I found myself walking down the library's main row of bookshelves, towards the Librarian's desk. It was the same way that I would have to take tomorrow. The bookshelves were taller than I remembered, and towered so tall over me that they dissapeared into a sort of grey mist above. Yet the strangeness didn't strike a cord with me and did nothing to change my state of mind. I had been to visit the librarian only a few times before, and most of those had been with my mentor, Nick Sleepslicer.
I soon found the very same man that I had been wondering about walking next to me as if he had been there the whole time. If the strange way that the room seemed to warp on and out of reality through the smoke-like mist didnt force me to realize that this was a dream then the presence of Sleepslicer should have. Nick has bwwn dead for years. But we continued down the hallway and I still didnt realize that that anything was odd.
Instead I worried about what kind of mood the Librarain was in. From what I came to understand, he had 3 main moods. One was emotionless, a point at which he seemed bored with everything. As long as you had information or a fair amount of money to pay, you could probably get the information that you wanted. The second mood was terrifying, even to someone like me. When he sat down at his desk and collapsed his hands together, he seemed like an old man and hardly a threat at all. But when he was mad, incredibly mad, he would stand up from his chair. I had never met anyone so tall. He stood over everyone and glared down at them all. Instead of a shriveled up old librarian, he had the build of a proud huntsman who had been training for years. And his eyes were the eyes of the devil when he was angry, and was able to strike fear into the heart of anyone, including my mentor, who was pretty frightening himself. Then his final stage was... understanding, almost generous. Almost kind. He had been in that mood when I had gone to see him last. This mood was said to be just a rumor because it came so rarely. Some that I had talked to about it believed that I was the only one since his family had lived to see him this way. This was after Sleepslicer had died, and I wad trying to find work on my own. He took pity on me and gave me the information that I needed, but only that once, he had warned me. The next time we met, it would be very different. He had given me two increadibly valuable bits of information. The first was a list of available jobs that would be good for me to get my start. The second was the information that I needed to get revenge on the people who had killed my mentor as well as my parents.
The image of the men dressed in all black came back to me. They surrounded Sleepslicer and I as the bookshelves evaporated. I- I couldn't handle them! There were too many! I looked to my mentor for guidance. He was also swarmed by the men, but he still looked to me.
"You know what to do," he told me, his voice clear as a bell and then echoed around me. Yes I know what I had to do. What he had trained me to do. But did I want to? Before I could think to far into it, I took a deep breath, focused, and became Scary Neo. When I opened my eyes again, they were both pale white.
I could tell because now I was watching from a distance as Scary Neo faught beside Sleepslicer. She became terrifyingly ruthless. She pulled the small blade out of the umbrella and rammed it through a man's chin and up into his skull, grinning wickedly as his blood ran down her arm. That was when I felt something warm and sticky running up my own arm. I felt sick to my stomach as I realized that it was blood, running along my arm the same way that blood was running along her arm. But she was me. I killed that man.
My attention was pulled back to the people fighting as someone cried out in pain. I knew who it was instantly. "Sly!" I wanted to scream, but his name caught in my throat. One of the men had stabbed him, and I watched his body fall limp to the ground, just as I did on the night that he actually died. I tore my eyes away from the man who had been like a second father to me and to Scary Neo.
Chapter 19
Start from the beginning
