Episode II: The Girl in the Mirror

Another wild and crazy night at the Magitech Lounge. Hydra was regaling us with his seemingly endless supply of off-color jokes and most of the regulars were trying to take swigs from their drinks between punch lines to prevent themselves from choking and spraying everyone else in the process.

“And so the dolphin says to the fisherman— ‘mermaid my left fin…that’s a manatee!’”

I shook my head and leaned back against one of the support columns, folding my arms over my chest as I glanced around the room. I was rather sure I’d heard that one before, but it was still pretty funny. Something caught my eye and I shot a glance at the bar mirror and froze. Someone was staring out of the mirror at us. At first glance it looked like just a reflection of one of the patrons, but everyone present was a regular. The kid in the mirror stood out.

She was pretty, I thought, in a pale, fragile kind of way. Her big brown eyes hinted at a great depth of sorrow and something within me tore wide open as I met her gaze. I switched to magesight and looked again, seeing nothing remarkably different than I had a moment before.

Magesight is weird. It allows us to see and manipulate the strands of mana that float through the world, long threads of silver gossamer webbing visible only to those with the right genetics to be mages in the first place, but created as a natural by-product of all sentient life. 

Mana glows slightly and casts an eerie illumination as it swims through the air. This is the secret of why mages can see in the dark. We don’t, actually, but it seems like we do. We just have access to illumination not available to the average person.

Other than several mana threads currently passing through the Lounge, magesight revealed nothing worthy of mention. The girl still stared out of the mirror, and the rest of the patrons still roared with laughter as Hydra delivered another punch line.

I was no longer listening.

My boss, Jack, apparently noticed my distracted air, and walked over to see if everything was all right. Jack’s like that. He’s the best boss one could hope for, soft-spoken and empathetic. He treats us all like family, staff and regulars alike.

Jack’s a rather non-descript individual in appearance, being barely over six feet tall, with a nice but easily forgettable face. He wears his long brown hair in a ponytail, usually, and his quick hazel eyes are always on the move. This week he wore a goatee and mustache, but that could change without notice. He was prone to sudden bouts of facial renovation.

“Everything okay, Kevin?” he asked as he approached, wearing a concerned frown.

I nodded. “Pretty much. Except we have company.”

“What?”

I nodded toward the bar mirror and he turned to look, eyes widening as his gaze fell upon the image in the mirror. “Okay,” he said slowly. “That’s just a little creepy.”

“Thinking that myself, boss.”

He winced. He hates being called boss, but we all do it anyway. One of these days he’s going to get used to it and it won’t be any fun anymore. “What do you suggest we do about it?”

“Not sure there’s anything we can do,” I told him. “She’s there and we’re here.”

He lanced me with a hard stare. “That’s not helpful, Kevin.”

I smiled and shrugged. “The Dimension of Mirrors isn’t exactly my realm of expertise, boss.”

I’m a mage, and a good one. But the D of M is Jasmine Tashae’s demesne, and not for the likes of me. If she was some mortal who’d been trapped there, it would be Jaz who’d have to get her out.

“What the hell are you two whispering about?” asked Steph, appearing by our side as if she’d popped out of the floor. Steph’s a vampire, and, as such, is very good at sneaking up on people. She doesn’t make any sound unless she wants to, so she’s always appearing unexpectedly. We’re all more or less used to it.

Steph does the whole neo-goth thing. To her, black is the only primary color.

She spotted the figure in the mirror and joined us in gaping at it.

“You should try out for a gig doing stand-up!” someone shouted to Hydra.

“Are you kidding?” he responded in his basso rumble. “I’d bring the house down. Literally.”

Everyone laughed at that, but this time it was tinged with a hint of sadness. Trolls weren’t a common kind of freak, but they existed in large enough numbers that everyone knew how much fear and hatred they drew from “normal” folk. There wasn’t a regular at the Lounge who didn’t empathize with Hydra’s plight.

And before you ask—no, he can’t be fixed with magic. Most trolls are highly resistant to even beneficial magic. There is no way to fix them by mystical means.

More’s the pity.

I glanced over and spotted Seth, our resident fashionista, looking our way and frowning. He climbed down off his bar stool and ambled over—though describing his motion as ambling might be an abuse of understatement. Seth doesn’t really amble as much as strut. The guy thinks a lot of himself, and dresses the part. His wardrobe alone probably costs as much as I’ll make throughout my lifetime, and mages tend to live a long time. 

