Her step-mother threw a dishtowel at him. "Or at least he thinks he is," she amended, frowning at her father. "All those stories you told him while he was growing up have apparently stuck with him, and he's certain that he feels like he's dying because of some world that doesn't exist."

Sarah's father tossed the dishtowel back at his wife. "Yes, well, he's been trying to find that red book of yours," he explained gruffly. "Labywhatsits."

"Labyrinth," Sarah corrected faintly, knowing that she was pale from the announcement they'd just made and trying to work up some life into her skin and tone. Her heart was still hammering, and her limbs felt weak and yet sparking with electricity from her shock. She was sure that she'd be numb from the passing terror as it cleared out of her system, and just tried to fight it off.

"Yeah, that one," her father continued with a grimace. "Says he's supposed to read it every year before his birthday, before you get here, or something bad will happen to him. He's misplaced it, despite him saying that it's just up and vanished. Things don't vanish mysteriously."

Her step-mother nodded a little. "He's sure that it's gone of its own accord, though. We've tried looking for it, and he has, but he can't find it. He says that he feels like he's withering inside, or that something's off-center, and it's been getting worse over the last few years. He's dead set on something bad happening today if he doesn't find and read that story before he officially turns fifteen, and he's even more certain that it'll be his death."

"Sarah, we've taken him to doctors over the last few years, psychologists as well, but nobody can find anything wrong with him other than this obsession he has," her father announced in frustration. "He's normal in every other way for his age, ahead of his age in a lot of ways even, except for that obsession with his book. It wouldn't bother us too much if he were just playing out some childish superstition, but he's serious about it. He never thinks about it until it's nearly his birthday, and then all hell breaks loose until he reads it." He hooked a thumb towards the kitchen window. "He even swears up and down that there's been a barn owl outside his window the last few weeks, and that it follows him around. Tattered old owl, at that, but he claims that it's the same one from the book, and the Goblin King is going to appear and want him or something."

Her step-mother stepped forward and placed a squeeze bottle of honey next to Sarah, already knowing that she'd want it. "You played with that at his age," she stated darkly, "and we worried about you, but you were just sinking into your own little world because of problems that you had to work through on your own concerning me and the marriage and Toby's birth. You were exasperating, but you put aside all of that and look at you now… grown up and stable and determined." She shook her head a little. "He's been doing strange things as well. At school, he plays games with the others that sometimes make them get hurt if they don't see how unwise it is and back out of it. He's been caught lying and cheating on more than one occasion, and bullying those weaker than he is. He hangs out with people who aren't the nicest in the world, and who are definitely not the smartest in the world, and acts so superior that I've been called in, or your father, to speak with the principal about him more than once."

Sarah knew, in a flash of intuition, that they'd lied to her about his whereabouts. "He's looking for the book at bookstores, isn't he?" she asked them, stunned at how far her brother was going to fix the strange feelings he had. "Trying to find it."

"Talk to him, Sarah," her father urged her gently, lines in his face from where he'd been worrying these last few years. Sarah wondered how she had ever missed them. "If he's acting out like this because of some problems that he has at school or even here at home, help him work through them so that he stops behaving so… so…"

"Weirdly," Sarah finished for him, not making it a question. There was a hint of life in her tone. She seized on the idea that maybe it was just a teenage trouble and had nothing to do with the feeling in her own soul that something was, as her father had said Toby had described it, "off-center." Everything was making sense in such a way that she hadn't realized she felt something was wrong with their ritual greeting until just now. All the conversations about her brother, after having gone through her own troubled teens as they had, suddenly clicked into place. They'd been so worried about him, and she'd brushed it off as their parental concern, that she hadn't stopped to wonder at her own subconscious unease at everything. Rather than hiding anything, she'd refused to see that anything was actually wrong with Toby beneath their casually offered, and highly usual, complaints. That they'd even complained to her at all and wanted her reassurance should have set off more alarm bells than what she allowed it to. A moment later, she realized that she had overlooked it because facing it had meant that some of the guilt would have come back to her alone, and that one fateful night many years previously when she had wished her young, malleable brother away to the Underground.

They nodded at her in relief. "Weirdly," they agreed, not wanting to entertain the thought that their son might be "insane" or "crazy." "You've seen how these things go," her step-mother continued quietly, "and you're closer to his age than we are, so have been out there dealing with the world he's grown up in. It's not the same as what we knew, Sarah, and you've adapted fairly well. I think maybe you can help him better than we can."

I'm not so sure about that, Sarah wanted to reply, but smiled weakly and nodded at them. I'm the reason he's this way, after all, with my wish, my rescue of him, and then my stories through his life. If I hadn't encouraged him… "I'll do what I can," she told them. "Just don't worry about it anym--"

She was interrupted by the slam of the front door, and it caused them all to jump. Hot on its heels was the call, "Sarah! Where are you? I'm home!" Toby's heavy footsteps could be heard coming through the hall quite easily. He still hadn't grown into his feet, though he'd grown into his voice well enough that Sarah could hear. Even last year, when he was about to turn fourteen, he'd been having the squeaks and breaks of adolescence.

