Epilogue: The Lady of Blades

We leaped into Deryk’s office and tossed the man at his feet. 

Sighing, he set his golf club aside. “I’m not going to get any practice today, am I?” he asked rhetorically.

“I think you’re looking for this fuck,” I said, planting a boot in the guy’s ass by way of illustration. 

He grimaced. “Well, it’s nice to see you too, Jaz. And you, Nyx.”

“Same here, Deryk,” Nyx answered back, not much sounding as if she meant it. She didn’t have anything against Deryk, of course, but she was feeling a bit out of sorts at the moment. That summons had interrupted at exactly the wrong moment and she was feeling a bit cranky. The real object of her ire was sprawled on the floor in front of her, but she’d turn it on anyone in a heartbeat if given an excuse.

I grinned at him. “Was I misinformed?”

Deryk shook his head. “Nope. I was looking for him, but I actually expected someone else to deliver him.”

“Yeah. She’s busy. She asked us to do it for her.”

He shot a suspicious look in my direction. “Uh-huh. And you’re doing it out of the goodness of your heart?”

I chuckled a little at that. “Hell, Deryk…you more than anyone should know I don’t have any goodness in my heart.”

He shrugged, dialing a lopsided grin. “So what’s the story?”

“She wants to work for you, but it sounds like you have something against her.”

“I don’t. In fact, she reminds me a lot of someone else I once took under my wing—a youngster with a lot more power than she knew what to do with. Dylan has less of a fondness for violence, thankfully, but still…”

I knew exactly who he meant. I really didn’t want to hear any more of this. It was bound to get sappy at some point. “That’s nice, Deryk. You still aren’t answering my question.”

“Oh, I’ll hire her eventually. But she needs mortal roots before I can consider her application seriously. The last thing the AO needs is a rogue djinn dispensing her own brand of justice under my authority with no mortal interests to keep her in check.”

“She has mortal interests,” I told him with a sigh. “She’s involved with Jack at the Magitech Lounge.”

He looked a bit surprised at that. “Oh, really? I had no idea. How seriously?”

“Looked pretty serious to me. I take it you know something about Jack?”

“You might say that. I’ve had an agent on him for a long, long time.”

Now that caught my interest. “Why is that?”

He shook his head with a wry grin, his way of telling me he wasn’t going to discuss it with me. I’ve always hated when he did that.

I sighed again. “So you’re going to hire her?”

“Yep. If she’s building a mortal life, she’s exactly the type of person we need right now. We’re starting to pick up some rather disconcerting murmurs from the clan vampires. They’re starting to amass some political power here on Prime, and, to tell you the truth, I’m a little worried about what they plan on doing with it.”

I frowned at that. “I’m not sure how much use she’d be, since most vampires are pretty resistant to magic.”

He shrugged. “Depends on how you use it. I’m no mage, as you well know, but I can think of a couple ways she could use it to devastating effect while negating their immunities at the same time.”

As you can imagine, this piqued my interest. Deryk didn’t often weigh in on magical matters because he wasn’t a mage, but he was a smart son of a bitch regardless and I generally consider it wise to pay close attention to anything he had to say.

 “I’ve gotta hear this,” Nyx said, planting her shapely ass on the corner of Deryk’s desk. As Montague tried to push himself to his knees, she swung out a foot and caught him in the ribs. He collapsed back onto the grass-like carpet with a hoarse wheeze.

Sometimes she can be even harder than I am, and that’s saying something.

Deryk had one of his telltale grins in place, the kind that says “I’m so smart I scare myself”. “Imagine having hundreds of mana threads at your disposal. What would happen if you used them to channel sunlight from one side of the globe to the other?”

“Will that work?” Nyx asked me as if I’d know. I’d never tried that particular trick. The best I could do was to string together fifty or so threads. The idea of being able to manipulate hundreds, or even over a thousand, left me a little dazzled. But I had the feeling that the djinn—Dylan—could do just that.

“How good a mage was she?” I asked. As a djinn, she could no longer see or touch free-floating mana, but she had an awful lot to work with anyway. Her core was a spell, but the energy that formed her physical shell was made up of a myriad of strands that were hers to command.

If anyone could do what Deryk was describing, it would be that woman.

“She was a mageship pilot,” he said, which told me everything I needed to know. Only the best of the best were chosen for that position. If she beat out the literally hundreds of other candidates for the post, she was among the best the Confed had to offer.

“Sounds like a perfect AO agent,” I said.

Nyx nodded, then turned a baleful eye on the guy on the floor. “You try to get up again, I’m going to kick a field goal with your head,” she told him.

