The Night Shifters (27 page)

I took a deep
breath. “Well – if he can, maybe he won’t fault us for doing
exactly what he told us to do.”

“
What he
told
you
to do,” said Voice. “He might call
me a cheater-pants.”

“Do you want to
stick around and wait for him?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“Me neither. Let’s
at least explore. Maybe we can figure a way out on our own.”

So we crept
up the hall, looking into unlocked doorways. We saw a few rooms
like the empty, ornate one we had escaped – but we also saw rooms
that seemed too big for the space they occupied. It wasn’t long
before the situation began to remind me of the hallway at the
Masked Man’s house. Somehow, King’s doors reminded me of those
others, though they didn’t have animal-shaped knobs. And in fact,
they bore almost
no
resemblance to the
Masked Man’s doors, so why were they giving me a feeling of Deja
vu?

Well, for one
thing, his hall had grown impossibly long. If we tried to walk from
end-to-end, it might take us days. “Voice – have you ever been
inside the Masked Man’s house?”

“No,” she said.
“Why?”

“I wonder if these
doors might actually lead to other places. I mean – you know – sort
of as gates?”

I felt
dissatisfied with that description, but she didn’t dismiss it.
Instead, she
hmnned
thoughtfully.
“You mean – like the branches of Camilla’s tree?”

“Yes! You’re right,
I’d totally forgotten about that! And these tree roots are kind of
like branches, aren’t they? Like the flip side, a tree in reverse!
Twice now, I’ve fallen through the branches of Camilla’s tree and
ended up somewhere else. Maybe we can do that here.”

“Did you get to
pick the place you ended up?” she wondered. “Or did you have to
take pot luck?”

“Pot luck. But it
didn’t turn out badly. At least, it could have been a lot worse...
“

We stared at the
nearest door. It looked pretty much like the other doors. Really
the only thing recommending it was the fact that it was two feet
away. “What the heck,” I said, and pushed it open.

It creaked like a
door in a haunted house. Voice clutched my hand tighter, and the
two of us peered into the gloom.

“Looks pretty much
like the room we just left,” she whispered.

But I saw a gleam.
“Wait... “

“A mirror,” she
breathed.

In a corner at the
far end of the room, a full-length mirror reflected the darkness.
At first I couldn’t tell what was holding it up – but as we
tip-toed closer, I realized it was in a wooden frame on a
three-footed stand.

“Camilla has one
exactly like that,” I remembered, with a shiver.

“Maybe it’s the
same mirror,” said Voice.

“That’s even
spookier.”

“But it doesn’t
look evil,” she said. “I don’t think Camilla’s bad, I think she’s
just – you know – “

“Dangerous.”

“Right. She’s an
Old One, like Him, and they’re – “

“Different.”
Different and dangerous. Two things that don’t make you want to go
into a dark room and check out the spooky mirror.

And yet...

“I kind of think we
ought to look in the mirror,” I said. “I’m curious to see what
it’ll show us. Do you think that’s a bad idea?”

“I think we won’t
know until we look,” she said.

So we edged closer.
And closer still. And finally we were so far into the room, we
might just as well walk right up to the damn thing. We stared into
it.

“I see us,” I said.
But that was kind of interesting, because I could see Voice more
clearly in the mirror than I could for real. She still looked like
she was made of glass, but I could make out her features now, and
her outline was clear, almost shining. “Hey there.” I waved at her
reflection.

“Hey back,” she
waved. And when she moved her hand, the surface of the mirror began
to ripple.

“Whoa!” We took
several steps back. The mirror stopped rippling, and now a new
image revealed itself. It looked like Camilla’s tree, I could see
the faerie lights in the upper branches. “Wave again,” I told
Voice, and she did.

Ripples, and when
they stopped, we saw the Street of Odd Shops, with the red- and
green-lighted windows. Voice waved again, and again, and each time
the mirror revealed another place in the City of Night.

“We can see them,”
I said. “But can we get to them?”

