“Oh—so this is a war of Zippos,” Loki grinned in the dancing fire. “I light up mine and you don’t like it because you think that yours is better. And where did you get that Zippo; a Darth Vader Zippo? Are you kidding me? You don’t even smoke.”
“Shut up.” Axel’s face blurred behind the fire. Loki thought Axel’s little Snow White adventure yesterday helped boost the feistiness in him.
“Don’t you ever tell a vampire killer to shut up,” Loki raised his voice from a whisper to a thick angry whisper, spitting all over the fire.
“I haven’t seen you kill cockroaches. The vampire princess could’ve torn you to pieces yesterday. God only knows why she spared you.”
Loki lowered his eyes. Axel was right. There was no explanation why she‘d spared their lives yesterday, but he doubted she did it for Axel. Why was Loki different from the others and how was he still alive after she’d laid her eyes on him?
He wondered if he should tell Axel about his dream in the parking lot, but he thought Axel would read too much into it.
“Look here,” Axel said. He pointed at a small door, the height of a chair. It was a wooden door with strange engravings on it, and it had a doorknob the shape of a rabbit’s nose.
“Axel?” Loki pointed a finger at the door. “What is this?—and don’t say it’s a door.”
“It’s not a door,” Axel took off the goggles and leaned forward. “It’s a secret door.”
Instead of stomping his feet and screaming, Loki leaned forward, so that their noses almost touched. “For your information, a door that looks like a door can’t be a secret door. If it were a fireplace that actually turned into a door it would be a secret door.”
Axel thought it over, scratching his temples. “It’s a magical, short, door. Are you satisfied?”
Loki sighed, breathing out warm air that stuck on Axel’s face like steam from a boiling kettle.
“So why is it short?” Loki said.
“I think it’s made for dwarves,” Axel giggled. “You know Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and now a short doo—“
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. What’s behind this door?”
“All the secrets we need to know about your vampire princess,” Axel reached for the nose-shaped doorknob and began twisting to open it. The nose looked too real. Loki twitched a little.
“Peep,” Axel squealed, “just kidding. You know that doors don’t have noses, don’t you?” he said as he opened it, and a golden light showed through from inside.
Loki knelt down to peek in. He saw a huge room, the secret library with the un-forged books, he presumed. Axel squeezed himself through, crawling on all fours. Loki followed him like a rat after cheese.
“Close the door behind you,” Axel demanded, standing up, ruffling the dust off his jeans.
“Are you sure no one can lock the door from outside and trap us inside?” Loki asked.
“Stop worrying so much. Live a little,” Axel said, standing behind a big round table with a single lamplight the shape of an apple next to numerous books. “Why is it that you always have to have a plan? We’ve just entered an amazing secret library. Enjoy it, and loosen up.”
Loki wasn’t going to argue now. Axel had no idea who Loki was and why he wanted to kill the vampire princess. To Axel, this was the best adventure he’d ever had, and Loki envied him slightly. How amazing was it to be able to enjoy every moment of your adolescence without being on a mission?
Loki examined the multi-leveled shelves stacked up high. The secret library was circular, with a ceiling that was tapered to a point, suggesting they were inside some sort of a tower—he’d never seen a tower sticking up out of Rumpelstein High. The walls were lined with bookshelves so high Loki didn’t think that the tall ladders set on casters all over the library could reach the top. The books were bound in leather and velvet, clasped with locks made of obsidian. The spines were decorated with glowing gold scripts and waving calligraphy that he couldn’t read. Some shelves were labeled as incomplete; some were empty and labeled with mysteriously unreadable language. The floor underneath was inlaid with chips of glass and precious stones woven together, forming some kind of pattern, like a secret message. Loki circled around it, trying to unlock the logic of it. He sensed that the pattern held readable letters designed to look like a crawling snake on half a circle.
”Is that a letter j?” Loki asked Axel.
“Yep,” Axel raised his head from the book he was inspecting.
“J,” Loki tried to read. “a,” he circled around it. “Is that a w?”
“The whole word reads: Jawigi.” Axel said. “Fable told me she heard it’s a secret and powerful word that not many people know about. It’s a kind of a spell or doorway to something.”
Loki looked at it again and Axel was right. It read:
J A W I G I
Loki swallowed, looking back at Axel.
“What’s wrong?” Axel asked.
“I think I read this word somewhere before,” Loki tried to remember He wondered if it was a suppressed memory from the days before he was shadowed.
“How so, have you ever been here before?” Axel raised an eyebrow.