That night he wore a gray pin-stripe silk suit with a thin, baby blue tie. “What are you—my gods! What’s that?”

“It’s called a girl, Seth,” Steph said dryly, not even casting her gaze his direction.

Jack snorted.

“I can tell that much,” Seth replied irritably, “but what’s she doing in there?”

“That’s a very good question,” Jack asked. “We’re wondering the same thing ourselves.”

“We need to get her out of there!” Seth exclaimed.

“Okay. How do you recommend we do that?” I asked him pointedly. “Somehow I don’t think breaking the mirror will do the job.”

“You’re the magic man,” he said unnecessarily. “Can’t you do something?”

“I’m thinking,” I answered, honestly enough. Actually, I was thinking that I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do, but I wasn’t going to tell him that.

“Maybe we should give Captain Glorious a call,” Jack said, a sly note in his voice. He was referring to one of San Francisco’s most notable superheroes, a costumed vigilante known for his outlandishly ornate outfit and over-dramatic bearing.

The way he said it made me think it wasn’t just an idle comment, but I’ll be damned if I know what he meant by it. Captain Glorious is a constant source of amusement for most of us here, especially since he’d arrived to help us deal with an errant bunch of vampires who’d been harassing Jack’s ex-girlfriend and subsequently ended up playing bodyguard for the lady for several weeks.

Most people didn’t know it, but Glorious was magically enhanced. He also had some meta power I hadn’t been able to identify, but there were runes hidden in his cape and costume that gave him the ability to fly and greatly enhanced strength. I did not, however, get the impression he himself was a mage.

He probably had a mage in the family, I’d decided.

“I fail to see what good that would do,” Seth muttered. Probably jealous of all the attention Glorious got when he was here. When the meta was around, people didn’t even notice Seth.

The floor shook beneath our feet and we looked up to find Hydra staring down at us. “There I am, making a spectacle of myself for your amusement, and I find you all standing over here pretending I’m NOT the elephant in the room.”

In all fairness, Hydra does have a lot of elephant-like qualities. He’s huge, covered in wrinkled gray skin, and has a miniature trunk in place of a nose. Despite this, or perhaps for this reason specifically, his elephant references rarely generate any laughter.

This time was no exception. Steph silently lifted her arm and pointed at the mirror.

“Mary, Mother of God,” the troll exclaimed. “Who is she?”

“We don’t know,” Jack answered. “We didn’t mean to ignore you, Hydra, but, as you can imagine, we found her a bit of a distraction.”

“No kidding. Huh. Hey, you all. Come get a load of this!”

So that’s how it was the whole damn bar ended up standing in front of the mirror staring at the girl staring back out at us.

“She looks sad,” murmured one of the Twining Twins. I have no idea which one. I honestly can’t tell them apart. They’re not really twins, but doppelgangers. The same person from two different universes. They met entirely by accident and now they’re business partners and best friends. With the disconcerting habit of communicating telepathically with one another, which adds a whole new dimension of strangeness to it all.

“I wish Rio were here,” I heard Jack say, and I nearly fell over. Not to say he doesn’t like Rio, but I know he doesn’t completely trust her. Not an easy thing for him to admit, considering that the Lounge has become a pretty close-knit community over the past several months. Rio and her guy, the immortal rock god Stormchild, had a habit of showing up only on the third Thursday of the month, and this was a Tuesday, so, unless the girl in the mirror stuck around for another week and a half, Rio wasn’t going to be any help whatsoever.

Rio’s a very powerful vampire mage, and she travels in circles I can only dream about. She probably knows all about the Dimension of Mirrors, which puts her way ahead of me.

“Poor thing,” chimed in Merry, our resident Wiccan Priestess and another mage. She leaned against me and looked as though she was about to cry. I put my arm around her and pulled her close.

“Ja be wit’ her,” murmured Timothy Moggan, the Rastafarian meta who’d wandered in for the first time a couple of months ago. The diminutive reggae singer had an amazing voice packed in that little body of his. And when I say ‘amazing,’ I mean powerful enough to pulverize granite.

He and our other resident busker, Hammad, occasionally engaged in jam sessions for our entertainment. I’d been hoping for such a show tonight, but, unfortunately, Hammad hadn’t made it in. The girl in the mirror pretty much postponed that sort of thing anyway. I’m sure Timothy didn’t feel much like singing tonight.

