Page 20 of Changeling (The Incubus Saga #2)

Breaking into the historical building known as the Animus House in Ellsworth, Maine, was easy.

Since it was before dawn, Nathan, Sasha, and Jim each had a flashlight.

They were also armed with handguns—more easily concealed than shotguns in a residential area no matter how early it was.

They were running low on iron bullets, so only the first three in each of their guns were made of iron to help conserve their supply.

The entryway of the building seemed normal enough as they snuck inside, large with a spiral staircase that went up to the second floor. There were doors on either side of the staircase that led off down separate hallways.

“The police have already been through the house,” Sasha said. “Only one officer was found later in the same catatonic state as the squatters. Report says he went up to the third floor alone. I’m guessing the dark fae we’re looking for is up there, but we should still search the whole house."

“The weird thing is, even though the building was considered a museum, it used to have private tours years ago," Jim added.

"There were strange reports then too. People missing, dead, or who ended up like the recent squatters and were sent to mental wards since there was nothing physically wrong with any of them. After the building was closed up, those kinds of reports stopped. Until now.”

“You thinking the timing is a little too coincidental?” Nathan asked.

“Considering how many dark sidhe we've come across and reports of the Veil thinning...” Sasha said, solemn and steady of voice, “it wouldn't surprise me if this is connected.”

Nathan and Jim nodded. They headed left but, as they came to the doorway, Sasha stopped them.

“Look.” Sasha lifted his flashlight and shone it over the top of the doorframe where some kind of writing had been carved into the wood very neatly. It took Nathan a moment to recognize it as Gaelic, and the meaning clicked into place as Sasha read it aloud. “Here begins your beginning.”

Jim went over to the door on the right side of the entryway and shone his light above that one. “Your path begins elsewhere,” he read. “Okay…I guess we chose correctly the first time."

"Let's follow the house's rules for now," Sasha said.

"The house's rules? You make it sound like this place is alive," Nathan said, and then stopped. The others looked at him and all of them shivered. Anything was possible when fae were involved.

Jim returned and they continued through the door at the left.

The feeling that something supernatural was going on was unmistakable, and not only because of the fae language.

This side of the house seemed to be just one long hallway, which finally curved off to the right and probably connected back around to the other door, unlike any floor plan Nathan had ever seen, or at all like how the house looked from the outside.

Along the walls were open doorways, maybe six or seven, evenly spread out.

Nathan tried not to notice the similarities of this place to one of his nightmares.

They came to the first open doorway and peered inside. It was just an empty white room.

“Well that’s anti-climactic,” Nathan grumbled.

Sasha pointed his flashlight above this new door and once again found Gaelic. “Yourself without one?” he said skeptically. “Yourself losing one? Yourself minus one? I don’t know what this means.”

“Well we’re not going to figure anything out with just window shopping.” Nathan took a step inside the room, and Jim and Sasha were right behind him. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary as they looked around the room.

“Well, this is exciting,” Nathan said. “Room number two?”

They went to the next room and, again, Sasha checked above its door first. This door had the same inscription except instead of saying ‘one’ it said ‘two’ as if the rooms were counting up.

They entered the second room together again and came up with the same plentiful bounty of absolutely nothing.

“Keep checking this one,” Nathan said, heading for the doorway. “I’m moving on to number three. If this keeps up, it’ll take us way too long one at a time.”

“Be careful,” Sasha called after him.

Nathan nodded as he left. Before entering the third room, he used his flashlight to check above the door again, just to be sure. It said what he expected, the same thing as the others but with the number ‘three’.

Nathan stepped over the threshold...and was suddenly no longer standing in a plain white room. The very walls shifted and changed around him into some other place. It was darker, but Nathan couldn’t help feeling that he recognized the décor of this new room, like maybe he had been in it before.

“Guys!” Nathan called, looking around the room carefully to take stock of everything.

This room was larger than the white room could hold, filled with furniture but all old and ratty like no one lived here.

There was a rumpled set of blankets on the floor.

Nathan still couldn’t shake the feeling that it looked familiar.

Turning back toward the door, Nathan called again. "Sasha! Jim!"

“Nathan!”

Nathan had expected a replying call but not that one. It came from behind him, and Nathan knew that Sasha and Jim would have to come through the door. He turned around, looking back into the dark room that shouldn’t exist, and gaped.

"Jim?"

" You could be the one to clean up once in a while, you know," this new figure of Jim said, starting to fold up the rumpled sheets.

"Yeah, yeah," came a grumbled reply, as another Nathan entered from a doorway that hadn't existed a moment ago. "I'm coming, okay?" He started to help Jim fold up the sheets, neither of them seeming to notice the real Nathan watching them.

Nathan remembered now why the room looked so familiar. Enid, Oklahoma. He and Jim had squatted in an abandoned house after escaping a run-in with Gabriel.

“Nathan?”

Nathan turned back to the door. He was only a couple feet from it and he could see Jim and Sasha standing just outside the room. They were looking into the changed scenery at the other Nathan and Jim with stunned expressions.

Nathan felt immediate relief. “You see them too?”

“It’s us,” Jim said.

“What’s going on? How did you trigger this?” Sasha asked as he and Jim stepped over the threshold.

As soon as their feet touched the floor, the scene disappeared, returning the room to empty, stale white.

Jim grabbed Sasha’s arm and glanced between the incubus and Nathan. “Hang on.”

