I'll just say it's been a rough few days. But here we are now.

Knuckles belongs to Sega Corporation. Now read on!

(Chase's POV)

Things got easier from there.

Sure, the remaining two book guards were still flying around – and they'd developed a healthy respect for my bow and arrows. I guess they can master a learning curve if it's steep and painful enough. But they hadn't accounted for Amos and DJ's own skills.

Amos could really throw a "literal can of whoop-butt," as he termed it. He timed his shots with the explosive jars of ground pyrobear bone well, taunting one of the book guards into a corner and throwing a jar at it. DJ herself was able to use one of my daggers (which I was happy to lend her) to stab the remaining book guard. Both disintegrated quickly.

"I didn't think humans could slaughter them so fast," I commented.

"Helps if they're being totally obnoxious," Amos responded, scanning the room. "Although I recall there being five of the little guys…"

Vinny Lee retrieved a scroll from near a door. I couldn't help looking and realized I'd seen that somewhere before. In the library!

"No wonder they were going after us!" Amos yelled, having spotted the scroll in Vinny Lee's hand as well. "You stole their scroll!"

"It looked crucial, amigo," he said. (Yes, I know what you're thinking. Knuckles did warn me off about misgendering him, but I didn't know Vinny Lee as anything other than male. Sue me.) "I didn't feel like leaving it to–"

"VORTEX'S GYM SHORTS, WHERE IS IMIRA?!"

That was Knuckles – and he looked ticked off. I didn't think Imira mattered that much to him. Shows what I know. His hands were flaming, which made me worried. Flaming hands were never good. The guy was wired to explode.

Vinny Lee developed a sudden interest in the tile floor. I guessed he'd been there when Imira left us behind. "What happened?" I asked him. "Where are the other three book guards?"

"Imira led them into the other room," he answered. "Just to get them away from me."

I grabbed the doorway. Very luxurious hallway, yes, but something reeked of sulfur and I had to slam the door before it got into the ballroom.

"Good god, what was that smell?" Amos asked. "That was worse than my brother's gas on Taco Tuesday."

I decided I didn't want to know what he was talking about. I'd gotten a glimpse of the monster through the smoke, and I already didn't like it. "A mefitis," I commented. "A draco of poisonous gasses. And it's dead."

"Pee-yoo," DJ commented. "Does it always release those gasses when it dies?"

"Or perhaps it farts them, too," Amos remarked, which got quite a few laughs out of DJ and Vinny Lee.

Humans had a strange sense of humor. Narakai would never have commented on people passing gas. But Amos seemed capable of doing it freely.

"Did you see Imira?" Knuckles asked, his voice becoming very strained.

I hesitated. I hadn't seen any sign of her at all. But I wasn't sure I wanted to just tell Knuckles that. If his hands were flaming this much at the suggestion that she might be in trouble, I didn't want to upgrade that to her actually being in trouble.

"Anything?" he demanded.

"I didn't look all that carefully! Too much poison in the air! Would you look closely with those gasses going off?"

"Oh, for the love of…" DJ cracked open the door, covering her mouth and nose before she did. When she withdrew, closing the door quickly behind her, it was with a grave face.

"She's not there," she said.

"WHAT?!" Amos sounded thoroughly upset. "What do you mean she's NOT THERE?"

"She vanished," I said grimly. "Like Maude and Tessa did."

Amos screamed something in what sounded like Yiddish – probably some lament, I didn't understand what he was saying, but his tone wasn't happy. I didn't think he'd be that keen to have her back, given how much she abused him. But I guess pack loyalty ran as deep for humans as it did for narakai, even if they'd only known each other for a few months.

I was also duly concerned about Imira's absence. She was their best fighter. If she'd gone missing, with the monsters in this place, we were in big trouble. I also didn't like seeing Knuckles so upset, and it was obvious he cared about her safety – a moot point, since avatars cared about every human's safety, but still.

Besides, there were still monsters to get rid of. And if my suspicions about Matthew Norgate's death were accurate, we had a killer loose in the mansion.

DJ said exactly what I was thinking: "We have to find her."

"But where could she have wound up?" Amos asked. His voice was getting into a dangerously high octave. I could easily tell when a novice fighter was getting panicky. His twitching was worse, his voice shaky – he was positively scared and stressed beyond belief. "And in what state?"

I could only imagine how hard this was on Amos. Bad enough girls were disappearing – and I could tell that rang his alarm bells in the worst possible way. I got the sense that Amos was very interested in the VLADJI ladies' safety – even if he did crack a few dirty jokes. This was the boy who'd diverted a keuranodraco's attention with dessert cakes just so Imira wouldn't get hurt by the lightning. The very picture and example of a gentleman – more so than Nep Wyvern, I thought.