“We can’t just stand here and stare at her,” Steph said into the well of silence we’d fallen into.

Jack grunted and we broke apart, most returning to where they’d been before they’d realized we had been standing there for a reason. A more or less normal buzz of conversation resumed, but Hydra didn’t return to telling his jokes. Somehow humor seemed completely out of place now.

I trailed behind Jack, who wandered back toward his corner booth. “Can you get in touch with Jaz?”

He shook his head as he slid into the booth. I took the seat opposite him. “She said she’d know if we needed help and would show up right away.”

“It’s not us who needs help,” I said, unnecessarily.

He replied with a glower. “We don’t even know if she needs help.” He took a long pause as he swallowed half his beer in one gulp. “She sure looks like she does, though,” he added somberly.

Some twenty minutes later Hydra announced to the lot of us that the girl had vanished. We were left wondering what her appearance had actually meant. Had it been some sort of group delusion? The Twining Twins actually put forth that theory, to the universal disgust of the rest of us.

Steph calculated when she’d appeared—eleven on the dot, apparently—and how long she’d remained there in the mirror. Thirty-seven full agonizing minutes.

I wondered if that meant something.

For the next week the apparition appeared at eleven and remained until eleven thirty-seven, much like clockwork. After a while we grew accustomed to her appearance, and went about our business as usual, but we remained slightly subdued while she was visible. It was hard to enjoy ourselves while her sad eyes followed us around the room.

It also tended to put a damper on the rest of the evening. Most of the regulars stuck it out, but the spirit of the place seemed somehow diminished once she’d shown and then vanished again.

Jack was growing desperate. It wasn’t about money—he made enough from the daytime business to make up for the lack of custom at night in normal circumstances, and few of the regulars were loathe to pay for their drinks anyway, but the Lounge was about the community, which was suffering in sympathy with the girl in the mirror. We were all frustrated and wanted answers we had no way to get.

Jack most of all.

Come Wednesday night we were crouched over our drinks, the mood in the bar heavy and somber, when the door burst open and a stranger appeared. It was 10:59 and the girl had yet to appear, though all of us were waiting expectantly for her arrival.

Boneyard, who usually stood guard at the door, had entered only a moment before, anguish plain on his square face as he stared at the mirror.

When the door opened, all our eyes were drawn there, a collective gasp escaping our throats as we took in the man standing just inside the threshold. He was not a particularly large man—particularly here at the Lounge, where several members of the clientele and staff were near seven feet or better—but he was certainly striking in appearance.

His skin was black. Not the black of a dark human of African or similar descent, but an almost unearthly black. Hair the same hue as his skin flowed back from a widow’s peak and fell across his shoulders like a torrent of liquid midnight. Eyes of pale blue scraped across the interior and the bright tattoos across his bare arms seemed to writhe against his skin. “I have heard that one might find absolution here,” he said, his voice a loud purr in the sudden silence.

“Depends on your sin,” Jack replied from behind the bar without missing a beat.

“My sins are many,” the stranger—it was bothering me that I couldn’t put a name to him, though I had the feeling I should have been able to—replied coolly.

I caught a hint of movement in the mirror behind Jack. He was tending bar tonight, a rare occasion indeed, but Callie, the regular ‘tender, had called in sick. Jack preferred to be out with the customers, but someone had to pour drinks.

The girl had appeared, right on schedule. The stranger didn’t seem to notice.

Jack slapped the top of the bar. “Why don’t you come have a seat and we’ll discuss it in length,” he said. “But first I think we should know your name.”

The way he said it led me to believe he already did. Which meant he was ahead of me. I recognized the dark stranger for a mage instantly, and, what’s worse, he was a completely distinctive figure. Yet I couldn’t put a name to him.

“I am Hades,” he said, and the silence in the room grew even more profound. There wasn’t one among us who didn’t know that name. Hades. The immortal who’d stolen human children and turned them into goblins. The one who’d used the last of the Sidhe bloodline to create a whole new race he dubbed Abyssian. That Hades.

The man made Hitler look like a schoolyard bully and he had the nerve to come in here and ask for absolution? Like we even had the power to grant it in the first place.

Hades scanned the barroom, dark face impassive. “You don’t believe in redemption? I’ve heard otherwise.”

