Chapter 2 - Civilized Warfare

Mrs. Park led me back to the French doors that she’d come out of. She was allowed inside without comment, but I was stopped before my first foot hit the kitchen floor.

Igor, our ever-present, industrious, grumpy chef, issued his command from where he was standing in front of the kitchen island.

“Shoes off.”

I paused and looked down at my bare feet.

This was going to be problematic.

“Are you talking to Mrs. Park?” I asked.

Mrs. Park looked round at me with confusion. When she saw my muddy toes, she rolled her head to the side in a silent laugh.

Igor never looked up and never stopped chopping. “Mrs. Park,” he said, “was outside for under a minute and I have no doubt that she stayed on the grass. You have been out there for hours, doing who-knows-what. Take off your shoes.”

“Igor, I appreciate and respect your point, and I would like nothing better than to do as you ask. Unfortunately, I can’t.”

The larger of his two eyes roved toward me while the smaller one stayed fixed on his task.

The wandering eyes sound weird whenever I describe them, and it’d be hard to explain why they never bothered me, but when you saw the rest of Igor, the independent eyes seemed inevitable.

Igor looked like he’d been cobbled together from the leftovers of a jumble sale. His left leg was shorter than his right, making him limp when he walked, and at least one of his feet was always pointing in a direction that you wouldn’t expect. He had a large hump over his right shoulder. The clothes he wore had to accommodate it, so they were all oversized. They hung off his body so you couldn’t see what his chest or arms looked like. His hands were two different shapes, his eyes were two different sizes, and his closely cropped hair came in patches with different colors and different textures. The various parts of his body seemed to be nothing but passing acquaintances. Why would they have to work together?

His left eye—the larger eye—regarded me for a moment, then went back to watching the chopping. Now that he’d seen how unreasonable his demand was, he’d have to change it.

“Take off your feet.”

I grinned. “Well, you could pass me that chef’s knife you’re using, or you could toss me a wet rag while calling me an abomination. There’s less blood to clean up that way.”

He scoffed, put down his knife, grumbled his way over to the sink, and grabbed a rag from the bag below it. Still grumbling, he wet it down (using cold water, of course—it was a bad idea to indulge abominations), rung out the excess water, then tossed it at my face.

I caught it and started wiping off my feet.

Igor said to Mrs. Park. “If you’re meant to be cleaning, you might do better to keep that one out of the house.”

“A little mud on the feet is good for the soul, Ingvar,” Mrs. Park said.

“Ingvar” was what Mrs. Park called Igor, despite being corrected by everyone in the house. Either she honestly thought “Igor” was short for “Ingvar” or she did it to annoy him. Most days I would’ve said that Mrs. Park was too generous and innocent to do something like that on purpose. Other days, I wondered.

“An abomination is irredeemable,” Igor said. “The floors might yet be saved.”

“Yes, and I’ll see to the floors too, if they need it, but I like to have someone help with the storage rooms.”

Igor stopped.

That, all by itself, was noteworthy. Igor never hurried, but he never paused either.

Then he turned and looked at Mrs. Park with both eyes. “Dahlia—”

I glanced around the room, trying to find the stranger that must have snuck in while I was wiping my feet.

Mrs. Park put her hand on her hip. “Don’t ‘Dahlia’ me, Ingvar.”

Mrs—Mrs. Park was Dahlia? I mean, sure, why not? It was more likely than the idea that her first name was Misses.

Mrs. Dahlia Park went on, “That dust is thick enough I could use it as batting in a quilt. I’m willing to respect Mr. Noctis’s whims as far as they’re reasonable, but we passed that point two springs ago! I’m a housekeeper. I have to keep this house clean.”

“Mr. Noctis will be back in a few days,” Igor said.

“And he’ll stay for how long? A day? A minute?”

I watched them argue back and forth while trying to figure out what, exactly, they were arguing about. There wasn’t enough information for me to know what was happening, but it sounded like it had been going on for a while.

Igor’s mismatched eyes narrowed.

Mrs. Park’s voice stayed sweet: “Ingvar—”

“It’s Igor.”

“—it’s clear that you disapprove of my…drastic actions.” Mrs. Park’s sarcastic voice turned out to be even sweeter than her normal one. The words came out like glops of honey. “But it needs to be done.” She paused. “Shall we talk to Iset about it?”

If there had been a crowd in that room, I’m sure we would’ve heard a few gasps and maybe a whispered, “oh, snap!” I would’ve said it myself, but I was too busy trying to figure out if the wine cellar below the butler’s pantry would make a good bunker.

There was no official hierarchy in the Noctis mansion, so an unofficial hierarchy had blossomed in its stead.

Igor ran the kitchen. He was the undisputed master and tyrant of his domain, and even Big Jacky—who owned the whole house and was usually painfully oblivious to subtleties—had an instinctive respect for Igor’s position.

