Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
The moment Vile snapped his fingers, the world around Sasha rushed by as if on a very fast-moving treadmill. While they didn’t move, it didn’t stop her from feeling like she had. She flailed her arms out and yelped in surprise.
Virtue was standing closest to Sidney as her twin had a similar reaction. He caught Sidney, but he couldn’t catch them both. Sasha was the lucky loser, and she hit the ground with a groan.
When everything came to a screeching halt, she was face-down on more marble.
Vile, who could have caught her, merely shook his head and tsked down at her. “You really are quite the klutz.”
“And you really are quite the ass.” Sasha lowered her head and sighed. She probably shouldn’t be insulting the eldritch monster demigod of fiction, but her nerves were frayed and she was running short on patience.
“It comes with the job, sadly, yes. I am what your kind made me.” Vile was standing next to her with that faintly amused smile that he always seemed to wear.
As though everything around him were the antics of children, and he was above it all.
“You thought it, not me.” He chuckled.
Pushing herself up to her knees, Sasha straightened her glasses. Stupid mind-reading antics. The library around them was dark—all the lights were off, except for one light directly over them. It was impossible to see where they were. “Please stay out of my head.”
When she went to get up to her feet, Vile extended a hand down to her. She narrowed her eyes back at him, and didn’t take it.
“Oh, now you don’t want help? Make up your mind, silly thing.” He huffed. “Either you want chivalry or you don’t. You can’t be offended both when it’s withheld and when it’s offered.”
“That’s not the problem. I just don’t trust you not to pull your hand away or snap my arm off.”
“Ah! Well, that is a perfectly reasonable reason to refuse my aid, yes.” He chuckled. “Forgive me for jumping to false conclusions.” But his hand was still there, palm up. “Come now, you can trust me.”
Yeah. Nope. She stood on her own, and brushed her knees off. “What is going on? Will you please at least explain why you’re doing this to us?”
Vile hummed and tucked his hand behind his back, unoffended she refused his offer.
He strolled away from her. “Oh, my dear. All you had to do was ask nicely.” This time, when he snapped his fingers, the lights switched on, with that kind of click-boom noise that old warehouse lights tended to have.
It reminded her of an old Frankenstein film.
Row after row of lights lit up, one at a time, expanding away from them.
“Welcome to fiction itself!” Vile raised his arms and spun in a circle, gesturing around them.
They were in some sort of intersection of massive hallways.
Beneath them on the marble floor was an enormous compass rose with way too many points.
It was almost insane to look at. From each point around them was a corridor of books that stretched off into the distance, impossibly long.
The rows of books were still continuing to light up as they went off into the distance.
In the marble floor of each main corridor was inlaid a word. Horror. Fantasy. Science Fiction. Romance. Mystery. Thriller. Action. And on and on. And the corridors branched as they went deeper in.
Genres. A sea of genres. “Holy shit…”
“And it never stops expanding, dividing, and sub-dividing.” Virtue sighed quietly. He was still standing close by Sidney, guarding her. “For better or worse.”
“Welcome to our world. Built over the millennia by all of humanity’s stories, this is our domain, where we rule supreme.” Vile gestured out his arms at his sides as he turned in a circle. “Every story you could possibly imagine!”
Vile’s arms dropped loudly to his sides. “And every single one of them is boring. Strip away all the set dressing, all the fancy names with too many apostrophes, and all the core stories are exactly the same.”
Sasha watched him. He had gone from pride to anger to dismay in one sentence like someone switching channels on a radio too quickly.
“Nothing is new. Nothing is unique. Nothing is unexpected.” Vile met her gaze and held it, ignoring the others. “And we are so bored!” His voice echoed through the library.
“He’s bored. I’m fine,” Virtue interjected.
“Pah.” Vile waved a hand at him dismissively. “Don’t lie and pretend you don’t get a kick out of stomping around and playing, well, you. You have just as much of a part to play in this as I do.”
“I’m only trying to stop you. You started this. You always do.” Virtue kept himself between Vile and Sidney.
Sasha, meanwhile, was left standing on her own. Well. Mostly. Vile was looming next to her, which was something he seemed to want to do.
“That’s because you’re with me, darling. Your dear sister is my brother’s champion, and you’re mine.” Vile grinned toothily at her. “Here’s an idea. How about we cut straight to the gothic romance so I can whisk you off while you swoon in my arms?”
