The fire pit was a bizarrely seventies Playboy touch, but it worked, not least as the flames of the fire were a supernatural kind that wouldn’t actually burn down the library.
Standing there, I felt almost overwhelmed by the room. It was the ultimate library, heaven for a girl who considered herself a strong contender for the ultimate reader.
“Do you like it?” Anyan asked, his voice teasing. Looking up at his iron-grey eyes, I realized I was beyond words.
In response, I could only moan.
I was pretty sure I’d just had a nerdgasm.
CHAPTER FIVE
What is this place?” I breathed, when I’d gotten my brain back online.
“It’s our Great Island’s Great Repository,” came a woman’s alto voice from a high-backed chair almost directly to my right. I couldn’t see her, as the chair had its back to us and she must have been seated. But then the voice stood, and turned, and I found myself staring into my mirror image.
For there was Jane, just as I’d last seen her in my reflection: the same long black hair with bangs framing her face, the same black eyes in which the pupils were barely discernible, the same heart-shaped face with its familiar plump cheeks, high cheekbones, and button chin, followed by my equally familiar curvy figure. Except where I was wearing jeans and a long black wool sweater, and my red Converse—my official Ninja gear—she was wearing a simple grey sheath dress. The sheath did nothing for me.
You’ve definitely put on the weight you lost sleeping, my brain observed. And then some.
It’s cushion, harrumphed my libido. For the pushin’.
“Ummmmmm,” I said, stupidly, as my mirror-image cocked her head at me.
“Yes?” the image asked, as I continued saying, “Ummm.”
I looked over at Anyan, and then the other me also looked over at Anyan.
“What the hell is going on?” I demanded, as the not-me version of me rolled her eyes and walked from behind the chair and away a few paces. After a few strides and a few seconds, I realized that the not-me was changing. Soon enough, an utterly nondescript woman stood staring at me. When I say “nondescript,” I don’t mean average, I mean she completely defied description. One minute I thought her hair was mouse-brown, and then I decided it was dull blonde, and then I decided it was more of a dull grey. Similarly, her eyes kept changing. From dreary hazel brown, to watery blue, to insipid green. Her figure and facial features appeared to morph between all styles of average. Indeed, that was the woman’s only defining characteristic, what with all the changes: the fact she was utterly average, at all times. I would forget her face the minute I walked away from her, even if that face hadn’t been changing before my very eyes.
“Still here then, Sarah?” Blondie, now standing slightly behind me to my right, asked the woman.
A rueful smile crossed the woman’s shifting features.
“I’m married to the knowledge, Cyntaf,” she said, in a thick Scottish brogue. “You know that.”
“Aye, Sarah. I do,” Blondie said, her own accent morphing to match Sarah’s. “Come and give us a hug, then.”
Sarah walked past me to get to Blondie, and I watched, alarmed, as her figure changed swiftly back into mine as she got closer. Then she was past me, and herself again, but then Blondie was holding another Blondie tight, stroking a muscular little hand over the side of her twin’s head, below her Mohawk.
The Blondie that was really Sarah was shivering, clinging to our original Original like a woman lost at sea. Our own Blondie’s eyes held both grief and wariness.
“It’s been so long,” the Sarah-Blondie whispered.
“I know,” our own Blondie replied. “I’m sorry.”
“I’ve missed you.”
Our own Blondie’s response was to kiss Sarah-Blondie, the Original’s body melding seamlessly and comfortably against her very own shape.
I felt a hand touch the small of my back and I looked up to meet Anyan’s gaze. He looked as curious and as uncomfortable as I did. When we heard whispers coming from the pair in front of us, we both turned our backs. With Gog and Magog guarding the little white van, only Hiral was with us. But he was eyeing what now sounded like a rather heated reunion with lascivious glee, and I felt Anyan use a heavy swath of power to turn the little creature around so he was also facing the door we’d just entered. Hiral looked around just long enough to stick out his long, black tongue at Anyan before he wandered forward to begin browsing through book shelves as if doing so had been his original intention.