Pulling Sasha along with him, Jim slowly started to back out of the room. The second they were in the hallway again the scene returned, right where it had left off with the other Nathan and Jim packing up their things. The real Jim then stepped inside alone and the scene remained.

“Just as I thought."

Nathan looked back frustratingly at his brother. “Would you mind sharing with the rest of the class?”

“Come here,” Jim said, gesturing Nathan toward him.

Nathan followed Jim out of the room, not at all surprised when the scene faded behind him. Jim gestured Sasha to go into the room alone, and when Sasha stepped over the threshold, the room changed into something completely different.

It was night. A hotel room, by the looks of things. A second Sasha wasn’t immediately visible, but a bouncing brunette on the bed certainly was. Nathan couldn’t help smirking.

“Oh yeah,” Sasha said with a tilt of his head, watching the way the very naked girl was moving languidly on top of his very naked other self, “I remember her. This was...three years ago. Three .”

“It’s what the inscriptions above the doors mean,” Jim explained as the truth dawned on them, though he was blushing a bit and keeping his eyes averted considering the particular scene before them.

“ You —meaning whoever enters the room— a year ago , or two years ago, or three, and so on. It also explains why nothing happened to us in the other rooms. We weren’t all together one or two years ago.

The rooms got confused. That’s why the cops didn’t find anything either.

No one went anywhere alone. Only the one guy who went to the third floor. ”

Sasha stepped back out of the room and it returned to benign white.

“Do you think there’s a room in this house we wouldn’t find you having sex?” Nathan asked as the incubus rejoined them.

“Depends on how far back they go,” Sasha smirked.

“So what do we know?” Jim asked.

“Well, it doesn’t only work on humans," Sasha said. "And whatever spell or power is controlling the house, it must create generalized time slips that zero in on an individual’s memories depending on which room that person is in.”

“ Observational time slips,” Nathan added, “not interactive. The other me and Jim couldn't see or hear us.”

“The rooms aren’t exact to the time, either, only the day, since we saw both morning and nighttime,” said Jim.

“And even after triggering one of the rooms, all of us are fine," said Sasha. "So if these rooms aren’t what’s making people lose their minds then what is? We should keep going.”

“But shouldn’t we keep checking these rooms separately?

” Nathan suggested. “I mean, if we go into every room together, we’re just gonna hit plain white rooms for the next three hours.

You said there used to be private tours of this place, right?

So we gotta assume that while it probably played normal to the general public, something supernatural was being done to the private groups.

But if it was only once in a while that people were found like those squatters, some people got out of this place just fine.

There has to be a way to do the tour right or wrong, I’m thinking.

We do it right, we should still be able to figure out what the wrong way is and find the dark fae at the source. ”

“Maybe, but we’ll be doing the tour wrong right away if we don’t go through all of the rooms,” Sasha said.

“We should backtrack. I'll go into the first room first, watch a while, and then move on to the second. Then Jim, you go. Then Nathan. That way we all hit every room. We just have to be careful when we get to the 3 rd floor.”

Most of the rooms went by without much ceremony or issue for Nathan.

Sometimes it would be simple and uneventful, maybe just him and Jim playing cards and bullshitting, just brothers being and talking about nothing, as if their lives were practically normal.

A couple of times they were hiding, or in mid-run trying to escape from Gabriel.

Nathan was wounded by some of it, but now that Gabriel was gone, it didn't bother him as much as it might have.

He was on his way to room #8 when he caught sight of Sasha rushing out of #9. Nathan hurried over, and the incubus gripped his arms tightly upon seeing him, as if he needed something, someone to hold onto. There was a very familiar grief painting Sasha’s features.

“Hey…you okay?” Nathan asked, wishing Sasha wasn’t holding his arms quite so tightly.

“I…I’m okay. I’m okay,” Sasha said. He smiled big and obviously forced. “Not my best…year.”

Nathan looked up past Sasha to read the door’s inscription.

Room #9, he reminded himself, and then played that over in his head.

Nine years ago Sasha would have been sixteen.

At that realization, Nathan felt something harden in his gut.

That would have been about the time Sasha ran away from home.

Right around the time…he killed that girl.

Sasha had confided something special and horrible in Nathan that day in the hospital when he told him about the first girl he had ever fed from, whom he had also inadvertently killed. The grief of that moment was fresh and renewed on Sasha's face as Nathan looked at him.

“You guys all right?” intruded Jim’s voice.

Nathan turned and saw that Jim was only just now leaving room #8.

Sasha’s hands left Nathan’s arms, which Nathan took as a sign that Sasha was not in a sharing mood right now. Not about this.

“Sure, we're fine, just touching base,” Nathan offered on Sasha’s behalf. “You?”

There was a moment where Jim’s eyes flashed with something that definitely proved the wool wasn’t being pulled over anything , but he knew better than to press about bad memories.

“Not really. But we should hurry up. It’s still pretty early, but we’ve only gone through half of the rooms down here and there are still two floors to go. ”

“You're right,” Sasha agreed eagerly. "Let's pick up the pace."

Nathan turned a ready smile on Sasha, who returned it, steeled himself for a moment, and then moved on to room #10. Nathan couldn’t help being curious about what Sasha’s next scene would be. Sasha would be fifteen, still living amongst his own kind, and still very close to all of his old friends.

Nathan's feet had clearly grown minds of their own because they did not carry him into his room but stealthily over to Sasha’s instead.