“Some people are beyond redemption,” Jack said slowly, meeting the immortal’s gaze without any sign of hesitation. There was an edge to his voice I’d never heard from him before.

Hades’s face tensed in anger. “I’m not so sure about that. How about the rest of you? Is there a crime so evil that you can never come back from it?”

“You tell us,” someone said. The voice was strangled enough I wasn’t able to identify the speaker. “Can you actually make restitution for your crimes, Hades? Is there anything out there significant enough to balance the scales?” The crowd parted and Hydra stepped forward, his huge eyes filled with a simmering rage that would have sent me fleeing in the opposite direction at full speed.

I imagine immortals are made of sterner stuff than I am, but that anger wasn’t something anyone would choose to confront, or so I’d imagine.

Hades nodded at the troll. “And I suppose you do not curse Loki’s name every time you look in the mirror? It was his crime that set the metavirus loose among the human population that has made you what you are,” he reminded him.

“The difference is intent, Hades. Loki’s intent was not to harm, but to save. Your only intent was to enhance your own power and standing.”

“So they say.”

Jack was on his feet so swiftly that I didn’t see him rise. “One cannot ask for absolution and, in the next breath, deny one’s crimes—or attempt to rationalize them away.” A muscle in his jaw jumped, the only outward sign of his anger. “What the fuck are you doing here, Hades? What do you expect of us?”

The immortal shook his head, seemingly suddenly uncertain. “I expect you to listen to me,” he snapped. “I have things I need to say.”

“Then say them,” Jack growled in response. “Stop banging about the shrubbery and get to the goddam point.”

“I was wrong, damn it! Wrong from the beginning. Some of it was jealousy. Loki was a crappy scientist, but he got all the accolades, all the recognition I thought should have come to me. Then our world ended and we fled here. I nursed my hatred of him all that time, and when I was caught working against the other immortals, Deryk Shea had me exiled! Yet he tolerated Loki’s meddling. He did nothing to punish him.

“Maybe Deryk saw something I didn’t. Loki may go off half-cocked most of the time, but he has good instincts. Somehow the harm he does is vastly outweighed by the good he accomplishes. Damned if I know how. His methodology is shit. Always has been. He’s a genius, but he’s no kind of scientist. What kind of scientist works from the gut, for god’s sake? What kind of scientist doesn’t examine and re-examine his theories before acting upon them?” He snorted derisively. “I hated him so bad it consumed me.

“I was swallowed up by envy, hatred, and my hunger for revenge. I wanted all of them to pay for what they’d done to me. For tolerating Loki’s excesses and refusing to tolerate mine. I took the children, sure. I took them and changed them. I caused irreparable harm to countless families—tore parents apart from the inside out. I realize this. And I know how wrong it was. When it became apparent that the goblins would be useless to me, I just threw them out…I abandoned them and turned my ambitions in other directions.

“Maybe I was simply mad. Looking back at it, I can’t even say why I did all these things. I did evil things…unspeakable things…for no other reason that I can see but hubris.”

We listened in stunned amazement to an immortal, a former god, a true dark genius, pouring his heart out onto the barroom floor in front of us. By the time he was finished, tears streaked his ebon features and he leaned against one of the support columns as if he’d fall down if he didn’t.

“Fine,” said Jack into the stillness. “What are you going to do about it?”

“What can I do about it? I cannot restore the goblins to their humanity, to their families now long dead. I cannot take back all the things I did in the name of my own pride and ego.”

“How long ago did you turn your back on the self who did all these things?” asked Boneyard, out of the blue.

Hades turned to look at him and shrugged. “Sometime before the Cen War,” he told him. “In the end I could not betray humanity to those monsters.”

That struck a false note, but no one commented on it. There was more to it than that, but none of us had any idea what it might have been. “So what have you done since?” Jack asked him.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s one thing to repudiate the evil you’ve done in the past. But have you once thought of what you could do to redeem your crimes? To begin to pay back the debt you owe? To try to make up for all your sins?”

Hades shook his head. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

 “You’re in luck,” Jack said. “I have an idea.” He glanced up at the clock above the bar and nodded as if to himself, then strode over to a spot directly across from where the girl stood, gazing out at us all.

He lifted his arm and pointed at her. “You want to make the first symbolic gesture toward redemption, Hades? Free her.”

Hades turned his attention to where Jack was pointing and stared in astonishment. “Who…what…how…what’s she doing in there?” he asked.

