Guardians: The Last Elder

Chapter 6: Josh is a jerk

"Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt."
~ Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

                                                            ______________________________

Our footsteps echoed as the trio of us rushed inside. But I was lagging behind a couple of steps, unable to resist myself from stopping and staring at almost everything that we passed. The first room was a lobby of sorts, almost the size of a football field with a huge chandelier hanging from the mosaic tiled ceiling. A hearth was ablaze with fire at the center of the room but nobody was sitting on the couches and chairs. Pictures, busts of people I couldn't recognize and intricate tapestries decorated the elaborately painted walls of the room.

"That room is deceiving," Vanessa said when I caught up to her and Mr Blackwell. "Makes you think it's an actual palace or something. It's really not." I gave her a confused look. She smirked and said, "You'll see what I mean."

As it turned out, she was quite right. The rest of the rooms that we passed were all equipped with modern electronics and computers and didn't give the general vibe of what you'd expect a palace to look like. Finally, we stopped and entered a room, similar to the others that we just passed. It had floor-to-ceiling windows that provided a beautiful view of the city. Small cubicles with computers in it were occupied with people, some rapidly typing on their keyboards, others just lazing around. The main wall of the room had a large screen attached to it that was divided into boxes – all showing different images of people and places I didn't know.

At the center of the room, a small crowd had gathered, all of them whispering amongst themselves.

"What's going on?" I asked Vanessa while Mr Blackwell was trying to get past the crowd.

"They are crowding over the bodies," she said.

"Do you know the victims?" I asked. She shrugged. "We have yet to identify the second victim. Our job was to gather the bodies and bring them back before the the mortals started interfering. They had already gotten involved before we even came to know about the deaths. The police are going to be a little shocked when they realize the bodies have disappeared. We'll have to look into that too. Anyways, there's a separate team to examine the corpses and all that stuff--"

"Wait mortals? You mean...you people aren't?"

"Not all of us."

What does that mean? I wondered. But I didn't push since I had other pressing questions to ask.

"I don't understand though. Why do you care if somebody was murdered in one of the, er, other worlds?"

"We don't," she replied. "We never interfere with the mortals unless absolutely necessary. But this is a different case. We suspect that a race of demons is behind these murders. They usually are. Plus, one of the victims, the guy Lukas Herrington, was one of us."

"Oh," I said. "But what was he doing out in my town?"

Vanessa shrugged again. "It's normal for us to visit the other worlds every once in a while. In fact, some do it almost every day. Some have even settled in the one you just came from – the mortal world, maybe because they've been assigned some sort of task or maybe because they've just chosen to. We suspect Lukas fell in love with a mortal. So he stayed back and didn't return. That's all we know for now."

I nodded.

After Vanessa excused herself to talk to her mother who called her over to where the bodies lay, I just stood there awkwardly and felt myself slowly losing patience. After all, hadn't we come here to search for my mom's whereabouts? Mr Blackwell himself admitted that she was in imminent danger. But now he was occupied with other job. I knew I wasn't being fair but I was tensed and worried for Mom.