Jack Noctis, aka, Big Jacky, was supposedly in charge, but he was also death. He was busy, not often home, and maybe you didn’t want to call on death himself to settle a minor dispute or answer a question.

In those cases, we’d usually go to Count Darius Vasil. Calling on him would probably be considered “pulling out the big guns.” The vampire had no actual authority, but everyone respected him, so his opinions and solutions carried weight.

Mrs. Park might have wanted to appeal to Count Vasil in this case, but he, like Big Jacky and Olivia, was not at home. He was working on a case for either the FBI or the Torr (or possibly both).

That left Iset. The nuclear option. The unwitting queen of our mansion.

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She was a quiet woman with a beautiful voice and a gentle manner that could win over anyone. She was wise and kind—and I know that doesn’t make her sound like much of a nuclear option, but she was!

Iset had lived with Big Jacky longer than anyone else. Three-thousand years and counting. He’d found her in Egypt when the priest who’d returned her soul to her mummified body had died. Jacky had offered her a place to stay, and in return, she became Jacky’s conscience and the heart of his home.

You went to Iset when you needed Big Jacky but he (almost inevitably) wasn’t home and (very inevitably) wouldn’t answer his phone. She would listen to what you had to say, then offer a quiet, reasonable suggestion that made everything obvious, and you shuffled out of the room feeling sheepish and wondering why you couldn’t have figured that out on your own.

What does Igor look like when he feels sheepish?

…Come to think of it, what does Mrs. Park look like when she feels sheepish?

It would be hard to think of two less sheepy people.

Igor, having had the gauntlet—which looked suspiciously like a yellow latex cleaning glove—thrown in his face, responded by throwing it right back.

“By all means.” He swept his arm wide, motioning to the door that led to the main hall and, at the other end of the house, the library where Iset was almost always to be found.

Mrs. Park went out first. Igor followed. Eager to know what all the commotion was about, I finished wiping off my feet, dropped the rag on a nearby kitchen chair, and hurried after them.

Since the matter technically concerned me, I didn’t feel bad about following them into the library. But since I could only get in on a technicality, I hung back near the archway so there’d be less chance of them seeing me and asking me to leave.

Iset was sitting back, elbows on the arms of her desk chair, her hands resting, one on top of the other, in her lap. She was watching Mrs. Park, who seemed to be doing most of the talking.

Mrs. Park’s arguments were lengthy and passionate. Dirt was the endless onslaught of entropy, turning our homes into tombs. To clean was to use our energy to fight back against the universe, creating order and joy where there would otherwise be decay. I had no idea if she would’ve been as passionate about housekeeping if she wasn’t in the middle of an argument with Igor, but by the time she was done speaking, I felt a lot more guilty about being a slob.

Iset turned her head toward Igor. His part of the debate was more succinct.

“Mr. Noctis said not to disturb the things in storage without his express permission.”

We waited. Igor stood there, looking smug.

Mrs. Park huffed. “Well, he told me that I was allowed to dust the rooms!”

“Yes,” Igor said, “but you’re not talking about dusting the rooms, are you? I’ve seen your spring cleaning. You’re talking about removing things from boxes, wiping them down, wiping up the boxes, putting them back—”

Did…did people actually do that? I thought the whole purpose of boxes was so that you wouldn’t have to clean the things inside them. They were miniature black holes where you put things away so you would never have to worry about them again.

My mind whirled at the enormity of reality.

“Honestly,” Mrs. Park said, “you make it sound like I’m desecrating scripture.”

Iset said, “Igor, when did Mr. Noctis talk to you about the storage rooms?”

Igor’s larger eye happened to be the one closer to Mrs. Park, so that was the eye that slid toward her in a lopsided glance. He seemed reluctant to answer.

Iset prompted him: “Was it before Mrs. Park came to work for us?”

“Yes,” Igor said, sounding relieved.

“Was it close to when you arrived at the mansion?”

“Yes. It was only a month or two after. I was doing the general cleaning.”

“Did Big Jacky explain why he wanted you to avoid disturbing the things in storage?”

Igor scowled. “No, he didn’t. And I didn’t feel…comfortable…asking.”

If I’d had a hairline, my eyebrows would’ve shot up to it. Since I was bald, they could only hover somewhere near the middle of my forehead, giving my eyes lots of room to pop out in surprise.

Igor had been…shy?—No. Maybe not shy. Even in my wildest moments, I couldn’t imagine that. But he’d been new to the house and careful of the owner.

Grumpy, hard-working, proud—and, now, reserved.

That brought his total number of emotional states up to four. Truly, he was a man of many facets.

Iset sighed and picked up her phone. I figured that she was calling Big Jacky. It was a ritual in failure, but it had to be done.

As the phone rang, Iset said, “I’m inclined to agree with Mrs. Park. The things in storage are overdue for a good cleaning—if not removal—but it does seem odd that Jacky would’ve given such explicit instructions.”

