Madame Macabre returned home well after midnight, exhausted almost beyond endurance from assisting the Liberty Squad in their battle against the Void Titans. She was so tired that she didn't even bother with a concealment spell; she simply flew into the window of her third story walkup in the Little St-Ouen district of Pyramid City, counting on the darkness and the late hour to protect her privacy. Her little bookshop was hard enough to find anyway-the odds that some stranger would be watching it when she arrived home seemed like an acceptable risk when weighed against trudging up three flights of stairs.
If anyone did show up tomorrow asking inconvenient questions, she could always cast a charm over their memories, but she didn't feel too concerned. Despite a sign hanging over the door that announced the presence of 'Tales Come to Life - Rare Books and Antiquities', and another on the door itself that invited people to 'Come On Up!' in hand-lettered Gothic script, very few buyers ever actually made it to Madame Macabre's shop. Quite a few very desperate sellers, usually clutching a book they were very happy to be rid of, but almost no buyers. And certainly no social callers apart from a few highly trusted superheroes. Madame Macabre didn't invite ordinary people round her place any more than the Bank of England held high tea in their vaults.
Of course, she thought with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach as she alighted through the open window, the fact that nobody could get in didn't mean she never had any security problems to worry about. Even as dulled as they were by drowsiness, her mystic senses could tell that something was wrong even before she found her clerk Mordecai slumped unconscious in his favorite armchair, a book with mysteriously blank pages lying open on the floor beneath his limp and dangling hand. As soon as she saw him, she realized exactly what it was that was pricking her magical intuition.
One of the stories had escaped again.
She reached down and scooped up the book with her pale, dexterous fingers, turning it over to look at the spine with a sense of growing apprehension. She relaxed a little when she saw the title-'The Tale of Silas the Somnomancer'-but only a tiny bit. Silas was far from the most dangerous of the narratives she kept imprisoned in her magical shop; if Stabbily Ever After or The Duchess of Bone had made it out of their volumes, she probably wouldn't have found Mordecai alive. But she knew how Silas's story ended, and that meant she still couldn't leave it until morning. Damn. It was always something.
She closed her emerald-green eyes for a moment and made a few mystic passes, her fingers contorting into strange poses as she borrowed energy from her future self. It meant that she would crash even harder when the balance came due, but energy didn't come from nowhere, and Madame knew better than to try to take on this particular foe on anything less than full rest. Silas only knew the one spell, and he was anything but subtle with it, but the longer she left him to his own devices the more powerful he would become. If he had any purchase inside Madame Macabre's own mind, like for example being utterly drained from a full day of casting powerful magic, she knew her wards would crumble from within as well as without. She had no intention of letting that happen.
Madame Macabre felt the bright, sparkling power flow through her mind and body, washing away the cobwebs in her brain and leaving her filled with mystic strength. She made a quick, fluttering gesture at Mordecai that caused him to wake up with a spluttering cough, and said, "You fell asleep. Please don't let it happen again; not only will I dock your pay, but there's a very good chance that you could wake up without eyeballs. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go talk to a man about a book." She cast a quick waking ward on him just in case, then left him stammering apologies as she flew out into the night once more.
She really wished she could find a better helpmate than Mordecai, but there wasn't exactly a hiring website for assistants to the wardens of a mystic prison for out of control entities formed from the collective imagination of humankind. And it wasn't as though she could simply stay in the shop twenty-four hours a day anymore-the world had too many magical threats for her to spend all her time keeping the stories under control. Mordecai tried his best, and if he sometimes slipped up, well... that was what she'd spent centuries training for, wasn't it?
Not that Silas the Somnomancer needed centuries of training to prepare for. Even by the standards of a predetermined narrative, Silas ran on rails a bit-he was never happy with his status as a somnomancer, he always wanted to become a stronger magician, and he always looked for artifacts and rituals that would give his simple sleep spells more raw power. He never understood that he was there as a cautionary tale to young wizards, reminding them that strength wasn't everything. Someone written specifically to be an idiot about their own area of expertise was rarely much of a threat.
(Madame Macabre sometimes suspected the writer wasn't doing it on purpose-the prose was so bland and didactic, and Silas was such an annoying character, that many of them never even made it to the sleep spell in the back that he was there to teach about. Probably generations of student magicians willed him to life purely out of their collective irritation.)
In any event, at this stage, he wasn't yet much of a danger. She simply had to trace him down to the nearest collection of magical items-he was drawn to them like a raven to shiny objects, and she usually found him at some museum or private collection that didn't know what it had and didn't have enough to be worth the attention of a real thief. Then it was just a matter of warding off his battering ram of a sleep spell and binding him back into his book. She'd done it dozens of times. It was almost comforting to have something so simple to solve at the end of a long day of saving the universe.
That attitude lasted about three hours. Then she started to get annoyed. She had checked the Pyramid City Museum, the Antiquities wing of the local college, and no less than three private collections that she'd been keeping an eye on, all with no luck. She knew she hadn't missed him-if she knew anything about Silas, it was that he wasn't subtle. He usually left a trail of somnolescent bodies in his wake, security guards and homeowners alike slumped where they fell as they gave in to the power of his tranquilizing sorcery. But so far, nothing. Madame Macabre was beginning to get a little bit worried. The longer it took to find him, the more tired she would get. She didn't want to fight him on his terms, not when losing meant...