Voice poked a
finger at the mirror. It passed right through, rippling the surface
like water. This time, when the ripples stopped, the image stayed
the same. “Where do you want to go?” she asked.

“Home,” I said,
without hesitation, though I still wasn’t sure exactly what I meant
by that.

Voice waved at me
in the mirror; ripples cancelled the old image, and a new one
appeared.

I gasped.

It was my house, I
recognized it immediately. But it wasn’t my house as I had ever
seen it. This was my house as I always wanted it to be, as I could
only dream it.

It was a
combination of all the most wonderful places I had seen in the City
of Night, the Hillside Apartments, the Temple/Garden Homes, the
Gated Courtyards, even (in its own modest way) the wonderful House
on the Hill – but it was also the home of my fondest memories. The
Faerie Tree still stood in the backyard, and this time the lights
weren’t just an electric string.

“This is it,” I
said. “This is our best chance. Are you ready to make the
leap?”

“As ready as I
get,” said Voice.

“On three then. One
– two – three!”

Our hands clasped
tightly, we jumped into the mirror.

Through The
Looking Glass...

I expected (or
maybe I just hoped) to land directly on the front walk of my house,
but apparently it wasn’t going to be that easy. We fell through
darkness illuminated by silver tree-roots.

And it was
a
long
way down.

“Ho boy!” Voice
yelled.

“It always feels
like this,” I cried over the whistling wind, but I don’t think I
sounded very convincing. I had no idea how it was going to turn out
this time – this could actually be the one that got me killed. Why
had I thought this would be a good idea? Poor Voice! She had
listened to me, and now we were both falling into God Knew What.
Probably even the Deus Ex Machina couldn’t save us from this
one.

Suddenly Voice’s
hand slipped out of mine. “Uh-oh,” she said.

I looked for her –
but I couldn’t see her anymore, and when I reached for her I felt
nothing but air.

“It’s you!” Her
voice sounded farther away. “Why have you been helping Hazel? Oh! I
get it now.”

“Get what?” I
asked. “Where are you, who are you talking to?”

“See you later,
Hazel!” she cried, as if she were getting farther away by the
moment.

“Voice!” I cried.
But she didn’t answer, or she was too far away to hear.

At least she didn’t
sound like she was in trouble. In fact, she sounded happy. There
was probably no point in worrying about the chorus, anyway. At
least not yet, not unless she turned into someone more
vulnerable.

Like me. I
looked between my feet and saw a golden light below. I desperately
hoped it belonged to the house I had seen, the one I wanted to be
in.
Feets
, I
prayed,
don’t
fail me now!

Something swirled
in the darkness that surrounded that light. Then a flash of
lightning illuminated everything, and I saw the vortex below:
black, impossibly huge, a tornado of pure Night.

I was falling
directly into it.

I jammed my eyes
shut. This was it. This time, I wasn’t going to make it.

And suddenly my
feet were on the ground.

•

I pried one eye
open. I saw a cobbled front walk, which climbed a series of
graduated steps to a familiar front door.

Breathing a sigh of
relief, I opened the other eye, too. There it was, my house the way
I had always wished it could be. It sat on its own hill, surrounded
on all sides by the sprawling City of Night – and if the shapes of
the neighboring houses were any indication, I had started a fashion
with my notions about what was beautiful. If the popular girl had
seen this all those years ago, I would have been proud.

But maybe
she
couldn’t
see it this
way. Maybe only I could. For now, that was good enough for me. I
climbed the steps to my front door, past little, terraced flower
beds, thinking how much Mom would have enjoyed tucking annuals into
them. My house, once surrounded by ordinary tract homes, now
ascended a rocky hill whose strata and formations were exposed on
its flank and at the top. It wasn’t a huge house, but wasn’t too
small either. I wondered if the lock on the front door was still
screwy. That little defect I could deal with. Because the rest was
perfect.