He sagged back down and lay there, huffing comically.

“What are you going to do with this bozo?” I asked him.

“Hell, I don’t know. I don’t want him. I’d just have to transport him to some penal colony, and arrange for him to be psychically deadened every so often so he didn’t affect an escape. Fucking pain in the ass.”

“We could just kill him,” Nyx said blandly. “Less trouble all around.”

For some reason, Deryk has never received suggestions like this one very gracefully. He shot her an icy glare and shook his head. “Uh-uh. That’s not the way we do things here and you both know it.”

Nyx waved a hand as if brushing away a fly. “Some people are just a waste of oxygen,” she said.

Many folks find it hard to believe, but Nyx actually has less regard for human life than I do. Particularly the lives of people like Montague. Those who preyed on innocents were my particular pet peeve and I usually had no qualms about sending them skipping merrily off this mortal coil. But Nyx despises people who abuse their authority. If given free reign, she’d leave a bloody trail of tyrant corpses through all the universes and not feel a minute’s guilt over it.

I love her, but sometimes she scares the shit out of me. There are times I find myself wondering if she’s waiting for me to step over some invisible line. Let me tell you, that line of thinking gives me the creeps. I like to think she’d warn me first, but sometimes I can’t help remembering that this is a woman who has slain two different versions of herself, doppelgangers who in her opinion had taken the wrong path.

Admittedly, they were some screwed up individuals. But the notion of killing another version of myself makes my head spin. I don’t know if I could do it. So far I haven’t had to. Thank God.

 “Well,” I suggested to Deryk, “what if we take him with us to Starhaven and let the Immortal High Court decide what to do with him?”

He cocked an eyebrow. “You could do that?”

“Sure. Why not? When the mageship he meddled with jumped universes, it took the whole ball of wax into the Court’s court, so to speak. He can be tried under its authority.”

Deryk clapped his hands together. “Good! Let them decide what to do with him. I like that solution best of all.”

I considered pointing out that he was dumping the whole matter in his son’s lap, but thought better of it. Deryk still hadn’t really come to terms with his son’s death and resurrection and I thought it would be pretty cruel of me to bring it up now.

Nyx chuckled evilly. “You hear that, Montague? We’re taking you somewhere where you have a chance of experiencing real justice. Not like the mamby-pamby justice they have around here. Get up.”

He shakily rose to his feet, keeping his gaze pointed at his shoes. He wasn’t about to do anything else to rouse her ire. He was smarter than he’d seemed at first, I decided.

“If you want to take him to Starhaven now,” I told her, “I’ll follow in a few minutes. I’ve got a couple more things to discuss with Deryk.”

She hit me with one of her piercing stares and then nodded. “Okay. Don’t take too long. Remember, we’re supposed to be meeting Gimp for lunch.”

Trust her to remember something that had completely slipped my mind. “I’ll only be a few more minutes,” I repeated.

“Love you,” she said.

“Love you too,” I answered back. And, damn me, I did. Am I crazy or what?

Once she’d gone, Deryk fired off a sympathetic look, which I deflected with a glower. Yes, I know she’s a handful, but she’s my handful. I don’t need anyone’s pity, least of all Deryk Shea’s.

“So what did you want to talk about?” he asked.

“Who do you think’s behind this whole clan business?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied.

Seeing my skepticism, he shook his head. “I’m serious. It may be that Jason Keening’s back in the picture, but I don’t think so. Several months back a powerful female vamp showed up, but she got thoroughly spanked at the Lounge.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

“That’s right. You were involved in that, weren’t you?”

I shrugged. “The Lounge is my territory,” I said simply. “I know what goes on there.”

“I imagine you do. No, I think Keening is too chickenshit to come here personally. He’d rather send others to do his dirty work.”

“Like killing his mother?”

“Yeah…like killing his mother. What a bastard. I liked Gina, though I didn’t know her very well.”

“She created the Conclave,” I said. “That speaks well of her in itself.”

“Indeed.” He sighed heavily and walked around his desk to throw himself into his chair. “No, I think Keening has sent another powerful minion in to cause trouble. We’re going to have to find out who it is and deal with him—or her—before things get out of hand.”

“If you need any backup, let me know, will you?”

“I will, Jaz. I appreciate that, even though I’ve never taken you up on it. My agents do pretty well for themselves.”

“You’ve always picked the best, Deryk.” I grabbed a spell sigil and used it to activate a worldgate to Starhaven. “Take care of yourself.”

“You too, Jaz.” He told me.

I threw him an irreverent sketch of a salute and stepped into infinity.