Yeah. That was weird.

Jack Noctis owned several homes around the world, and he seemed indifferent to all of them. The only way things got updated around the mansion was when the other residents made an issue of it long enough for Jacky to realize that someone was complaining. Then he’d turn the whole project over to Iset.

I knew this because, around the beginning of January, when things had started to get really cold, Olivia and I had launched a campaign to get the ancient radiator system in the mansion replaced, improved, maintained—anything! In late April our efforts flagged. It was getting warmer, and my attention span is directly tied to how uncomfortable I am. We’d only reached the point in our negotiations where Jacky vaguely remembered that we’d mentioned something about the topic before.

Iset caught sight of me while waiting for Jacky’s phone to kick her over to his voicemail.

“Emerra?” she said. “Did you need something?”

“Huh? Oh!” I pointed to Mrs. Park. “I’m here as her interested assistant.”

Iset’s phone drifted away from the side of her head. “You’re helping?”

She sounded thoughtful.

She tapped a bandaged fingers of her free hand on her desktop a few times, then pulled the phone away from her ear, ending the call without leaving a message.

“You say that you’ve dusted up in the storage rooms before?” Iset asked Mrs. Park.

“Yes.”

“Start with that. I’ll do my best to get in touch with Jacky as quickly as possible. If you don’t hear otherwise, assume that you’re allowed to move the boxes to dust around them and clean the floors, but, please, don’t open them.”

“Those boxes will need tending sometime, Iset.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Park. I know you’re doing your best. If Jacky has anything to say about the state of the house, I’ll remind him that he was the problem. You can get started. I’ll send Emerra up to you in a minute.”

Mrs. Park let out the loudest sigh I’d ever heard. I wasn’t even sure it could be classified as a sigh at that volume. It was more like retiring the arms of verbal warfare.

“That man,” she muttered.

Igor cast one last smug look toward Mrs. Park before heading back to the kitchen. I could understand why he’d want to savor the victory. The few times he felt forced to go head-to-head with Mrs. Park, he usually lost the argument. He may have been king of the kitchen, but Mrs. Park was some kind of fate. Even a partial victory was something.

Mrs. Park wandered after him, leaving Iset and I alone in the library.

I walked over to her desk while glancing over my shoulder to make sure we were alone. “Yikes! Who knew there could be so much drama over spring cleaning?”

Iset sounded amused. “You’ve never dealt with a house full of servants, have you?”

“Where is Big Jacky anyway?”

“Morocco, at the moment. He was hoping to be home in a few days, but I’m not sure I want to try putting Mrs. Park off for that long.”

“It’s just a few days.”

“I think it’s been closer to a decade. That’s the last time I remember Jacky helping with the storage rooms.”

I let out a long, low whistle.

“But if you’re going to be there, that makes me feel easier,” Iset said.

“How so?”

“If Jacky is particular about being there when the boxes are unloaded, it sounds like he’s wary about something. He’s not a magician, so there’s nothing that he could do if anything happened, but it’s possible that he doesn’t want to miss seeing something. That’s the only unique power he has that seems relevant here.”

“He sees things?”

The moment the question left my mouth, I realized how dumb it was.

Big Jacky was death. He could see souls. He could see ghosts. It felt normal to me because I could see them too, but the rest of the world thought we were both weirdos.

“Perhaps the word ‘perceives’ would be more accurate,” Iset said. “You, on the other hand, can see. And you’ll see more than he can.”

I squirmed.

You’d think, by then, I would’ve been used to having two legendary magical eyeballs stuck in my head—and for the most part I was! But it was unnerving to realize that people would compare my eyes to Big Jacky’s, and when they did, I would come out the winner. It felt like I’d stepped out too far, or presumed too much. In a house full of unique people, I was allowed to be special—but I wasn’t allowed to be that special.

Iset interrupted my brooding by saying, “Keep an eye out while you’re helping Mrs. Park.”

“No problem.” I saluted. “Anything specific to keep an eye out for?”

Those magical eyes of mine showed me something new: Iset’s emotion. I was used to seeing feelings written across Big Jacky’s skull, and I’d catch glimpses of emotions with other people, but this was the first time I’d seen anything in the mummy’s face other than several layers of bandages.

She was nervous.

“Iset, are you okay?”

She raised her head. The emotion vanished. It was hard to hold on to the idea that I’d seen anything at all.

“Fine. Thank you.” She reached out for the pen sitting on the legal pad on her desk. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you should be looking for.” She lowered her voice. “That’s my fault. When I arrived, I was so busy moving in, I didn’t think to ask the questions I should have asked.”

“Jacky didn’t misplace some priceless knick-knack or something?”

Iset twisted the pen around in her bandaged fingers. “I’m sure that he’s misplaced several over the years, but you won’t find them in there. Everything in the storage rooms belonged to the man who built this mansion.”