Oh, good. Now he was flirting with her. Or threatening her.
Or both.
Vile cackled. “Now you’re getting it.”
Right. Sasha narrowed her eyes. The mind-reading trick was getting obnoxious. “Explanations. Please.”
“Fine, fine.” He took a step back from her. “Spoilsport. But I suppose we’ll have plenty of time for that later. Because, you see, my brother and I have been playing this game for the past few, eh, forevers?”
“He’s playing a game.” Virtue corrected him.
Vile continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted.
“The rules are quite simple. We each take a champion from Earth. Twins, like us. Poetry and symmetry, etcetera, etcetera. And that is where you come in.” He closed the distance between them again, leaning his head in close to Sasha.
“And with our champions selected, we play a simple game of best of three…”
She jerked her head back away from him. “What do you mean, best of three? Three what?”
“What do you think? Stories, of course!” Vile laughed, clapping his hands and strolling away from her. “You will join us through a selection of our favorite stories.”
That explained where they just were. “But how do you win a story?” That was what made her nervous. “Like, who ‘wins’ the plot?”
“Mmm. We used to judge it that way. But that always left so much room for obnoxious scholarly debate.” Vile adjusted one of his cufflinks. They were little silhouetted skulls. “So now, I tend to go for something a bit more literal than that.”
“Like what?” Oh, she was dreading the answer.
“Lives.” He grinned a wicked flash of white teeth. He held up three fingers on one hand. With each word, he lowered a finger. “Best. Of. Three.”
Sasha swallowed the lump in her throat and glanced over at Sidney. “We…die in the story, it counts as a life?”
He nodded.
Video game rules. Great. Just great. “And once someone loses the third time?”
“Dead forever. You lose.” He adjusted the other cufflink as if this were the most boring and normal discussion to have in the world.
“And what about the survivor?”
“Mm? Oh, free to go.” Vile shrugged dismissively.
“If they’re still sane and don’t want to simply be put out of their misery, that is.
Sometimes it can take a few dozen stories to get to the final match.
Stories often end in a draw or can drag out for a while, especially if the contestants don’t want to play at first.” His grin turned vicious, and if Sasha wasn’t mistaken, his teeth might’ve been all points for just a split second.
“I’m really sorry about him,” Virtue muttered to them. “He gets like this, but it’s really not his fault.”
Sasha was tempted to laugh at how ridiculously different Virtue was from his twin. But she supposed that was exactly the point of the two of them. With a breath, she knew it was pointless to ask, but she had to try. “Let us go, Vile. Please.”
“Do you think that’ll work?” He arched a thin black eyebrow.
“No. But it was worth an attempt.” She paused. “What incentive do we have to not just sit on the floor and ignore what’s happening around us?”
“Then you will leave it up to me to craft the story. And trust me, my dear, that is a very quick way to ensure this gets spectacularly messy. I am always guaranteed to make my own fun if left to my own devices.” Upon seeing her horrified expression, he frowned.
“If you didn’t want to know the answer, don’t ask, dear.
And don’t give me that look. This game doesn’t have to be miserable!
Think of it this way—you will get to experience all your favorite stories.
Whoever you want to meet. Wherever you want to go. Whoever you want to fu—”
“Brother!” Virtue cut him off. “Tell them the other half of the rules. The part that gets them both out alive.”
Vile sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know why you insist on telling them this part. It just gets their hopes up every time. It’s cruel.”
“Hope is never cruel.”
Oh, bless his heart, Virtue actually sounded like he believed that. Sasha watched the exchange, still in shock at what was going on.
“You’d think he’d grow out of it with time, and yet, here he remains, but—I suppose we are both our natures, if nothing else.
” Vile rubbed a hand over his face as he once more answered her unspoken thoughts.
“Very well, brother. Here is their carrot on the end of the stick for you. There is a way for you both to be set free alive, returned to Earth—and that’s to tell us something entirely new. ”
“New?” Sidney blinked. “Okay. Easy. Like—okay, a giant purple chicken. That shoots lasers. And has crocodiles for arms. And is an alien. And—and has rocket blasters for eyes. Who marries a squirrel. Done! New.”