Episode II: The Dream of the Djinn

Most people mistake me for a human being. This is good because I don’t want to have to explain what I am to anyone I should happen to meet on the street. Mages can see what I am if they look, but few of them are rude enough to question me.

I’m a djinn. Possibly the only djinn on Earth Prime or in the whole Confederation of Human Worlds. That makes me more unique than anything that walks or flies in this universe.

And I’m in love. With a mortal man.

I look at him sometimes and it makes me ache to know that his short life will be over in what amounts to the blink of an eye. He will be gone and I will remain.

I understand why many immortals forswore love and even passion for thousands of years. They could not tolerate watching those they loved wither and die in front of them, powerless to do anything about it.

I can’t imagine how many times they had the lesson driven home before they were able to grasp this reality, though. Our emotions are not so easily bent to our will. Agony must be piled on top of anguish for us to learn how dangerous love can be.

My name is Dylan Shepherd. I was once a mageship pilot, a member of one of the most elite units in all of the Confed Fleet. But my ship destroyed itself in an act of desperation, trying to save what has become an alternate Earth from the depredations of another of her kind—a rogue mageship whose base programming had been altered by a human intelligence operative. The way I see it, that agent himself is responsible for Radiance’s death and my own.

Yes. I died. But in her last breath, so to speak, my ship used every erg of her magical power and skill to bring me back from beyond the grave. She grabbed my spirit and forced it into the artificial construct of an extremely complex spell weave. I was dead and then I wasn’t. I personally buried my own body, along with the others who’d died in that short battle, some half mile beneath the place where we had fallen.

When I returned to Earth Prime, the world at the center of the immortals’ sphere of influence, I resigned my commission from Fleet. I didn’t belong there anymore. My ship was gone, my memory of her sacrifice too bitter in my mouth for me to pretend to respect my superiors.

I had changed in more ways than immediately apparent.

I sought out the Magitech Lounge and the man who ran it. The one who had been brought into the past by Radiance and had witnessed both my death and rebirth. An ordinary man with an extraordinary heart.

I was already falling in love with him, though I didn’t really know it yet. I knew I wanted to see him again, to look into his eyes and see myself reflected there.

When I arrived he had company, a Military Intelligence agent of my acquaintance, one who’d been involved during the design phase of the second run of mageships—the run that had produced Ranger, the ship who’d gone rogue.

I’d spent the last couple of days putting things together, using my new power to dig in places no one would ever have expected and coming up with answers I didn’t like at all. Military Intelligence, the armed forces version of the civilian Adjuster’s Office—the agency that monitored all preternatural and parahuman elements serving in the Confed military—had implanted an illegal code during Ranger’s initial programming.

Don’t ask me how I discovered this. Suffice to say that some of the things I did were not quite legal, even by today’s rather libertine standards.

Ask me if I care. If you dare.

The man in charge of their little operation was named Gerald Montague and he was a throwback to the old, super-paranoid types that pretty much ruled the roost in the days before the Cen War. How he rose to any position of prominence within MI, I have no idea. Most of the time his kind are shunted into career paths in which they can do very little damage. Certainly to some low-level perfunctory office where no one takes them seriously.

Unfortunately, unbeknownst to anyone including myself, Montague was a psi. A rather powerful psi, as things turned out. Maybe even a meta. He was powerful enough to hide his talents from the rest of the world and from the military’s own psi corps.

My guess is that he used this talent to further his own ambitions and managed to infect a whole section of the intelligence community with his own paranoia.

Something tells me we need better screening procedures.

I returned to the Magitech Lounge to see Jack again and found Montague there. How he knew to seek answers among Jack and his friends, I don’t know. I can hazard a few guesses, but that’s all they’d be.

He didn’t recognize me for what I am when I appeared on the scene. He leveled a hand blaster at me and I, of course, handily rendered it inoperable. When he tried to shoot me with it, nothing happened.