“We’d all dearly love to know the answer to those questions,” Jack replied. “If you can free her, you realize, it’s just a tiny step in the right direction.”

Hades nodded thoughtfully, not taking his eyes off the girl for a second. “What I don’t understand is why none of the mages around here have already freed her.”

“We don’t know how,” I said in a low growl. “I take that to mean you do?”

“Yes. It’s not all that difficult, really. Jasmine Tashae was the one who discovered the route to enter the Dimension of Mirrors. I suggest you mages watch how I do this.”

That was an unmistakable suggestion to switch to magesight, which I did. Hades snatched a passing thread and hurled one end at the mirror while holding the other end firmly in his hand. A second later, he tossed the thread out of his hand and the girl stumbled out of the open end. She stumbled, and would have fallen, but Steph, moving like only a vampire can, caught her before she hit the floor. The girl smiled faintly and passed out in her arms.

Time passed.

“She’s coming around,” I said. I’d already done a scan of the girl and she checked out okay. There was nothing noticeably wrong with her. All her vital systems came back healthy, which was something I’d been concerned about the whole time. There was no telling how long she’d been in there, and what effect it might have on the human body.

“How did she eat in there?” Boneyard asked, leaning over me as I knelt by her side.

“I don’t think she had to,” I responded. A glance at Hades affirmed this suspicion. He was nodding.

“The Dimension of Mirrors is completely outside of time—even farther out than Starhaven, if that makes any sense at all. People do need to eat on Starhaven, though they do not age significantly while they’re there. The Dimension of Mirrors is almost like a place of stasis…time crawls by so slowly, if at all, that such things as food and liquid become, at best, an afterthought.

“I would imagine she’s hungry now.”

She blinked up at me. “Where am I?” She spoke with a slight accent—Eastern European, I thought, but I couldn’t be sure.

“Safe,” I responded, feeling silly for replying with such a non-answer. But it seemed like the best bet. “How do you feel?”

“Hungry,” she answered. This prompted a chuckle from the room.

Now that she was out of the mirror and plainly visible, I estimated her age to be about twelve or thirteen. Just a kid, slightly taller than average, a little bit gangly. As I said before, pretty in a pale, undernourished sort of way. “I’m Kevin. What’s your name?”

I helped her sit up and she looked around the room. “Am I in a bar?” she asked.

“Yes. But don’t worry about it. No one is going to come in and cause trouble. Not here.”

She looked dubious. “My name’s Anya,” she said, answering my earlier question.

“Nice to meet you, Anya. What would you like to eat?”

“A hamburger?”

“Coming right up. Hey, boss, you want to order her up a burger?”

“I’m on it,” Jack replied. “Take her to my booth, will you? She doesn’t need to be sitting there on the floor.”

I helped her to her feet and guided her to his corner table. “How did you get in there?” I asked, then cursed myself for broaching the subject so quickly. I should have given her time to adjust to the change before interrogating her.

She didn’t seem to mind. “I don’t know. I just wanted out of where I was so bad I looked in a mirror and zap, I was looking out of it.”

“When did this happen?” I asked her.

“What do you mean, when?” She glanced over and smiled as Boneyard approached carrying what looked suspiciously like a strawberry milkshake. 

He set it down in front of her. “This should tide you over until your burger’s done,” he said with a smile.

From out of the corner of my eye I spotted Hades standing alone, momentarily forgotten in the excitement of the girl’s rescue. Everyone wanted to say hello to her, to introduce themselves, but hung back for fear of overwhelming her. They left her care to Jack and myself.

I watched unobtrusively as Timothy walked straight up to Hades and passed him a mug of beer. “Ya did a good t’ing, mon. Ya should be feelin’ a better mon already.” He laughed and clapped him gently on the shoulder of the arm not holding the beer. “Ja is a bein’ of infinite forgiveness.”

Timothy’s voice was powerful enough that it carried over the background murmur of the Lounge with little trouble, whether he wanted it to or not.

“Time passes very oddly where you were,” I explained to the girl. “I was wondering what year it was when it happened to you.”

“I think it was in May of 2006,” she said. “What do you mean, ‘passes very oddly’?”

Jack met my gaze and gave a nearly imperceptible shake of his head. I shifted gears rapidly. “What did you do while you were in there? The last few days you watched us, but what did you do before that?”

