“Let’s go back to the part where you mentioned dying, and assume it’s not going to happen. Because it can’t. You’re making it clear it can’t.”
“Blake. Witch hunters. They’re the one thing Rose was most worried about, the reason she finally caved and did the dead man’s switch. Even if we manage to beat them, the house is going to get raided at nightfall. We-”
“Trouble!” Tiff called out.
Paper was pouring in through the gap in the door on the second floor. Reams of it, yellowed and old, moving through the space as if it had a life of it’s own, and coming through in piles. Hundreds of pages, with writing scrawled on them.
The influx of paper stopped.
“Shit! Don’t let her form!” Ty called out.
Tiff went from deer-in-the-headlights to action. She didn’t cross the distance in time.
The pile of scattered papers rose off the ground. A human figure was standing from beneath it all, and as the papers slid left, right, forward and backward off the pile, the air caught them and shuffled them together.
The end result was a girl in old fashioned clothes, carrying a diary bound in skin, complete with ugly black stitches. Her head hung, her hair in her eyes. Her lips were painted crimson.
One of the bogeymen they’d sent out the door only a minute ago.
“It’s a bounce!” Alexis called out, springing to her feet. “They blocked her somehow! She’s after the nearest available target!”
Return to sender.
A very good reason many practitioners were very careful before they sent a curse or a demon stomping over to their enemies. If they fucked up, or if the enemy was clever or strong enough, that same curse or demon or whatever could come back, stronger.
Clutching her diary to her chest, the girl advanced on Tiff, hard shoes click-clacking on the ground.
Tiff had only just managed to get both hands and both feet onto the ladder when she saw how close the diary girl was. A step away.
“Jump!” Ty called out.
Tiff did, shoving herself away from both the diary girl and ladder.
Ty caught her awkwardly. Both fell to the ground.
Alexis was already at the cabinet behind the big wooden desk when the diary girl stepped off the ledge above the ladder. Alexis turned her back on the girl, throwing open the cabinet doors to look at the contents.
Rather than fall as a body, the diary girl turned into pages again. They filled the lower half of the room.
I heard cries of pain as the pages blocked my view of the others.
“Blake,” Alexis said. “Look after -ow, god!- After Rose. Don’t trust your instincts when it comes to her. Go do what you can, but go!”
“Alexis-”
She knocked something over or pulled it out of the cabinet. I heard a clatter. “Go!”
The pages coalesced into the diary girl’s body again. Seeing her up close, I could make out how her flesh was just carefully cut pieces of paper, stacked atop one another, some pieces with blood on the edges. Her old fashioned 40’s dress was made of more paper, yellowed and scribbled on in places. Her eyes, now that I could see them, were the only thing that was real.
A book of flesh, a body of paper.
Alexis, Tiff, and Ty were each bleeding from a thousand papercuts. Not enough to make blood gush or pour, but enough to make beads of blood appear at different points along the lines.
“Bounce her back,” I said.
“Antique box,” Alexis said, standing just to my left. She held a box a human might have been able to fit inside, but only if they really contorted themselves. “Not sure how to get her in it, but once we do, we can push her outside the library and remove the lid.”
The paper girl tilted her head. Her hair shuffled to a more appropriate position, considering the angle and gravity.
A moment later, the paper girl attacked, becoming a flurry of papers, blowing past Alexis as if she were a simple stack of paper in the midst of a very small tornado.
“Alexis!” Tiff shrieked.
Alexis did what she could, pushing against the headwind, box held up. Not a single paper found its way inside.
The box fell, cracking on the floor.
Each return-to-sender makes the summoning stronger, I thought.
Alexis was bleeding more openly now, little rivers of blood leaking out of wounds. As she moved her hands to her face, some slits opened a little wider, allowing a bit more blood out.
“Got another box?” Ty asked.
“In the bedroom upstairs,” Alexis said. “Ow. Oh god, this hurts.”
I felt my heart pounding in my chest. What to do? There wasn’t anything inside the room that I could use, even if I could afford the spiritual energy I needed.
I couldn’t break the mirror without losing all access to the library.
Words, then.
“Diary girl,” I called out.
“Mirror boy,” diary girl whispered back. When she turned her head, her neck didn’t bend so much as the individual papers turned. She could have turned her head three-hundred and sixty degrees around.
She smiled, the paper of her face reshuffling, her expression changing in the wake of the rearrangement. “Paper and wood. Affinity. A-F-F-I-N-I-T-Y. I’ll let you free when I’m done. If they bring you up and out and you manage to kill them, you’re free.”
“I don’t want you to kill them,” I said.
“E-X-S-A-N-G-U-I-N-A-T-E,” she spelled out the word. “The blood loss will kill them, not me. Then I’ll have their skin, and I’ll make a new book with a new cover and fill it with new words.”
“Leave them alive,” I said.
“Ohh,” she said, her voice almost sing-song, amid the whispers. “We can sup on the fear. Cut them in the sensitive parts of the flesh. In the meat between each tooth, the corners of the mouth, the eyelids and the eyes themselves. The webbing of the fingers and toes. The achilles tendon. Then, when we have them just how we want them, the soft flesh of the stomach… The armpit… the thigh.”
If I hadn’t known better, I’d have almost thought she was trying to be seductive. She breathed those last few words.
My thoughts weren’t really focused on that at all, outside of how I might use it.
No, my concern was on how I could argue for my companion’s lives. Or, more precisely, how I couldn’t.
She’s too far gone. There’s no human left inside.
“Blake,” Ty said. “I need you to do something for me.”
“I’m going to deal with this. Then I’m going to help you figure out how to keep the witch hunters out, and you guys are going to be safe.”
The paper girl hugged her diary to her chest, hard.
“After all this is said and done, I need you to look after that obnoxious, glorious little bird of ours, okay?”
“Tyler, no, that’s-” I started.
“Blake, shut up,” Alexis said, with more ferocity than I’d heard from her in a long, long time. “They bounced one back at us. They can bounce more. We don’t have food in here, we don’t have water. We don’t have time. There are enemies at the metaphorical gates, we’re outnumbered, we’re being overrun, and we’re in no shape to weather a siege.”