Now, I’m pretty certain it wouldn’t have done anything to me, since I’m only nominally physical and only when I want to be, but there was no reason to reveal that to him. Plus the particle beam weapon would’ve done damage to the bar, and that wasn’t any more desirable to me at the moment than revealing to him the fact that I was no longer human.

Also on scene was Jack’s adopted daughter, a girl who’d been rescued from the Dimension of Mirrors by the immortal, Hades, after being trapped there beyond time for over two hundred years. She looked at me with undisguised suspicion and I can’t say I blamed her much. She’d been through hell, quite literally, tossed into the midst of a war even I couldn’t understand very well at the time. And this atop centuries of imprisonment in a world so alien I can’t begin to describe it to someone who’d never been there.

I have. Once. I’d prefer never to go again. It’s very easy to get lost, even if one does know a way out. Nothing is ever quite what it seems there.

The girl’s origins are even darker than one might suppose. She was a child of the earliest days of the Arcane bug, the nano-virus that returned magic to humanity. Loki, the immortal bioengineer who’d crafted the viruses, had programmed them initially to transmit through sexual contact alone. He’d wanted only adults infected at first, thinking that they would be more adept at handling what he was giving them.

He wasn’t entirely correct about this, but that sort of mistake was forgivable for a being twenty-five thousand years old and not socially savvy in the first place.

Loki’s a scientist, and a truly decent human being. It never occurred to him that some of those infected would be the kind of pervert and piece of shit that Anya’s stepfather was. He infected her with the arcane virus and she became a mage. Not knowing what she was doing, she opened a doorway into the Dimension of Mirrors and fled there in an attempt to escape his filthy attentions.

She succeeded beyond her wildest dreams.

I did not know all these details at the time, but I knew she had reason to distrust adults. Her mother had betrayed her by looking the other way, pretending not to see what was being done to her, and her stepfather…well, let’s just say death would be too gracious a fate for him. If I believed in such things, I’d wish for him an eternity swimming in a lake of fire.

I don’t, of course. Belief in the old philosophies of heaven and hell isn’t all that common on Earth Prime anymore. For that sort of religious path, one had to seek out specific colonies spread throughout the interstellar neighborhood of the Confederation of Human Worlds.

For all I know, the bastard could still be alive. A two hundred plus lifespan isn’t entirely unknown for magi. Though, by the sounds of it, he wasn’t the type of guy who’d bother to learn the skills necessary to rejuvenate himself. Even with magic, one had to pursue the knowledge that went with it. It wasn’t like wishing things into existence, after all.

I found myself speaking with the girl, trying to reach through that hard shell of suspicion. I wasn’t sure why. She’d announced her intention to move out and get her own place, a decision that had left Jack a bit emotionally bruised. I’d had the immediate impression that I was at least partially the cause of this decision on her part.

I think on some level she was jealous of me. Not that she harbored the kind of feelings for Jack that I did, but she obviously loved him. In a way, I was taking something from her and she didn’t like it. She was reacting emotionally and not aware of herself enough to recognize what she was doing.

So I showed her.

She grasped it quickly. Her brain may be wired as a young teen’s, but she has many, many years to draw upon, and there’s some wisdom knocking around in there too.

She decided to stay. And to go back to school.

I didn’t plan on sticking around to play the mother figure. Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m not sure what I expected. All I had in mind was spending some time with Jack while I used my free time—like when he was sleeping—to chase down that bastard Montague.

I offered to be Anya’s friend. I meant it sincerely. She seemed to take it in the spirit in which I’d meant it, but the last thing I expected was her to embrace the idea as if it were a lifeline.

Silly me. She was a thirteen-year-old girl in desperate need of a female friend she could claim for herself. And I did volunteer.

It was about a week after our little talk when I found myself standing with her at the base of a wide set of concrete stairs leading up to the double doors marking the entrance to Golden Gate High. Or so the huge sign over the doors proclaimed in golden-hued block letters.

“So this is it, huh?” she asked in a small voice.

I nodded. “I checked it out. Golden Gate currently serves about a thousand students—eighth through twelfth grade.”

