating,” Andrei said, with a wheezy sort of chuckle.

“We do not have time to do it the old way,” Nellie said.  “Something walks–”

Artur moved from his perch on the wall, uncomfortable.

I started making guesses.  It was something with legs.  “Evil is afoot, because evil does not have wings.”

“It is night,” Nellie said.  “We are surrounded by books.  They will have to read all the words before they can listen.”

Oh, an obsessive-compulsive spirit.  Great.  Like the vampires that have to count all the rice spilled before them before they can move.  I’ve read about them, but never really encountered it.  Of course, for what I did, I didn’t have to know anything about it, as long as I knew what had brought it over and where it needed to go back to… because that’s all I do.

“No exorcisms,” the words got out of my mouth.

“I told you,” Artur said to Nellie.  She looked too young to be his mom.

“It is not like that,” she said.

Viktor hushed her.  “No, we know you by your hands, not your voice.  You are a tailor, not a singer.”

“A doctor, not a performer,” Andrei offered.  It amused but annoyed Viktor – he had a very open face.

Just trot out my failings.  Of course, Andrei could have been offering me a Star Trek reference.  That would have been pretty cool, but I wasn’t getting my hopes up.

“There is no word for you in the tongue of the wise, but if there was, it would be a good one,” Andrei said, as if he had been reading something of my concern.  “We have been talking to others about you.  You will be able to do something for us we cannot do for ourselves.”

Viktor nodded.  “And we will pay.  We have collected a sum from the afflicted.  It is yours if you try.”

Not, if I’m successful.  And money?  It was the best thing I’d heard in days.

I was doomed, wasn’t I?

I laid under Doloise for what seemed like hours, but was probably less than a minute.  It’s amazing how time slows down when you’re being scrutinized.  The funny thing, of a whole list of things I would find hilarious if they hadn’t been happening to me, was that I was far, far more scared of Doloise and what she might do than any magical amulet.

Doloise was saying something about snakes when I struggled enough under her for her to determine that indeed, it was time to let me up.  Snakes?  I listened a little bit more closely.  The amulet was a beautiful silver circle with a medusae-like image.  Ah.  Coil Serpentine.   Thomas slept with an old woman named Adelinda who was obsessed with snake and dragon magics, and I learned a tiny bit.  She was constantly harassed by Ophite cultists, which is why Thomas had gotten involved with her…but maybe I had been knocked on the head which is why I was thinking more about how to work in the classic Indiana Jones line rather than why Doloise tried to “protect me.”

“We are not,” Doloise continued, “what you think.”

Melusine.  “Silence, Zmei.”

One of the elderly fellows stood up.   “And the flames of infinity are so transparent, And the entire abyss of ether is so close, That I gaze direct from time into eternity…And recognize your flame, universal sun.” I recognized it from one of the poems I had memorized for this meeting, “By life tormented, and by cunning hope,” by… Afanasii Fet?  Something like that.

“I am not that one,” Doloise said, but her gaze was pointed down.

“I was thinking something more `Thomas the Rhymer,’ myself,” I said aloud, as if to prove I was really here.  “But she’s not that, either.  She’s here because she owes me.”

“Servant?” The woman asked.

“Guardian and guide,” Doloise said.  You could almost guess her mood from the angry tone she put into the words, but I couldn’t tell where the anger was really directed.  Maybe I had a guilty conscience.  I moved closer to her, anyway, and Sullen Boy moved away from the wall.

“Am I in danger?”

“I could not take the risk,” she said.  “These people are?”

“Simple poets,” the other elderly man, who had been working at the computer, spoke up, scooting away and looking at me.  It was the fellow who had told me to come, and he had the same hint of an accent the woman did.  “Thank you for…” he chose the word, “attending.  The excitement is…” another choice, “it is a good change.  But you should have come alone,” he said, shaking his finger at me.

I shrugged in the eternal, “Well, it wasn’t my idea,” expression.  The teenager got it.

“What are you?” the woman asked.

“My name is,” well, it’s Eastern European anyway, so I dropped it.  “But most folks call me ‘E.'”

“You are the Closer,” Sullen Boy finally spoke up.  He didn’t have a hint of an accent.  “Not like the chick on TV,” he amended.

I nodded.  Hey, sometimes it’s good to have a reputation.

“He’s the one,” the young man continued.  “He showed the kikimora–”

I interrupted. “I didn’t know,” I started to explain.  This could be awkward.

“The way home,” the older gentleman who had welcomed me concluded SB’s sentence with a Look.  That didn’t need any translation.  “It is not a bad thing,” he said to me.   “You brought peace.”