Her father stood up and headed for the doorway, creeping out of it. Sarah cast a last look at her step-mother, who had rushed to the cake to finish icing and decorating it, before she turned and went with her father to meet her brother before he could see his cake. As she passed out of the door to the kitchen, she heard her father in the living room with Toby, trying to calm the excited boy down, and so headed in that direction.

She entered the living room and was greeted with a tackle and pounce from her brother. "Sis!" he exclaimed as he nearly bore her to the ground. At virtually fifteen, he was as tall as she was, and nearly weighed as much. Given another year of activity and good feeding, he'd outweigh her by several dozen pounds, and wouldn't stop until he was built like her own father in his teens. She'd seen photos of him, when he'd first met her own mother, and she knew that Toby took after him more than anyone else when it came to his height and build. He'd be a good six feet in height, perhaps a bit more, before it was over, and would have a bit of a lithe, fencer's or runner's body rather than a heavier one.

She was struck by his appearance every time she saw him these days. He had grown into her father's, and her own, dark hair, and it was a fetching dark brown that was lighter than her own. He had been born with blond hair, not unlike his mother's, but had darkened considerably as he had grown up. He had left it growing long despite their father's wishes, and it was now at a tail at the nape of his neck. Their father said little, though, knowing it was just a stage and that it didn't really matter much in the world today. It didn't hurt his looks, but enhanced them.

Sarah had long admired her birth-mother for her beauty, but her step-mother wasn't too bad either when she wore a bit of makeup. It had lessened with the march of years, and had deteriorated greatly in the last few years that she had dealt with Toby's oddness, but there was still something wonderfully noble about her step-mother's features that hinted at how pretty she had been in her younger years. Maturity had only aged her like a fine wine, leaving her handsome rather than pretty. All the same, she could be seen in her brother's very handsome face, in the shape of his brows and the length of his lashes. Her father's nose sat above her step-mother's lips, and somewhere he'd sprouted almost feline-like tilted eyes. He looked more like an elf than a human in certain lights, and Sarah never had to pretend to see it. Others had as well, especially girls whose hearts melted at the sight of him already.

But it was Toby's eyes that held her frozen in place whenever she looked into them. She had rarely met his eyes as a result, but he never seemed to notice the power he held over her with them. She knew she had no reason to keep away from his gaze other than her own past, and that they were filled with too much innocence, warmth, and love to be what she remembered, but she couldn't help herself all the same. She feared, loathed, and loved those eyes for one simple reason.

They belonged to Jareth, the Goblin King.

Once upon a time, she met a King with mismatched eyes, and when she retrieved her brother from him, the magic of the King and the world where she had wished Toby away had apparently marked him. Though his eyes hadn't really settled into any particular color at the time of his stay in the Underground, hovering between blue and brown with the promise of either, they had decided to reflect Jareth's own in the end. "He has my eyes," she remembered hearing an owl whisper in her dreams once, and she had woken in a cold sweat with no idea or reason as to why it should be so. Jareth had been long defeated by that time, beyond her reach, and she hadn't thought of her brother's mismatched eyes in months at the time.

Now, though, an unbidden thought came to her as she met Toby's eyes accidentally. If he has your eyes, Jareth, she asked him mentally, what else of yours will he have now because of me?

She didn't have to look away from Toby's eyes this time, because her father came to her rescue even as she stammered out an amused reply of, "Whoa, hey, don't kill me!" Laughing, their father clapped Toby on the shoulder and patted him a bit. Toby didn't see the look in his father's eyes, however, or the sudden flash of real fear there that he would do physical harm to Sarah in his excitement. Sarah did, though, and didn't have to ask about the origins. If Toby was as obsessed as he claimed, he might very well hurt his sister trying to get her to help him. "Come on," their father said as he dragged Toby back towards the couch. "You can't visit with her if you're smothering her, boy."

"Sarah, you have to-" Toby began at the same time as their father pulled him away, and then went silent. He put on a brave face, but a quick look from Toby's true fear, to her father's true fear, showed two separate feelings. She rested on Toby's face again, at last, and found him smiling despite the barely-held terror behind his eyes. She looked away, smiling herself, but uncertain all of a sudden. As soon as she had seen Toby and had heard him speak to her so softly, as if trying to tell her something that only she would understand, she had felt her heart twist up around that feeling of wrongness that had been inside her. As if it had been scabbed over with a blister, it had been left open to fester, and had done so immediately. Whatever had hidden it from her was no longer hiding it, courtesy of her brother's arrival.

As Sarah sat to pretend that she knew nothing, and to have a pleasant party with cake and ice cream, she also knew that whatever was wrong with her brother, it wasn't all in his mind. She'd have to invite her friends before midnight that night, when Toby had been born, if she wanted to know the truth of things. Anything that dealt with both of them could only point at the Underground.

(To Chapter Three)