She blinked up at me. “I thought the old system had been abandoned. Y’know, the ancient grade system and all.”

“For the most part, they have been. One of the greatest flaws of the old system was the lack of attention to individual abilities and learning styles. They tended to teach to the lowest common denominator, or at best, the average. Those who required accelerated programs and those who needed a little extra help were often marginalized one way or the other. And the social structure made learning even more difficult for some.

“The downside to the distance learning techniques that were adopted after the Cen War was that they neglected the socialization end of things. There were some students who had very little organized interaction with their peers until they left school to enter the job market. That didn’t work too well either.

“So places like Golden Gate are trying to capture the best of both worlds—they employ roughly three times as many educators as did comparable schools of your time and also make great use of the super databases that have become available over the past couple centuries as well.

“Grades are divided into modules, aimed at teaching the students the skill sets necessary for the career paths in which they’re most interested. You can choose between business, legal, technology, medical, education, or civil engineering. You’re allowed to intermix certain introductory courses to help you choose a solid path, but once you’ve figured out the direction you want to go, you’re fast-tracked toward a college level module once you’re ready to continue.”

“Sounds…interesting.”

Poor girl was terrified. Not that I blamed her. In her shoes, I would’ve been terrified too. I wish I could have told her what she could expect, but I was one of those who’d been focused from an early age in a certain direction. The schools that taught mage students exclusively, particularly for future government and military careers, were an entirely different breed from this one. This one would be at once very similar to the schools she remembered and quite divergent at the same time.

I knew she could handle it though. Anyone who could deal with being stuck in the Dimension of Mirrors for two centuries without going completely bonkers could handle high school. “We hedged a little on your background,” I told her. “We said you were fourteen. It’s the minimum age for enrollment at Golden Gate.”

“But can’t they just check?”

“Check where? The only place any records for you exist are in the Adjuster’s Office databanks, and they’re not available to just anyone. They seemed perfectly willing to take our word for it. The preliminary tests you did last week revealed that you’re at a comparable level with your fellow students here, so we thought we’d leave it at that.”

“Thanks, Dylan.” She peered up the stairs and heaved a sigh. “You don’t have to come with me. I can handle it from here.”

I pulled her into a hug, which she resisted at first, then grinned over her head as she relaxed into it. “You’ll do fine. You’ll be out at 2:30 and Jack, Bone, or maybe Hades will be here to pick you up then.”

“Hades?” By the sound of her voice, I decided she was caught between amusement and trepidation. Hades wasn’t exactly an unknown figure. Having him arrive on the scene to transport her home would either serve to make her extremely popular or a pariah for the rest of the year. 

We would see which way it broke if and when Hades showed up. “I’ve got some stuff to take care of, so I might not be around when you get home. I’ll catch up with you when I get there later, though.”

She headed up the steps. I waited until the door had swung shut behind her and transported out, making the leap between San Francisco and Tacoma in one easy step. I accessed the mage road this time, though unlike most mages, I could’ve done it on my own without having to make use of the magical transportation infrastructure. I might have not been able to see or touch ambient mana anymore, but considering that my very form was made up of far more mana than any mage could hope to touch or command, I figured the trade-off was well worth it.

There’s been considerable speculation in certain circles as to my comparative power. Let’s just put it this way. The average mage can grab two strands at once and produce two separate mana effects or weave them into either a simple spell or the beginnings of a more complex spell. A very skilled mage may create a spell using up to fifty mana strands, though, in my estimation, this requires an immortal mage. The spell at my core that holds my soul on this plane is made up of three hundred interwoven threads. The rest of me—the physical illusion I wear around my core—is twelve hundred more threads that I can manipulate in any way I choose. They are a part of me and cannot dissipate, and as far as I know, cannot be destroyed. Each one is worth a single effect at a time and I can manipulate as many as I choose at the same time.

No mage, even an immortal mage, is anywhere near my equal. Though I must admit, the immortal Hades and the vampire Rio are closer than any other beings I can name. Magically speaking, of course.