Now one of his female teammates was missing in action. He had enough stress with the disappearing guests. This threatened to put him over the edge. I remembered what DJ said about it not being pretty when he lost it. We had to find Imira, and find her fast – before whatever issues Amos had put us in danger as well.

"Amos!" DJ snapped. "We'll find her."

"But if she's dead, or kidnapped, or–"

"Amos! Calm. Down. We need a cool head when we do this."

Amos took a deep breath. "Vinny Lee," he said calmly to the other VLADJI, "what was on that scroll?"

"You sure you want to ask that now?" I asked. "The book guards–"

"Knowing Imira, she probably took them out herself," Vinny Lee replied, rummaging through his tote. I knew what he was looking for – the scroll he'd swiped from the library – but I couldn't help noticing a lot of crashing and clinking as he went through it, as if there were other items there besides.

"How – exactly–" I began to ask, but DJ cut me off.

"I frankly never ask how much she stores in there," she replied.

I kept my mouth shut about DJ's choice of pronouns. Sometimes, I can learn.

I remembered Knuckles' admonition earlier – that humans had ways of fixing themselves to their reality that were often disastrous for them, and that it would be doubly disastrous if the narakai got a hold of them. That implication did not sit well with me.

It also didn't seem like Vinny Lee was using any of those methods, either – almost as if she was resisting the lure of being a non-conformer. First time for everything, I guess. But that observation, taken with Knuckles' warning earlier, made me question whether the non-conformers really were escaping anything about themselves, or whether they were just looking for worse.

At last, Vinny Lee retrieved the scroll. He then looked around for a table. Not finding one (that hadn't been overturned and/or destroyed in the previous keuranodraco incident, anyway), he pulled out his little square of port-a-table and turned it into a full metal table.

He then set the scroll down and opened it. I scanned around waiting for angry book guards to come in and attack us, but none of them did. Vinny Lee was right – either Imira or the mefitis must've taken them out in the hallway she'd led them into. Who knew something could fall in our favor for once?

Although it had come at Imira's expense – possibly. She'd risked her neck to keep the book guards off Vinny Lee, gone into the hallway where several others vanished. She really was very brave.

The five of us peered at the scroll. It looked like some sort of map – overlaying our location, like the first scroll had, but this was a little different. It looked like a map of the ballroom, with several grave markers on it – three, to be exact – each with its own symbol. I spotted a compass rose in the bottom corner, indicating north, south, east and west.

"Wind, lightning, water," I said, looking at the symbols on the grave markers. "This is a map of the site where the elders buried the dracos!"

"So, we're looking at a map of a monster graveyard? Great," Amos responded. "Sure is nice to know someone was keeping tabs on those dracos when they were buried."

I know he probably didn't mean to insult me or the elders, but I felt miffed all the same. And yes, I still remembered Imira questioning the elders' sealing job.

Thinking of Imira reminded me she was counting on us…

"The keuranodraco's tumba is right in the center of the grid," Vinny Lee said, pointing at the center of the map. "Which means we have a reference point for los otros dos. Perhaps we don't have the scale of the map itself–"

"Beg your pardon?" I asked, because Vinny Lee was speaking part Spanish, part technobabble, and I could barely catch any words that I even remotely understood.

"Yeah, it's bad enough when you switch between English and Spanish, now you spout science-isms along with it?" Amos added. "Make up your freaking mind."

"Lo siento," Vinny Lee said quietly. "I only meant I have an idea of where the other two dracos are. At least, in relation to – I know they're next to the keuranodraco. On either side. But how far apart–" He shook his head.

DJ shook her head, remarking on her tech talk, "Someone has been spending way too much time with Tails."

Looking at the map, I could see what Vinny Lee was talking about. The graves were all in a straight line, and all next to each other. If the keuranodraco had emerged from the dead center of the ballroom, that meant the other major dracos were just on either side of it. But we didn't have the scale of the map, so we didn't exactly know how far apart they were. The holes would have to be huge to fit a threesome of major dracos, though.

Perhaps they ended near the walls of the room…

I glanced off to a wall and found a guard there. He was big and burly – and had big eagle wings, which I was pretty sure was not standard for mansion security.

"How about that guy?" I asked, pointing in his direction. "Then we'll know for sure."

Well, what do you know?

Verse for the update: Hebrews 10:24.

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