Common sense dictates that when a person walks through a door into a building, especially one that they can see the inside of through windows, the person in question ends up indoors.
Walking through the door to Sana’s Cafe ended with me standing outdoors.
Forget this place being a secret room, or a hidden building.
It was an entirely new city.
We’d stepped through.
“What is this…” I muttered.
“It’s still a Lost Place…” Wol said quietly. “But I’ve never seen one this big before.”
Tall buildings surrounded us on every side, none of them close enough to close the gaps that created shadowed alleyways. Flickering orange lights from broken street lamps dotted the street, mixing hues of dim orange and nighttime blues. Everywhere I looked, the doors to these buildings were boarded. In fact, every opening had been boarded up by two-by-fours and whatever else could serve as a barricade.
There’s a sense that people develop, especially those who grew up in poor urban neighborhoods. It’s a survival thing. In those types of neighborhoods, you walk a step down the wrong street, and the mood of the neighborhood changes completely. The air turns almost quiet, and there’s a subtle tension in the air. You feel like an outsider because everywhere you go, people stare at you. Those looks aren’t filled with curiosity—they’re a mixture of hostility and wariness. You hunch your shoulders and hurry your steps, heart-pounding as you try to make your trek back to where it was safe. You let things go that you normally wouldn’t. A stranger muttering a racist slur under their breath, cat-calling, those sorts of things. All you want to do is leave.
That’s what I felt here.
It was more than that too. The air was different. The whole place was laden with some kind of magical energy that was a constant pressure behind my senses. The sensation was hard to describe, almost like a fog slowly rolling in. Part of the backdrop, something you’d ignore and accept, yet noticeable everywhere you looked.
I looked up at the sky. The moon had taken the place of the sun, which had been there moments ago.
Yokocho smiled with a mouth full of fangs. “It’s always night in Sana’s Cafe.”
“This is not a cafe,” Mina said. Her eyes were wide as she looked around. I wasn’t the only uncomfortable one here. Seoul leaned into her leg. “I should know. I’m Korean.”
“It’s just the name of the place, Ms. Baek,” Yokocho said. He rummaged around in his suit’s inner pocket and brought out face masks. “Put these on. I dare say you two stand out a little too much.”
Once Mina and I put it on, Yokocho looked us over. “Well, I guess that’s about as good as it will get! I must say, Jain, my dear boy, you really should invest in a good mask.”
Mina’s brows furrowed into a scowl. “That’s for two-bit sorcerers. We’re Society Practitioners.”
Yokocho shrugged. “The place that I am leading the Geistheilers to is not too far from here. Would it be ok if we stopped by first? Why, I do believe we can kill two birds with one stone! It is just the sort of unsavory place where you could ask your questions.”
I nodded. Stepping through the door and entering a whole different plane of existence had rattled me a little bit. It happened too fast, too quickly, without any time for me to adjust. Wol and Mina had briefed me a little, but it hadn’t prepared me for a literal pocket dimension held inside an abandoned New York office building.
Taking our silence as an answer, Yokocho took the lead.
The entire place was just apartment buildings. No people. No cars. Just small alleyways that seemed to loop back on themselves. There were dead ends, either blocked off by large black garbage bags dumped over one another, metallic chain-link fences, or straight-up concrete walls.
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Yokocho navigated the alleyways with ease, quickly putting a good amount of distance between us. The Geistheilers followed on his heels. I slowed down on purpose so that Mina and I could talk in relative privacy.
“Why do you keep talking about that?” I hissed to her, trying to keep it down.
“About what?”
“Society this, Society that,” I answered back. “Like back at the entrance, you said Society practitioners don’t make those types of deals. And now, you’re talking about this mask thing?”
“Masks are for people like them, Jain,” Mina gestured at the Geistheilers. “And making deals with beings like yokai? A bakeneko in exile from Japan? It’s not… it’s not a good look.” She shuddered. “I’m going to have a lot of explaining to do if my harabeoji finds out about this.”
“Is this your opinion, or everyone in Society?”
She shrugged. “There’s a reason why Society is Society. We have rules and laws that keep our practice in line and preserve the ancient arts. Those guys… they’re…” She shrugged again. “You know...”
I scowled. “Two-bit sorcerers? Hedge witches? Scrap wizards?”
She had the decency to whisper. “Outsiders. Society doesn’t keep company like them,” she said, pointing her chin at Yokocho and the Geistheiler.
“You guys were all too happy to have the Hudson Witch be in charge of the trials,” I shot back.
“The Hudson Witch is different. But even she’s… they don’t like her. But they do admit that beings like her are powerful and have their place in the world. But she’s still not one of us. Do you understand?”