I transported myself into Deryk Shea’s office, interrupting the squat little man in the midst of a golf putt. The ball went awry and slammed into the corner of a bookshelf before scuttling under it. He looked up at me with a pained expression and grunted a greeting.

Ever since I resigned my commission with Fleet, I’d been negotiating with Shea to take me on as an Adjuster’s Office agent. So far he hadn’t taken the bait. I couldn’t imagine why not and, frankly, I was getting a little annoyed by the whole damned thing.

“You again,” he muttered, shaking his head and tossing the golf club in the corner. “Still want an answer, do you?”

“Nah. Thought I’d take a walk and happened to show up here by accident,” I replied with a casual smile. Falsely casual, of course. I wanted to be a part of something bigger than myself. If I could no longer serve the Confed as a mageship pilot, I thought working for Deryk Shea and the Adjuster’s Office might be a decent alternative.

I couldn’t quite understand his reluctance to bring me on, though. I doubt it was because I wasn’t human anymore. He didn’t have a reputation as a bigot. And it wasn’t because of any lingering doubts about my loyalty to the Confed either. I’d made the greatest sacrifice possible for the Confed. The way I saw it, the Confed owed me.

Many people describe Shea as an ugly little man, but I guess I’ve never seen him that way. He’s short, squat, and his facial features aren’t exactly proportionate. The effect is startling, but not in the least bit hideous.

What’s really amazing is that immortals can re-arrange their bone structure to alter their appearance at will. He wears that face because he wants to. Damn strange, if you ask me. But then again, no one ever accused Shea of being a normal sort of guy, even when compared to his fellow immortals.

“Have a seat,” he told me. “You want something to drink?”

I considered both the suggestion and the question. I extended a thread, dragged his guest chair over, and dropped my butt into it. I threw my feet onto the edge of his desk, crossing my ankles and summoning one of the cigars from the ornate box on the other corner into my hand. “What do you have to drink?”

I lit the cigar with the tip of a finger and puffed contentedly while he affixed me with a baleful expression. A tiny gleam in his eye, barely visible, revealed that he was more amused than irritated by my audacity. This fit in with what I’d heard about him over the years. He respected nerve more than just about anything else.

I could work with that.

“Something tells me you can rustle up whatever poison you have a taste for,” he grunted. “But, if you insist on drinking my booze, I’ve got cognac, single-malt, bourbon, vodka, and rum. All premium, of course. Take your pick. But you can damn well get it yourself.”

“Maybe I’ll just have a beer.” I shot out a strand and liberated a bottle of something exotic from nowhere in particular.

His brow shot up. “That’s theft, you know,” he remarked casually.

“How do you know?” I asked pointedly, grinning at him. “Maybe I got it from my own cooler.”

“And maybe I’m a fucking Martian,” he snorted dismissively. “What do you want, Dylan?”

I popped the cap and took a long swig. As I swallowed, I lowered the bottle and glanced at the label. I’d have to remember this brand. It was pretty damned good. “You know what I want, Shea. I want a job.”

“No, Dylan, what you want is my official sanction of your personal vendetta in pursuit of Gerald Montague.”

I blinked at him. I wouldn’t have put it that way myself, exactly, but he had a point. “And this is a problem?”

He shrugged. “Not particularly. I just didn’t like the fact that you weren’t being completely honest about it—to yourself, or to me. I’ve never had an issue with operatives being personally involved in their cases. I know that classic police wisdom says it’s bad juju, that it leads to mistakes and endangers not only the investigation, but the agent as well. I say that’s only true if one doesn’t truly know the stature of the investigator in the first place.

“This is why I vet all my agents personally and interact with them on a regular basis. I like knowing who I have working for me, what makes them tick and where their trigger points are.”

“Oh? So what are my trigger points?” This also fit into his reputation, I mused. He backed his people all the way. He’d gone on record as saying that Adjuster’s Office agents were incorruptible, the twenty-third century’s version of the ‘Untouchables.’

