By the time they came to another elegant arc and Aedan squeezed her fingers signaling another journey over the bridge betwixt and between, Mitei was more than glad to vacate Underhill. It had been beautiful but at some point it had also been a self-made hell for the people who lived there. She found herself glad that the people of Underhill had not been able to call her to them, Mitei was not entirely sure she understood their fascination with her but of course she also did not make any claims to understand the mortals desire to avoid her either.
Luckily the next stop was Philadelphia, as Aedan explained the lands of Underhill made a bridge between the immortal and mortal planes. It was easy to go from Underhill to Philadelphia though it was not apparently possible to go directly from winter wood to Philadelphia or vice versa.
“Oh it’s possible, little sister,” Aedan said as they popped out into Mitei’s familiar maze. “But it isn’t easy to do on purpose, that’s a matter for luck really and rather bad luck at that.”
That only brought more questions to mind but Mitei let them go, along with Aedan’s hand and glanced around the maze. She did not run full out, that would be foolish, disoriented as she was and entirely without a reference on her current location she might end up like that fat dignitary. Mitei took it slow, looking around the corner carefully, scanning the carpeting and the height of the walls before going back for Aedan and tugging him along by the hand.
“Do you have any idea how long we have been gone?” Mitei asked as she hurried along.
“Not really,” Aedan replied as he tried to keep up with her much longer stride. “Time isn’t really my thing. It’s still fall though, if that’s any help.”
Shit, Mitei thought stopping so abruptly that Aedan bumped into her. I forgot about the List! Even as she thought about it she was pulling the usual piece of parchment out of the air in front of herself. There were a lot of names on the List, quite a lot in fact, enough that the thing pooled into a little puddle of paper at her feet. Still time, she thought as she glanced at the names, times and locations on the list. In truth Mitei was not sure what the list would have looked like if she had actually missed an appointment but this puddle of paper before her was exactly what she expected to find first thing in the morning before she sent the assignments out for the day.
She grasped the List with both hands and attempted to send the days assignments out as usual but encountered a wall where she would normally find her Path. A cold sensation crept up her spine as Mitei pulled out a few hairs, weaving them together and trying to create a Pall to direct the List. The strands fell through her gesticulating fingers falling limp and lifeless to the ground where they sat, like the shed hairs of something entirely mortal.
“Come on, we are almost to my office. We can regroup there, maybe Jules has some insights...” At the very least, Mitei did not want to leave her other friend alone and out of site. Not now, when she was on the verge of not just failing an appointment but actually missing several thousand all in one go.
It just was not meant to be however, when she and Aedan turned the last corner and finally caught site of the impossibly huge doors to her private office they were greeted not by one secretary sitting guard outside its doors but all of them. The women were occupied at their desks having a rather heated conversation but Megan noticed Mitei with Aedan and hurried over to fold Mitei into a tight embrace.
“What has happened?” Mitei asked confused, “Megan, are you – crying?”
“A lot has happened since your last visit dear,” Megan said pulling back and wiping her face. “Seems Roth finally pulled off her coup. We’ve all been summarily dismissed.”
Mitei stopped in her tracks, feeling like all of her limbs had finally decided to transform after all, into something like water as she slid gracefully to the floor. “I have lost the company.”
***
They’d been traveling for what could have been hours, or days, or maybe a month. Except that last couldn’t be right could it; if we’d been traveling that long surely I’d be more than a little hungry by now. Jules caught up to Leo again, stumbled and reached out to the taller man to steady herself and keep him from taking yet another giant leap forward.
“This isn’t working,” she said surprised to hear as much strength in her voice as she did, she felt so much more tired than she sounded. Hungry and thirsty too, “we keep going forward but we don’t seem to have actually gotten anywhere, the terrain never changes.”
It was a depressing thought, something neither one of them had wanted to mention once they had finally started moving again. But it had to be faced at some point and Jules hated beating around the bush of uncomfortable truths. Not only did they not appear to be making any remarkable forward progress, potentially making it harder for Mitei to find them in the process but getting no closer to finding their own way out, they also hadn’t come across the increasingly vital elements of food and water. It was time to stop and rethink their strategy but Leo hadn’t wanted listen to reason up till now each subsequent attempt on her part being met with greater and greater resistance.
Argumentative fool.
Well, Jules had had enough of his attitude; it was time to take the reins of this little endeavor firmly in hand. The thought that the woman who had so recently been blown up and roasted alive was the more rational party in this instance was laughable but it didn’t make the assessment any less true, Jules didn’t know what Leo’s problem was and didn’t care, it was a puzzle for happier times and right now didn’t qualify. She was prepared to the throw the lanky looking teacher down and sit on him if she had to in order to get him listening again.
She felt him tense beneath her hand, she could almost see him straining to concentrate on a place just a few more feet forward of their current location and Jules did the only thing she could think of to stop him from stumbling blindly forward - she punched him right in the breadbasket.