“I…I’m not sure. I avoided the gray ghost,” she said, “and the people who traveled with it sometimes. But I don’t remember seeing anything that I wanted to be a part of until I ran into this place. You all seemed so bright and cheery and I wanted to be a part of that.”

I wanted to ask about this “gray ghost”, but her hamburger arrived at that very moment, so we left her to eat in peace and found a spot to talk away from the others for a moment. “You don’t want to tell her how long she’s been gone, do you?” I asked Jack.

“Not yet I don’t,” he answered. “Can you imagine the shock? This world is completely different than the one she left. I’m not sure any of us know enough about her world to help her adjust.”

“But there are those who do,” I reminded him. “Steph might.”

He shook his head. “She’s only about a hundred years old,” he said. “She was born after the Cen War, and grew up knowing about vamps and ‘thropes and all kinds of freaks. This girl knows about none of those things except maybe from movies made back in the day.

“I’m wondering how she got into the mirror in the first place.”

“I have a theory about that,” I told him. “What if she’s a meta?”

He frowned. “But that would mean…” He let his voice trail off, face twisting as he realized the implications. “The only way those viruses were transmitted back then were through sexual contact.”

I nodded. “It would explain her needing to escape bad enough to activate the meta ability without realizing what she was doing.”

“Oh, god. I don’t think we’re qualified to deal with this, Kevin. Not in the least.”

He was right, as far as it went. My training had covered dealing with physiological damage to the brain as well as the body, but here we were talking about something that went a damn sight deeper. If my theory was correct, she’d been traumatized before she’d found the means to escape, and then suffered through what must have seemed like an eternity of being alone, before being cast back into a world it might take her decades to understand. “So what do you suggest?”

“I’ve got to ask you something first. Rumor has it you’re a doctor. Are you?”

I’d been expecting him to ask this question for quite some time. I was actually surprised it had taken this long. “Yes,” I told him. More or less true, at least.

“So what are you doing here? Why aren’t you practicing medicine professionally?”

Becoming a doctor at the ripe age of twenty was heady enough, I wanted to tell him, but being a mage on top of it was akin to challenging the very gods themselves. I’d been too willing to experiment with both disciplines, too willing to try things no one had even considered before, and it was inevitable that someone would pay for my arrogance.

I’d practiced a long way from Earth, which was the only reason Jack didn’t already know the story of my fall from grace. I’d done something unforgivable in my profession: I’d used my knowledge to destroy a man. Consciously, willfully and arrogantly.

There are some who would argue that he deserved what I’d done to him. I could even make that argument myself. He was a petty tyrant, the son of a powerful political figure, and he liked using his position to force women into compromising positions. To either have sex with him or be financially or socially destroyed.

He tried to do it to my sister. Rather than bowing to his will, she’d taken her own life. It was a coward’s way out, but it was truly the only escape she could see. He’d threatened to use his position to make her life hell, and to take me down with her.

I don’t know if he could have done either of these things, but the only thing that mattered was that she believed he could. I’d probably never know all the details.

When she was found dead of an overdose of sleeping aids, I was the one who sought answers. There wasn’t anyone else, considering our parents had died in an accident when we were both teenagers. I was the only one that questioned the apparent suicide. Suicide isn’t illegal, after all. Not anymore. But I couldn’t understand why she’d done it.

My investigation had turned up the reason, and, in what might have been the ultimate act of foolishness, I made the bastard pay for what he did to her. I used my knowledge of the human brain to destroy the neural pathways in his head that made him an adult. I systematically eliminated memories, connections, and the bio-chemical responses that made him what he was. I turned him back into a child and froze him there. He will never again see the world other than through the eyes of a five year old.

I was nearly warlocked for the crime, locked away from my magic for the rest of my life. To be honest, I’m not sure why I hadn’t been. But I’d been stripped of my license to practice medicine, and sent back to the Earth my parents had fled before I was even born.

“Bad choices,” was all I said to Jack. What more could I say? He could take that any way he wanted.

He seemed willing to do just that, responding with a nod. “Would you be willing to take the girl under your wing, to give her a place to stay until we can find somewhere suitable for her to go?” he asked suddenly.

I froze, a rabbit nailed to the highway in front of an oncoming freight-mover. “What? Shit, Jack…I wish I could. I just don’t have the room.”