He settled into his chair behind the desk and regarded me silently for a long, pregnant moment. “You believe in duty. You believe that you owe something to the community and believe that your talents should be used for the greater good.

“In short, you’re an ideal AO officer.”

I disappeared the cigar, which was frankly starting to smell pretty foul. “I hear a ‘but’ in there somewhere.”

“Perceptive of you,” he remarked dryly. “As much as I think you’d be an asset to the AO, I also have to say I don’t think you’re quite ready yet. You’re too detached…no longer mortal or anything remotely resembling a real human being anymore. And the transition was so swift I don’t believe you’ve come to terms with it. Not so far, anyway.

“You need to rebuild a life outside the agency to anchor yourself to the real world again. Without it, you’ll lose perspective and become caught up in your own power.”

“Oh?” I lifted a brow and regarded him with undisguised skepticism. “And you know this how?”

His thick lips curved into a gentle smile. “I’ve had a lot of time to study people, human, superhuman, and other. I was good at reading people even before I became immortal. Now I’m probably as good at it as any psi who’s ever lived. Not because I have some preternatural gift for it, but because I care.

“Becoming a djinn did not make you any less human than you were, Dylan. I know deep down you worry about that. Because you’ve absorbed the unconscious meme out there that your biological self is what makes you human. But these days that meme is simply bullshit. We are all human. The definition has grown from what it once was. I am human, you are human, vampires are human, lycanthropes are human. ‘Human,’ in this day and age, simply means ‘born of the race of humanity.’”

I stared at him, literally astounded by what he was saying. I’d never heard it put quite this way before. He made it sound so simple.

 “At one time there was a strong movement here on Earth Prime to marginalize preternaturals and paranormals, to legislate them into second-class citizens, to actually force them to register themselves with the government so their movements and activities could be tracked.

“I threw my not-inconsiderable resources into opposing this, at least here in what used to be the United States as well as in Europe. There were places where I had very little influence, and for a while, those places were hellholes for anyone who wasn’t ‘normal.’ 

“Some regimes were afraid of them because they couldn’t control them the way they could ordinary humans. Others saw them as inherently evil, a direct result of ancient Cen social engineering, as it turns out. People back then didn’t know how much of your religious doctrine had been crafted by the Cen to keep you weak and fractured. Hell, we didn’t even know it.

“Of course,” he admitted with a shrug, “most of us were too damn self-involved to pay attention to anything beyond our own personal diversions. I have to tell you, I was quite disappointed in my kind when I called upon them to help us oppose the Cen’s invasion plans and the vast majority of them couldn’t be bothered. That’s one of the reasons I backed Loki’s play. Crazy as it was, it might well have been the only thing that could have saved us from the Cen.”

“So basically you’re not saying ‘no,’ you’re saying ‘not right now.’”

He nodded somberly. “Precisely. Go out and find yourself an anchor, Dylan, and come back to see me when you think you’re ready.”

I finished off the beer in a single gulp, vanished the bottle, and stood. “I’ll think about it, sir.”

“Sir? A little late to be kissing my ass, don’t you think?” He grinned up at me.

“It’s never too late,” I told him and transported myself back to San Francisco.

 

I didn’t go straight to the Lounge, instead finding a relatively secluded spot in Golden Gate Park and sprawling out on the forest floor. I didn’t need to sleep anymore, but I found moments of deep meditation to be quite useful for sorting through the myriad of life’s little details.

I needed an anchor, Shea had said. I needed something to tie me to the mortal world. Something to remind me I was once human, and reason to believe part of me still was.

I laughed aloud when I realized what should have been obvious from the beginning. I already had something that fit the bill, though I hadn’t really thought of it at the time. I was falling in love with Jack. And I was growing damn fond of Anya too, in a maternal sort of way.

Now that was a weird thing to realize. I’d never thought of myself as the maternal type. But there was something about that kid that got under my skin.

Of course, she wasn’t really a kid, was she?