Halfway up the
steps, a deafening crash of thunder almost brought me to my knees,
and I had to close my eyes against the white-hot flash of
lightning. When I looked up again, the stars had been obscured by
roiling clouds. Lightning strobed inside them, turning them green,
as if an ocean were waiting up there for its cue to drown the
world.

The Hole
, I
worried.
It’s
still up there. And it’s getting worse.

Yet – the world did
not seem quite ready to come to an end. I watched the storm for a
while, worried that I would get right up to my front door and then
some damn wind would snatch me away, or that ocean waiting to rain
down would wash me right into next Tuesday.

Instead, the sky
simmered down a bit. Now that I had acknowledged it, perhaps it
would just sulk until it built up enough steam for another
explosion.

And in the
meantime...

The flowers
still nodded in the breeze, and my front door beckoned.
I’m not a
falsely-dangled football,
it
seemed to promise.
I’m the real deal!

So I climbed,
enjoying every step, resting my sore eyes on the place I had longed
for. I must have passed into the City of Night 3.0, maybe when I
jumped through the mirror, or maybe when I talked Voice into
helping me escape from King’s cave. Plus, I had punched out the
Girl Killer, I definitely deserved points for that. I had my boobs
back, I had my house, and now I was a happy camper.

I put my hand on
the doorknob. And it slipped open, as if my Mom had forgotten to
make sure it was locked. This time, I blessed her for it.

Inside waited the
treasures I remembered. Other people might not think they were
valuable; they were just books, and dishes with flower patterns,
pictures and odd furniture that Mom and I had loved because they
were whimsical. All of them had their own places in my house, which
now possessed multiple levels and quirky little rooms that were
perfectly suited for what I wanted and needed. A little study,
rather like Sir John’s den, even had a fireplace of its own. And my
bathroom was decorated with the glass seashells and glistening
ferns I had seen in the green-lighted windows of the Odd Shops. A
small fountain graced the corner with the bathtub, and at its
center knelt the Celestial Lover.

But the best room
of all was the bedroom, and the moment I saw my good ol’ bed, I
knew what I had to do. I pulled off the catsuit, slipped into my
favorite pajamas, crawled into my own bed, and pulled the covers
up.

You forget in
between times, when you’re fretting over problems and scheming to
make things better, how wonderful it feels to crawl into your own
bed. I hadn’t even thought about it all this time in the City of
Night, maybe because I hadn’t known it would be possible to come
back home. Whatever the reason, if I had ever felt safer or more
comfortable, I couldn’t remember it.

And that was just
fine with me.

Starlight poured
through the window, letting me see just enough of the room to know
it hid treasures I hadn’t seen yet, a wardrobe to rival Camilla’s
and Blue’s, a dressing table with a mirror that held no secrets and
no hidden dimensions. I would examine these things in due time. But
for the moment, I wanted only to be a sleeper, a dreamer. Safe in
my own home, no one could threaten me or demand favors. Bernard had
proved it to me twice – I couldn’t be drawn into any games unless I
left the house.

Soft darkness
soothed my eyes, I felt myself drifting off. But first, Mom entered
my thoughts, as if she were entering the room. She gave me her
anti-Cheshire smile.
Hold out for love, Hazel
, she advised.
Don’t settle for anything less.

Good advice. But
she sounded like she had known that kind of love herself. Was she
talking about Dad?

He doesn’t belong
to this world.

As far as I could
remember, that was the only thing Mom had ever said about Dad. I
probably should have pressed her for more details, but there was
something about the way she said it that made me worry I was
bringing up a painful subject. It’s hard for a kid to understand
all the complications of adult relationships. I had thought Dad was
missing because he chose to be. But what if there was another
explanation?

Your mother was
one of those dreamers. She came here once.

“What did you do,
Mom?” I asked. “What did you see? Who did you meet?”

Once was all it
took...

“Did you fall in
love with somebody? Why didn’t you stay?”

Stop thinking so hard,
Mom advised.
Worry about that later.

“Did you see the
flower beds, Mom? Pretty cool, huh?”