“You’re starting to sound a lot like those elites of society,” I said, putting up air quotes. “New money isn’t as good as old money, kind of people.”
“That’s exactly what this is,” Mina sighed. “Look, Jain. You’re one of us now. Even if you lose the Shin inheritance to Victor, you still have the Hallow inheritance. Now that you’re in the know, I doubt this kind of legal maneuver is going to work. And since you’re one of us, you have to start acting like it. Walk the walk, so to speak.”
“Or?” I asked, a small challenge in my voice.
I thought the tone in my voice would get a rise out of her. It didn’t. Instead, she just sounded tired. “Then you won’t get the respect you deserve. And you know what happens if you lose respect in Society?”
“Same thing that happens everywhere else,” I said bitterly. I knew all too well what happened if people didn’t respect you. Mostly from school.
“Yeah, well, then maybe you should listen to my advice,” Mina said. “People are already talking about the fact that your second was a blood sucker.”
I decided to drop the issue. It didn’t matter at the moment. “What’s this thing about the masks anyway?”
“A lot of lower practitioners wear masks as part of their kit. Hide their face when they’re acting like this,” Mina said. “Harder to have the other part of your life invaded by preternaturals, you know?”
“They’d do that?”
“Not if you have the right protections in place. Family, connections, safehouses, a home,” she said, then suddenly stopped.
There were things up ahead in the alleyway.
A little kid wearing a raincoat was jumping around pubbles, his laughter bouncing off the walls. A couple of human-shaped preternaturals were gathered in a small circle, seated on stools and throwing dice in the center. They leered our way, grunted, and went back to their game. Upon closer inspection, I realized they had hog heads above their shoulders. A small being resembling a fairy was trapped in a bird’s cage, sobbing. Her insectoid wings had been torn off. Other preternaturals were walking about too: fae, animalistic preternaturals, beasts, and more. But they were all ragged somehow. Rougher around the edges, like old sketches that had been frayed over time, or been wrung through dirty sewer water.
And I felt the weight of their leering gazes.
Someone wolf-whistled as Mina and I walked past.
“Sexy!” Someone said. It was followed by some more cat-calling.
The Mina I know would’ve come back with something snappy. Maybe threaten the guy, or something.
Instead, she wrapped her jacket a little tighter around herself, eyes wavering for an instant. Seoul growled in her stead, head swiveling to try to find who said that.
…Was she scared?
We reached the door where Yokocho and the Geistheiler were waiting for us.
“This is the place!” Yokocho held out his arms in the ta-da gesture.
It looked like a run-down apartment, abandoned, too, from the looks of it. There was no door. I saw cigarette butts, plastic crates, and used condoms strewn about the hallway inside.
“This looks like a crack baby’s den,” I muttered.
“Oh, you are far too kind. Come then,” Yokocho led us inside.
The inside was even worse. It smelled of piss and human waste, and it got worse the deeper we headed into the building. I held back a gag, and heard Mina do the same.
“What are you two doing here anyway?” I asked, looking at the Geistheilers.
Just like before, the two looked at each other. Same tilt of the head, exact timing, and even the stance of their bodies. The short Geistheiler answered. “A book.”
“A book?”
She nodded without looking at me. “A book.”
“About what?”
“A creature,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. I nodded at her taller counterpart. “How come your friend never talks?”
The short Geistheiler finally faced me. There was the hint of a smile beneath the mask. “My familiar has taken the vow of silence when he was still flesh. He has kept it.”
Holy crap, the taller Geistheiler was a familiar?
“We’re here,” Yokocho said.
In front of us was a plain door, painted with a sickly pale teal. It was the exact door you’d find in an NYC apartment anywhere. A little rundown, a little bland—a decor remnant from an era before private equity firms began to flip old buildings to raise luxury apartments with all the post-pandemic fiasco.
Before anyone could say otherwise, Yokocho rapped his knuckles on the door. “Yoohoo! A bakeneko cat has customers for you!”
The door opened on its own.
“Huh, that’s strange, he usually keeps the door—” Yokocho began, then stopped.
A small green-skinned preternatural, presumably the owner of this establishment, lay in a growing puddle of blood on the floor.
And above him was the biggest, strangest dog I’d ever seen. Its shoulder had to reach mine, and at the moment, he was hunched over and growling at us through the umbrella grasped in between his jaws. The yellow-furred dog bristled, and what looked like a straight mane of fur rose up from the back of his head all the way down to his tail.
There was a moment of silence.
Then the dog hurled itself out the window, bounding away into the distance.
And this was all before my brain had time to register the fact that the preternatural on the floor was slowly bleeding out from his neck.
“Well, that’s unfortunate,” Yokocho said with a frown.
“Are you all stupid?!” Mina suddenly cried, “Get him!”