I leaned back, folded my arms behind my head, and stared up at the blue sky through the shifting emerald canopy of the eucalyptus trees towering above me.

Maybe I should have revealed all of this to Deryk Shea, and maybe, if I had, I would have walked out of his office a shiny new Adjuster’s Office agent. But, then again, I was still uncertain myself what it all meant. Was I entering a relationship with Jack, or was I just fooling myself? It wasn’t as though we’d even kissed yet.

What did he feel for me? I experienced a brief moment of longing for empathic abilities to go along with my magical ones, but, thankfully it passed quickly enough. I didn’t really want to be empathic, though I wouldn’t mind being enough of a psi to be able to track down Montague and stop the bastard from ‘porting out again.

I stood, threw out a transit tube, and stepped through to the Lounge.

I knew something was wrong even before I exited the other side. I can’t even say why. They say transition is instantaneous, but I think it’s just slightly slower than that. There was time for something to impinge on my awareness in that split second before I stepped out onto the dance floor.

Something large and furry barreled past me, venting a roar of rage and pain. A crimson blossom of flame spread across its back as it thundered down the ramp and through the front door. I spun away from it to see Montague and several other ordinary-looking humans standing by the stage, armed with hand blasters and nearly identical expressions of icy disdain.

Jack lay unmoving at their feet and Anya struggled in another’s grasp, her face twisted into an expression of shock, fear, and pain. Her eyes were clenched shut and I detected the bitter fragrance of mace in the air.

A mage’s greatest weakness is his or her eyes. If they’d come upon her by surprise and sprayed her in the face, effectively blinding her, she would’ve been easy prey. Most mages would have been. I felt anger rise in me like a radiant tide as I stepped forward.

Montague took a long step sideways and laid the barrel of the blaster against the side of her head. She stopped fighting and took a long, shuddering breath.

He smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant expression, even had his face been whole and unscarred. The scar simply made it uglier. “The question here is whether you can act fast enough to stop me from pulling the trigger,” he said. “I’m betting you can’t.”

I spoke through clenched teeth. “What the hell do you want, Jerry?”

“Your cooperation,” was all he said in reply.

My gaze flicked down to Jack and I wondered whether he was dead or simply unconscious. I couldn’t tell from here without sending out a probe. And if there was a mage among them, that might be perceived as a prelude to an attack. “My cooperation with what?” 

“We want another mageship. And you’re going to help us get one.”

“You’re out of your fucking mind. Even if I was willing, there is no way I could pull that off.”

He reached into a breast pocket of his suit and tossed something to me with his free hand. I caught it and glanced down. It was a sliver of crystal, about as large as my pinky, octagonal in shape. A data sleeve. “This carries the same virus with which we infected Ranger. I want you to get aboard a mageship and place it in its primary receiving port.” He paused at my look of disbelief. “Or maybe you’d rather I kill the girl.”

“I don’t think you’re that crazy, Montague. If you did that, there isn’t a force in this universe or any other that could protect you from me.”

“We’d have to see about that, wouldn’t we?” None of his madness showed in his gaze, I noticed. We might as well have been discussing the weather for all that it showed in his eyes. Not even the slightest glimmer of fear revealed itself in him. And he should have been afraid. There was no way he could guess what I could do to him.

Possible scenarios were flying through my brain even at that very moment. I could make him very, very sorry.

They were all staring at me and missed the slow, deliberate movements of the man at their feet. Jack twitched, then edged himself farther onto his side. “Lady of Blades!” he cried suddenly and the men jerked as one.

Montague shifted the weapon in his hand from Anya’s head to point it at Jack. “You’re tougher than I expected,” he muttered, shaking his head. “I’ll have to shoot you again.” He chuckled, shaking his head. “You don’t really believe an urban legend is going to save you, do you?”