That’s me, an agent of magical perestroika.  Glasnost for ghosts.  Having exhausted a vocabulary I was sure I hadn’t gotten completely right, I brushed some imaginary carpet lint off my clothes and chose a chair.   Something made me think he hadn’t chosen me just to share stories around an electronic campfire.  He needed something.

Their eyes watched me, but Doloise was a concern, too.  I patted the seat next to me.  Good doggy.  Good dangerous, dangerous otherworldly thing.  Behave.

“We come to the library,” the man began, “to share wisdom.”

Doloise nodded, sharply, as if she had heard something important.  I watched the guy who had spoken the translation I remembered.  He sat down again, but his eyes were on the woman.

“This is Nellie,” the fellow who invited me pointed to the woman.  “Andrei,” he referred to the poetry-speaking gentleman, “Artur,” the young man (SB), and “I am Viktor.  We have others, not all who make it each week.  There are always…”

“Forces at work?” I offered the cliche.

“Yes, that would be it.   The library has knowledge in it, which makes it a safer place to meet than a home.”

I understood all he wasn’t saying, too.  Thresholds and that magical feel to things.  Something between public and private, in a strange way.  There were, well, the library was like an onion.

Or an ogre.

Doloise stopped me before I came close to the automatic doors.  “This is a place of danger,” she said.

I blinked.  “It’s a library.”

She stared at me, hard, through those amber sunglasses.  “Does that mitigate its dread in any fashion?  Does that lower your alarms so that you cannot see its true nature?”

I thought for a moment.  “Knowledge is power, fear the librarians,” was more of a bumpersticker than any kind of truism to me.  A librarian wasn’t necessarily a practitioner, although they had access to knowledge, access which indicated a door of some sort.  Perhaps I was in the wrong business altogether.

(Truthfully, I believe that the Internet has the potential to make libraries redundant.  I’m not quite gung-ho on self-publishing because I think that the effort to find someone to take your work and publish it actually does weed out some of the utter tripe, but I’m a firm believer of Sturgeon’s Most Well-Known Law.  (And several of his lesser laws, but that’s neither here nor there.)  In my heart, though, information and whimsy both need to be free.  Which doesn’t mean they don’t have to be sensical in some part.  Glittering vampires?  Give me a break.)

Of course, she could just be referring to the sorcerors.  I found a handful of words that indicated a brotherhood of the knowing people (the “znaiushchie liudi”) that these might hail from, but my accent would be atrocious, and this was one of those places where looking dumb would not be a bad thing.

What’s with having a “guardian and guide” if you don’t listen?

“Be on alert, then,” I told her.  “I’m going in.”

That sounds a lot tougher when you’re armed and you make that kind of practiced swoop through the door that minimizes your profile and puts your back right to the wall.  For me, I simply stepped through the threshold.  I dropped a couple of books I had meant to return last week into the small access panels for that purpose, and then went into the main part of the library.

The room we were meeting in was off to the right, and I gave a friendly (if still solemn – I was on “alert”) nod to the librarian manning the station off to my left.  I see her all the time because the reserved section is over there, but I don’t remember her name.   I resolved to keep it in memory.  After all, she could be some kind of fiendish danger.

Doloise followed me carefully.  I considered it for a moment – weren’t bodyguards supposed to go in front of you to make sure you weren’t walking into an ambush?  Of course, she might be bewildered by the grey shelves filled with those diabolical tomes.  I crossed through the fiction section indiscriminate of the potential hazards that well organized (alphabetical, even!) novels might offer me.

I would totally have been well pwned if I turned a corner and a demon tried to eat my face.  I would have deserved it, petard and all.

I tried to be a little more serious as I went through the doorway.

There were a few people sitting, one standing, and another leaning against the wall in that brooding posture that says their mom or dad brought them and they wanted to be doing something else.  Teenager.  Check.  One woman, and two elderly men, all who could entirely be from initial visual contact from an Eastern European or, dare I say it, Northern Asian background.

The teenager brooded at me, probably because I was the next target walking through the door.  He did, however, drop his jaw a little bit when Doloise came in behind me.  I hadn’t realized she had that effect on other people, or maybe he saw things I just didn’t see anymore, through familiarity, talent, or even a lack of both.

His reaction goaded the woman to look up at us.  She said something in a language I guessed was Russian to the elderly man she was speaking with, and stood up.

“Can we help you?” she asked.  Slight accent.  She was also a blonde, and she wasn’t really looking at me.

I couldn’t honestly confess a sudden interest in poetry, but I didn’t really need to as that’s when she drew out an amulet from around her neck and Doloise pushed me to the ground.