Just past the desk and the walls, the vague outline of stony ruins, covered in trees and vines, entwined throughout the room, like two photographs that had been merged together. They flickered and rippled like mirages, not completely there, shimmering in and out of existence. You couldn’t see them clearly; if I stared directly at the desk, all I saw was a human hunched over a computer screen. But from the corner of my eye, I could just make out the existence of another place, like a sunspot that kept moving the more you focused on it.
There were also nightmare piskies everywhere, in both realities, it seemed, perched on fake plants, crawling along branches, and clinging to the ceiling. Several hovered around the single human at the desk, who was currently not paying attention to the door or the bizarre half-real landscape around him. His eyes were glued to the computer screen, his shoulders hunched in concentration, as the sounds of shouting and artificial gunfire echoed over the speakers.
Meghan gazed around in confusion and shock. “What’s happened here?” she wondered. “What is this place?”
“No idea, princess,” Puck muttered. “I’ve never seen anything like this, and that’s saying something.”
I stared at the two realities, as Meghan continued to gaze around the room. “Are we back in Faery?” she asked. “It’s like we’re in two places at once.”
Nyx suddenly drew in a breath. “Two places at once,” she whispered. “This...this is the site of an anchor. We must be on the mortal side. The other place—” she gazed around in wonder “—must exist somewhere in the Between.”
“Yes,” Grimalkin said solemnly. “I believe that is correct. What we are seeing now is the reflection of both worlds, overlapping because the anchor exists in both places at once.”
A shout rang out from the human behind the desk. Abruptly, he straightened with an extremely violent expletive, throwing the mouse to the other side of the desk, where it clattered loudly against a pen holder. The piskies surrounding him hissed and chattered in seeming glee, and the rest of the piskies in the room buzzed their wings, giving the disturbing impression that the building was full of wasps.
I felt the anger of the room spike, felt my own violent nature rise up in response. For a moment, the fury was suffocating; my head was suddenly filled with images of stalking up to the human, grabbing his skull, and slamming it into his keyboard. He works for InSite, whispered the dark voice within. He’s an enemy, a threat to everything you care about. Destroy him.
I pushed down the urges. Attacking a hapless human employee, even if he did work for InSite, would get us no closer to our objective. Even if part of me was sorely tempted.
“Well, he seems fun,” Puck commented, as the oblivious mortal retrieved his mouse, muttering under his breath the entire time. The piskies in the room, however, stared at us balefully and bared their fangs at his voice. “Playing games on company time, how shameful. Somehow, I don’t think he’s going to know anything about our Evenfey friends.”
“Probably not,” Meghan agreed. “So, there are humans working for InSite that don’t seem to know about the fey, even though they’re sitting in the Between.” She observed the human for another moment, then shook her head. “Something is definitely here, though. The glamour aura of this place is scary. And there’s something...below us.” She paused a moment, as if sensing something we could not, then shivered. “I think we have to go deeper.”
“I only see one hallway,” Puck pointed out, nodding to the corridor beside the security desk. “Probably going to lead us right into a death trap, so that’s something to look forward to.” A swarm of nightmare piskies suddenly fluttered from the hallway, buzzing around the room and making him wrinkle his nose. “Oh, this is gonna get so much worse, isn’t it?”
Cautiously, we moved down the hall. The dim corridor stretched before us, flanked by wooden doors that probably led to offices or conference rooms. But from the corner of my eye, I saw crumbling walls choked with moss and vines, and stone pillars lying shattered against the walls. The scene flickered in and out, like the horror movies Meghan was still fond of.
Nyx shook her head. “This place,” she muttered. “It’s strange. It feels ancient, but I can sense the iron poison here as well. How is this possible?”
“I believe it is due to the nature of the Between,” Grimalkin replied. “Nothing in the Between is permanent—it is constantly shifting, moving between the Nevernever and the mortal world at random. Phaed is one such place, if you remember. The site that we stand in now might have existed anywhere, at any time, in the mortal realm or Faery. Until someone found an anchor to hold it in place.”
“You’re making my head hurt, cat,” Puck muttered. “Can’t you just say ‘nothing ever makes sense in Faery’ and leave it at that?”
A figure appeared in the spaces between pillars, the bleached white deer skull staring at me from the darkness. I jerked up, whipping my head toward the figure, only to find myself gazing into an office with a bald human sitting at a desk, busily typing away.
“Ash?” Meghan glanced back at me, eyes shadowed with concern. “Did you see something?”
“I...don’t know.” The human at the desk continued to type, and the room around him remained empty, but I knew something had been watching us. “For a moment, I thought I saw something,” I went on. “But it was in the other place, in the Between.”
“I saw it, too,” Nyx said softly, her gold eyes narrowed as she scanned the hall and tiny offices on either side. “I think something knows we’re here.”
“Well, Furball is gone,” Puck said, his voice echoing a bit too loudly in the sudden silence. “So, you know what that means.”
We came to a single elevator at the end of the hallway. When Meghan hit the button, the doors slid open, revealing the polished metal box through the frame. A trio of nightmare piskies buzzed out, zipping over our heads, and went flying down the corridor. Nyx recoiled, shrinking away from the opening like it was the open mouth of a dragon.
Puck put a hand on her arm. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “Trust me, first time I rode one of these things, I felt like I was going to die. You’ll be okay, though,” he added. Reaching into his shirt, he pulled out an amulet, a stylized raven on a chain. “You have one of these things, remember?”
Nyx took a steadying breath. “So much iron,” she said, looking in disdain at the metal box. “How can any fey exist here? Even those piskies, those Evenfey. How can they survive in this place with so much iron and—and...what is that word? Technalobby?”
“Technology,” I offered. “And they can survive because the amount of anger in this place overshadows the effects of iron. They’re sustaining themselves off all the negative glamour.”