Behind them, at the back of the stage, there stood a full-length mirror. The surface seemed to ripple and two women stepped out of it, one after the other. The first one through was tall and almost too beautiful for words, with a cascade of raven hair tumbling around her broad shoulders. She held a gentle curving katana in one hand, the length of its amethyst blade glittering like spun glass. She was clad in what looked to be a green karate gi.

The second woman was smaller, but no less striking. She looked Hispanic and she wore a black body-suit marked with a distinct pattern of what looked like spider webs. On her hips hung two short, sharply curved swords and the butt of a pistol hung in a holster under her arm.

Their arrival had been completely silent.

I felt a chill. The taller woman’s pale green eyes flicked down to take in the scene and narrowed when they caught sight of Anya in the minion’s grasp. She shook her head almost imperceptibly and moved forward, that shimmering blade describing a tight horizontal arc.

The minion’s eyes widened and his arms flew away from Anya, who stumbled forward. His hands came up as if reaching for his face and his weapon tumbled to the floor. Then slowly, his head slid from his neck and fell into his reaching hands.

The Hispanic woman leaped high into the air, tucking into a double somersault, and came down on another one of the men’s shoulders. In one of her hands was one of the curved swords, its broad surface black as pitch. She drove the blade downward, through the top of the man’s skull.

Blood poured from his mouth as he slumped to his knees.

I was abruptly reminded of an old expression—like a fox in a hen-house. Though they were outnumbered five to one, the two women moved among the men like veritable whirlwinds of carnage.

Jack rolled away, pushing himself to his feet and snatching the stumbling Anya along with him as they retreated to where I stood. I surrounded them both with a web of mana and watched in growing horror while the women performed an almost obscene rite of devastation on Montague’s men.

It was like watching a ballet with blood and swords. They didn’t have a chance against the two women, and within ten or fifteen seconds, only Montague still stood. He’d been disarmed, the blaster thrown across the room by a single sweep of the taller woman’s katana, torn from his grasp and sliced in two.

She leveled the point of the weapon at him and spoke in a husky contralto. “Anyone who enters this place with murder on their mind will face the same fate as these,” she said, gesturing toward the corpses littering the floor with her free hand. “I am not an urban legend.”

I took a moment to scan Jack. He’d taken a blaster bolt to the shoulder, leaving a scorched, ragged hole through which I could see blackened muscle and tendons. It oozed fluid, but the bolt had cauterized the wound and prevented him from bleeding out.

It had to hurt like hell.

Montague looked around at his minions, his face ghostly white. “I…I had no idea.”

“Now you do,” the woman replied humorlessly. She stepped back and to the side so she could look over at us without losing sight of Montague. “Is the girl all right?”

Once I’d done a quick inspection of Jack, I’d moved to Anya. Her eyes were still screwed shut, but other than the damage inflicted by the mace, she seemed mostly unharmed. I nodded.

“Good. What do you want to do with this guy?” she asked me. Not Jack. Me.

Before I could formulate an answer, the other woman gestured and the bodies disappeared, taking along any trace they were ever here, blood and other bodily fluids included. The room still held the stench of sudden, violent death, but I knew that could be fixed easily enough.

All the things I’d thought about doing to Montague flashed through my mind once again, but I rejected them all. I wanted him rendered harmless, but I no longer thought flaying the skin from his bones would be all that satisfying. In fact, after what I’d just witnessed, the thought of inflicting anything like that kind of damage sat in my stomach like a lump of molten ice.

Okay, so I’m more squeamish than I’d realized. Blood and gore just isn’t my thing. “I just want him neutralized,” I told her finally. “I thought I wanted revenge, but what good will that do?”

“Personal satisfaction,” said the smaller woman with a wry grin. Her voice was even deeper than her taller companion’s. I hid an amused smile at Jack’s seemingly involuntary shiver. He was in serious pain yet something about those tones had a libidinous effect on him.

Men are weird.

I simply shrugged. “Do what you will with him. Just get him out of our hair.”

“We’ll give him to Deryk,” said the taller of the two, with an evil grin. “He’ll know what to do with him.”

The other woman snickered.