“What is she?” I whispered. The way Sarah had morphed her shape hadn’t been like a shapeshifter—I could tell she’d no more controlled it than did a chameleon changing colors.
“A doppelgänger,” Anyan said. “They don’t really change shape as they do automatically invoke a glamour so powerful you could even touch it. It’s strong mojo, but I’m sure you can imagine how it makes people uncomfortable.”
I nodded, remembering what it felt like to look into my own eyes. But, then again, Blondie seemed to have no trouble. My libido couldn’t help but wonder what it was like to make love to oneself, which totally shorted out my brain. Stuck on that one thought, I didn’t hear whatever clued Anyan in to the fact the little reunion was over and we could rejoin the party. But I automatically moved with him as he steered me back to the two women.
Sarah had moved away from Blondie, so that she was herself again, whatever that was. Her form was still shifting, more erratically and wildly than before, but it eventually began to slow down until the shifts were again subtle. Blondie, meanwhile, looked grim. I wanted to hug her, unsure what was going on but knowing that not a lot shook her up. Yet whatever there was between her and the librarian had done so.
“So,” I said, to break up the tension, “I’m Jane.”
I didn’t go to shake the doppelgänger’s hand, or anything, as I knew I’d end up shaking my own.
“And I’m Sarah.” Sarah’s eyes slid over me curiously, before darting to Anyan.
“And you are Anyan Barghest,” she said, a note of awe in her voice. A stack of books came winging from somewhere on the ceiling, to land in a stack at her feet.
“Anyan the Great,” she said, picking up the first book. “This details your greatest triumph, when you ended the reign of Drina the Despotic. And here,” she said, throwing the first book on the floor only to pick up the second and third, one in each hand. “Here we have an exposé on your early life, and another detailing your skill as a strategist.” The books joined the first on the floor, and then a bunch of paperbacks floated up in front of our faces. They had lurid covers featuring a hunky man who was sort of Anyan-esque, wearing a black wolf pelt. “My favorite, the romance series featuring the dreaded Fanyan Barghest, loving his way through all of the courts.”
I cocked an eyebrow at Anyan, who looked suitably mortified.
“Total fabrications,” he told me, blushing a rare shade of beet.
But I was less surprised by the fact someone had tried to turn him into a supernatural Fabio than I was that he had a critical (and not so critical) volume of work dedicated to him. I’d been told he was a hero, over and over, but I never saw that version of Anyan. The version of Anyan I knew, my Anyan, never took himself that seriously.
“And my favorite,” Sarah said, floating a huge, leather-bound tome towards me. I plucked it from the air, and nearly tipped over it was so heavy.
“The definitive biography. Everything you ever wanted to know about Anyan Barghest is in those pages,” Sarah said.
“And we don’t have time for reading,” Anyan said, his voice firm. He held out his hand for the book, and after a long second I handed it to him.
I put a damper on my brain, not letting it jump to the thousand, mostly horrendous, conclusions on which it wanted to pounce, like the fact the book would prove Anyan was quite the Casanoghest, or that he had a thing for livestock, or was a known cannibal.
You have the man in front of you, I told myself, firmly. You don’t need another creature’s version of his life. He gets to tell you that himself.
Feeling better, I winked at Anyan before turning back towards Sarah.
“What’s a Great Repository?”
Sarah’s ever-changing eyes met mine, and for a second they again flashed large and black, mirroring my own. I shivered, but then they shifted again and she was bustling away from us towards a cart stacked with stuff. There were really ancient scrolls, and equally ancient roughly bound books. There were also a few more properly bound books, but they, too, looked incredibly old. Incongruously, the final articles on the shelves were what looked like modern-day, if outdated, textbooks.
“What your human history calls Great Britain, your supernatural side calls the Great Island,” Sarah said, acknowledging my human ancestry far more gracefully than did most other supes. “It’s unique as, due to geography, supernaturals and humans grew together through their formative years. While that changed, and the relationship has since evolved, there is still a symbiosis of cultures here on the Great Island greater than anywhere else on the planet.”