Leo went down with an inelegant whoosh of air, grasping his belly and giving her the most wounded look she’d ever seen on a grown man, “I tried talking but apparently you’re too far gone to listen. We have to stop and rethink this!”
She had his attention now, though the look he gave her next was rather less wounded and more murderous. “We have to keep going if we want to get out of here, it’s all we can do.”
“Not really,” she said sitting down in front of him, though making sure she stayed out of easy arms reach. “Look, we only really tried moving forward – we haven’t tried calling out yet, or looking for actual clues, we’ve just been running forward blindly like a scared child lost in the woods. That’s the kind of stupidity that won’t just get us lost, it might get us killed.”
He was sitting up now, that murderous look was gone again and he just looked tired and confused. She could work with tired and confused, “alright then. What do you propose we do first?”
That was the question though wasn’t it? Jules wasn’t sure; she sure as hell didn’t have her cell phone with her, it was probably so many scraps of shrapnel in her car by now. Alright then, next up was, “we should look for food.”
Leo actually fell over laughing, “I didn’t notice any drivethru’s but if you think there might be a McDonald’s around the next corner I could totally go for a Big Mac.”
“Don’t be an ass, I know that’s really hard for you but try anyway.” Jules stood back up, “so far we haven’t tried actually looking for food now have we?”
“Well if there was anything edible we would come up on it eventually…”
“Not if we don’t try looking for it, not the way this place seems to work. Why not let me lead for a while and I’ll see if I can’t steer us toward dinner, or breakfast, I can’t really tell what time it is anymore.”
For a wonder he didn’t argue with her and even made a gallant gesture indicating she should make the first move. Great, now if only I knew what that first move should be – well I guess I should concentrate on food. Jules filled her mind with tho
ughts of edibles, starting with the type of cheap hot meals she could buy easily in places like McDonald’s then vetoing that image and concentrating on raw ingredients, the stuff she could pick right up out of the fields back home and pop into her mouth. Delicious fruits and vine ripened veggies, ripe near to bursting and begging to be harvested. When her mind was so full of the memories and images that she was starting to drool, she took a step forward and stumbled when the ‘ground’ abruptly changed height and texture between steps.
One moment she’d been standing on indistinct but flat ground, the next well, what she was standing on now was definitely firmer and textured more roughly against her bare heels. Both she and Leo had stopped trying to look around a long time ago but Jules couldn’t resist the urge to look down after so many miles of nothing changing beneath her toes.
The ground here was different, still very hard to focus on but - it was impossible to put her finger on the differences mentally alone so Jules reached down and felt something round almost immediately beneath her fingers. Even touching it as she was, it was still hard for her mind to focus on, so she tried tapping it, trying to use her other senses to identify this odd piece of Path.
Hollow. She let her fingers trace its circumference and found it to be not quite a perfect sphere, the texture was odd too, hard to identify how but when she tried she found she could pick the object up in her hands. Trying to grasp something she couldn’t see was a mind warping trip but she tried not to think about it too much, instead turning back in the direction she thought she’d come weird object held up in front of her and a shout on her lips to alert Leo to her apparent success.
Leo wasn’t there.
Not behind her, above, below or any of the directions she frantically cast her gaze. Great, now I’ve lost him, she thought grasping the round object and feeling the first really gripping signs of fear since she’d come back to her senses in this formless hell. No place is half as frightening when you’re with someone as it can be when you’re alone and Jules felt all of the bluster going out of her, along with all the strength in her knees almost dropping the strange object she’d found as she slumped to the ground.
The horror of her situation slammed into her so hard that she nearly blacked out with the sudden realization, she was lost in a place with no exit and the only person who even knew she was here was far away from her now. She might never find him again and what then?
Jules forced herself to take a deep breath. Then another and another, by the time she was on her fifth breath she could draw it in and let it out without sobbing and she whipped her checks with Leo’s sleeve noticing for the first time the warm scent of him still lingering to the fabric. No way was she giving up now, not when she had found something she thought might be edible, nope not even an option. I just needed to let out all that tension, all better, she thought focusing on the task at hand and pushing all extraneous fear or consequences to the back of her mind. Jules searched on the ground around her, finding two more of the hollow round objects and gathering them into her arms. I’m going to find that jerk and make him eat these, she thought taking a step into the formless void.
***
Never in all the years that Mitei had had this particular office had it ever been as full with her loved ones as it was now. All of the secretaries assigned here were currently bustling about the space. They knew better than to flood her with all their questions at once but there was so much to do with her sudden appearance that there was a distracting whirlwind of activity all the same.
Megan directed the group, sending some to fetch food and others to pick out an assortment of clothes for their shocked and silent boss. Of all the wonders, even Aedan had been taken aside and was conversing quietly with Megan in the corner while Sarah and Ashley bundled Mitei into the bathroom.