He frowned, not quite realizing what was wrong with that statement. Thankfully his grasp of the mechanics of magecraft was rather limited. No mage worth a damn couldn’t create space—or the illusion of space—as needed.

And my house wasn’t particularly tiny to begin with. Cluttered and filled with all sorts of junk I didn’t need, but hardly too small to take in a young boarder.

My reasons were simpler, and more selfish, than that. I didn’t want the disruption. Judge me for it if you want. I’ve been judged before and survived the experience. And as far as sins go, it was nothing compared to the sins of the dark god in the room.

“It doesn’t leave me with many choices,” Jack sighed. “I can make room for her upstairs if I have to, but I’m not sure a tavern is the best place for a kid. Even this one.”

Great. The guilt card. And what’s worst of all was that he didn’t know he was playing it. He’d taken my words at face value and his only concern was the well-being of the kid. “Maybe we should take a minute to ask her what she would like,” I said.

He considered this for a moment, then nodded. “You’re right. We should ask her.” He walked over and slid back into the seat opposite her, waiting for her to finish chewing and swallow before asking, “So your name is Anya? It’s a pretty name.”

I hung back, curious to see how he handled this. She set the burger down and lifted her gaze to his. “Thank you,” she said shyly.

“Hi, Anya, my name is Jack. That a good burger?”

She nodded.

“Well, we were wondering what to do with you until we find somewhere for you to go. You can stay in one of my extra rooms upstairs, if you like.”

“Can’t I just go home?”

Jack winced visibly. That, of course, was impossible. Even if the house or apartment in which she’d lived still existed, her family was most likely long dead.

Jack’s mouth moved silently as he tried to think of an appropriate response, but before he could, she raised her eyes back to his. “They’re dead, aren’t they?”

“Probably,” he answered. “It’s been a long time.”

“How long?” As I watched her face transform, I realized the shyness was fading quickly, replacing itself with a sense of calm maturity that looked positively alien on her small, thin body. I began to think we may have underestimated the girl. There was no way to tell what she witnessed while trapped in the Dimension of Mirrors, or the effect it had on her. In a very real way, she wasn’t the child she appeared.

“Almost three hundred years,” Jack told her.

She nodded and took another bite of her burger. “So my parents—“

“Are probably gone.”

She snorted mid-swallow and looked pained. She coughed twice to clear her throat. “Probably?”

“It’s a different world,” he explained. “Some people live hundreds of years or longer now. There are some who were alive then who are still alive now. But the chance of your parents being among them is pretty small.”

“You say that as if it’s a bad thing,” she said, watching him unblinkingly. “My father was a sick bastard and my mother as useless as they come. The only good thing about going into the mirror was that I no longer had to live with them.”

I’d seen that kind of anger, that kind of pain before. I wished I could raise the dead just so I could bring them back and kill them again. I knew what she meant without even asking. I knew it from the sudden throb in my temple and the taste of something vile at the back of my throat. I was a doctor, and even in these enlightened times there were those who preyed on children. Even their own children, and those who stood back and did nothing about it.

We already knew she’d been infected by one of the viruses. My first guess was the primary metavirus. It easily explained her sudden shift into the Dimension of Mirrors. That she got it from her bastard father seemed a foregone conclusion. Of course, it might also have been the first and only manifestation of the Arcane virus. There was little or no mana in the Dimension of Mirrors, from what I understood, and, even had she the knowledge of how to use it, she wouldn’t have known what to do to escape.

I wished I could tell just by looking at her, but that only worked with trained mages who set their spells in orbit around themselves.

This led me to another thought. If her father was a mage, he might still be alive. Mages lived longer than ordinary folks, longer even than metas, paras, and many ‘thropes.

Anya was shaking her head in amazement. “I was in there for three hundred years?”

“Two-hundred and fifty four, give or take,” Jack replied. “So what do you want to do?”

“You say the world has changed. Is there still a Social Services office?”

“Of a sort, yes. We can take you there, if you want, but, if you’d rather, you can just stay with one of us. We can file a writ with the courts and they’ll send a case worker out to investigate, make sure you’re who you say you are. Then you’ll be registered as a citizen and be allowed to make up your own mind where you go from there.”

She blinked at him. “I’m only twelve,” she said. “They’re not going to let me decide for myself…” Her voice trailed off as she saw a look of mild amusement flick across his face. “What?”