I frowned. “You know Deryk Shea?”

She laughed at that. “I used to work for him, a long time ago.” She cocked her head and peered at me curiously. “I’ll be damned. You’re not human.” She strode forward and reached out the hand not still holding the katana. “I’m Jasmine Tashae.”

Now I realized who she was. She was a legend. More than one legend, apparently, if she was indeed the Lady of Blades. “Dylan Shepherd.”

“Well,” she said, in an odd tone, her emerald eyes scraping across me in a most disconcerting manner, “aren’t you interesting?”

“He’s a psi,” I told her with a glance toward Montague, trying desperately to send her unsettling gaze elsewhere.

“We know. Nyx has already taken care of that. She paralyzed the psychic centers of his brain. It should last long enough. Believe me, he’s not going anywhere unless we take him. Unless he wants to try to run.” She flashed a brief, feral smile. “That’s actually the scenario I like the best. I’ve been on vacation and my other swords are clamoring for a good work-out. They’ve been terribly bored.”

This woman was truly scary, I decided. She and her friend had just slaughtered nine men and neither of them seemed to think it anything out of the ordinary. I suppressed a shudder. She might misinterpret it. Or, rather, interpret it all too correctly.

She scared me. Hell, they both did.

“I’ve been trying to get Deryk Shea to hire me,” I told her. “I just recently resigned my commission in Fleet, and would love a position at the Adjuster’s Office.”

She frowned. “So what’s the problem?”

“Ask him,” I told her.

“Okay. I will. Nyx? You ready?”

The other woman nodded and shoved Montague toward her friend. “Time to pay the piper,” she told him.

They all winked out at once, leaving us behind to pick up the pieces. I began by healing Jack’s injury, then took Anya into the restroom to rinse the nasty stuff off her face and out of her eyes. 

 

By the time I’d finished with her, Jack had apparently gotten in touch with all the Lounge regulars who were able to move around in the daylight. Nearly all of those who’d accompanied him on his trip into the past were present. Much to my surprise. But that wasn’t near as much as a surprise as what he was saying.

“I’d like to talk to you all about something,” he said. “I’m going to invite Dylan to live with us,” he said slowly, lifting his gaze to mine as I stood outside the restroom door with my arm thrown around Anya. She was wiping at her face with a towel and stopped abruptly when she heard these words. “I think I’ve fallen for her,” he continued. “I know some of you have had problems with her since what happened, but I’m asking you to put all that aside now.”

“Have you talked to her about this?” asked Hades, leaning against one of the support columns and grinning broadly. “She looks as though you hit her with a club.”

Jack shrugged. “Yeah, maybe I’m doing this all backwards. I was just shot with a blaster—give me a break.”

This prompted a round of laughter, which faded as he raised his gaze to me. “I want you in my life, Dylan. I want you in our lives.”

“Well,” I said, raising my voice to be heard throughout the Lounge, “when you put it that way, how can I resist?”

This was met with an embarrassing round of cheers. I looked down into Anya’s face and saw her grinning. “I was wondering when you two would stop dancing around and actually get around to doing something about your feelings.”

Great. Save me from ancient children and their wisdom. I sighed mentally. “Keep in mind,” I told them as I weaved my way through the crowd, “that I’m trying to get a job with the Adjuster’s Office. That means if any of you step out of line, it’ll probably be me who’s sent out to get you back on the straight and narrow.”

“I don’t care how powerful you are, Dylan,” said Hydra in his booming voice. “There are some of us who’ve never even seen the straight and narrow.”

This pronouncement engendered another round of laughter and some hoots of derision as well.

“Be that as it may,” I told them, reaching Jack’s side and looping one arm around his waist, “I plan on keeping you guys in line. Anyone have any problems with that, take it up with Anya here.”

I couldn’t wipe the grin off my face. Even if I didn’t manage to get hired on at the AO, I thought my new life looked like it been worth all the sacrifices. Maybe I was right and maybe I was wrong.

I was just happy to have the opportunity to find out.