The pair of women clucked to see the state of her naked form. Wiping her down with the utmost care, combing out her silken hair and gently clothing her again in something soft and warm before pulling the customary robe on over it all, Mitei barely noticed their ministrations or even what she was wearing. When they ushered her out of the bathroom and back to the seating area near the doors where a rather large meal, by her previous standards, had been laid out, they had to push her down rather ungently to get her to sit in one of her beloved overstuffed armchairs.
“Mitei?” She just sat; vacant eyed, the piles of steaming food quickly cooling. How could everything go so wrong so quickly? Someone was calling her but the voice barely penetrated, she felt so tired suddenly as if all the rest she had managed to earn herself in the last thousand years or so did not matter at all.
“Tsk, snap out of it.” If the words had not been enough Aedan made sure to get through to her with a slap upside the back of her head, Mitei sputtered startled and then looked around as if she was only just waking, “see, sometimes even the ‘almighty’ need a bit of rude awakening now and again.” Aedan was saying, hands raised in a gesture probably meant to ward off some of the murderous looks that her flock of dedicated secretaries where now casting his way. Suddenly Megan looked a lot more capable with that cake knife than any assassin Mitei had ever seen before.
She laughed, long and sudden, letting the mirth sweep away the last of the fuzz in her head. The room quieted immediately, though her secretaries were incapable of sharing her laughter they all seemed to relax a bit to see her in a more normal mood.
“Explain,” she said simply when she regained her breath and Megan had shooed most of the other secretaries back to their desk with instructions to keep packing and not let anyone know that Mitei had been found.
“There was a board meeting this morning but that’s not where all of this started,” Megan began, then hesitated, sitting down beside Mitei and grasping her hands gently and looking her directly in the eye even though it was obvious the effort cost her greatly. “It started with a bomb in Jules car.”
Megan went on detailing the horror of the bomb, how the emergency crews had been able to identify the owner of the car and the presence of enough flesh to suggest that she or someone had actually been in the car when it exploded. Yet how they hadn’t managed to find enough material to make up an entire body and had contacted Jules’ father before the company could stop them. The reports of strange happenings in a Los Angeles high school that seemed to connect Mitei to that location at about the same time, several students and teachers gravely injured. Some babbling nonsense about gods, Death, a steaming woman and of all things their newly returned math teacher.
And Leslie Roth, how that woman had taken advantage of the emergency board meeting called to deal with the PR nightmare that both incidents represented. How Roth had mentioned that Mitei’s apparently worsening mental and physical condition had obviously conspired to make it impossible for her to do the jobs at hand of running a multinational corporation and handling the day to day business of Death. Finally how the board had summarily agreed to appoint Roth as the acting CEO and demote Mitei to nothing more than a salaried President in name only, while most of her executive power was funneled right into Roth’s hands.
Roth had immediately fired all the secretaries, excepting Megan and Anne, Mitei had always suspected Anne was working for Roth but was surprised to find that Megan was spared as well. Megan spent the last five minutes of her explanation crying and begging forgiveness for no greater crime than accidently sharing a blood line with Roth. Mitei let her weep and dissemble, patting her head absently while the pieces finally fell into place.
So, she had not actually healed another stranger, there still were only two people who had withstood her touch, staggeringly good news in the midst of all the bad. Still if Mitei thought about it, she could feel time shifting forward; feel thousands of names on her List that would not be met with a representative of Death today, perhaps tomorrow as well. It itched horribly and burned a bit, nothing about it made her feel well at all in fact.
First she would have to find them, Leo and Jules, bring them back
here. Once she had them both back she would have control of her path and she could take care of her remaining appointments and after that – she would deal with Leslie Roth.
***
Jules had been gone for far too long. Shortly after she’d disappeared on the Path, Leo realized their mistake. She didn’t appear a little further in front of him, or beside, above or below, she was completely out of site and presumably lost on the Path that neither of them really understood. He had to stop himself from taking so much as a single step when he realized that. Without an anchor point, he couldn’t even be sure if he could pace in place of if each step would take him farther from where he had started and make it impossible for her to meet up with him later.
This was exactly why he hadn’t wanted to blunder off with half-baked locations in mind. Not that she would have listened to him, or now he had time to think of it that he would have in her place. Jules was right, he’d been pretty focused on being a jerk since he’d gotten her to stop screaming and she’d mentioned Mitei’s name. Completely alone now, as he had never been before and devoutly wished never to be again, Leo could admit to himself that Mitei triggered deep seated and primal fears that he never would have claimed to have before.
Finding out that he had these kinds of irrational fears to begin with hadn’t been a comfortable moment of personal growth and admitting that he was afraid of anything, but especially something so formless and indistinct, galled down to the very core of his being. It was easier just to push anything having to do with that fear away than face it. A lot easier in fact. Unfortunately he had also noticed that it was getting harder and harder not to let that fear dictate his actions and not only was he coming off as a bigger and bigger ass, he had let something like this happen to Jules.