“I told you it was a different world. You’re not twelve years old anymore. You’re well over two hundred. You’re legally an adult. If you understood the world as it is today, you could go out tomorrow and get a job and an apartment, and start living whatever life you chose to live.”

“A job? Really? Doing what? I have no skills. I never got past sixth grade.”

“Well, then, I’d say you’d best stick with one of us until you get some skills,” he answered smoothly.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned, to find Hades looking down at me. I hadn’t realized he was that much taller than I was until that moment. He topped me by at least four inches, if not more. “She’s a mage,” he told me. “I can see it in her.”

“How?” I asked, hating to admit my ignorance to him.

He shrugged. “I don’t know, exactly. I can just tell. I’d like to offer my services as a tutor.” He raised his hand to forestall my reflexive objection. “Not to say I don’t think you’re competent, or that there aren’t many good mage schools out there. But I have several thousand years of practice to lean upon…far more than anyone you know. And I would like to do something good for a change.”

It may sound strange, but I believed him. “I’ll tell you what. Once we get Anya settled in, we’ll all sit down and talk about it. That’s the best I can do.”

“That’s the most I can ask of you,” he replied with a tight smile. He walked up to the bar and laid something down. “I must be going,” he said, “but I wanted to thank you all for being here. It’s been good for me, and, I dare say, good for your other unexpected guest as well. This is a five hundred credit chit. Everyone here should be able to drink for free tonight with some left over. Put the rest toward getting young Anya some new clothes and whatever else she needs.”

With that, he cast a smile around the room and walked out the door. The regulars watched in silent amazement as he left, then looked at each other in puzzlement. I went and ordered another drink, then returned to the table where Jack and Anya remained deep in conversation.

She smiled up at me as I approached. “Hi, Kevin.” She slid over and patted the seat next to her. “Go ahead and sit down. We were just talking about you.”

Somehow I wasn’t surprised. “Hades said something strange before he left,” I told Jack. “He said that Anya’s a mage and he wanted to volunteer to tutor her.”

Jack chewed his lower lip thoughtfully. “What do you think of that?” he asked me.

“What does he mean, mage?” Anya asked with a frown.

So I explained how the Cen had come to Earth a thousand years ago and spread several viruses around, to kill as many of us as possible, and damage our DNA so we’d lose the ability to sense or touch mana—the very stuff of magic. And how the immortal Loki, not long before she’d gone into the mirror, had sent out several counter-viruses, one of which repaired the genetic damage. And how she’d most likely contracted one of those viruses and unknowingly used magic to escape into the Dimension of Mirrors.

“And who’s this Hades guy? The one who got me out, right?”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “He’s an immortal, and one bad guy. Or, rather, he was a bad guy. Now…we’re not so sure.”

“And he wants to teach me? Why?”

I shrugged. “We don’t really know. He says it’s to make up for some of the shitty things he’s done.”

“And do you believe him?”

“I want to. I believe it’s possible to change. I know he took himself out of the equation before the war. He could have fought on the side of the Cen and done a lot of damage, but he disappeared instead.”

She nodded. “Fine. So say I want to learn. Can I take lessons from him with one of you there?”

“Of course,” Jack said quickly. “Kevin is a mage too. I’m sure he’d be willing to keep an eye on your lessons.”

I didn’t really appreciate him speaking for me, but he was right. “I’d be glad to,” I said.

She smiled sweetly and finished off the last of her milkshake. “I’m tired,” she told Jack. “Can you take me to my room now?”

“Sure.” He stood as I slid out of the booth. “Things are going to get very interesting around here for a while,” he said, grinning at me.

“As if they weren’t always interesting around here,” I responded. “Go. Get her set up and I’ll see you when you get finished. If you’re not back by closing time, we’ll take care of it.”

“I know you will.”

I watched the two of them head upstairs and motioned for the rest of the crowd to join me near the bar. “There’s a good chance she’s going to be around for a while,” I told them. “We all need to look out for her.”

En masse, they gave me a look as if the dumbest words ever spoken had just fallen out of my mouth. I shrugged and pointed to the credit chit on the bar. “Who wants a free drink?”

Boneyard, who’d taken Jack’s place behind the bar, sighed dramatically and began lining shots along its length.

I spent the rest of the night immersed in the easy camaraderie of the Lounge, deliberately blocking out any thoughts of what tomorrow might bring. It’s a rare occasion when I manage it, but sometimes you have to live in the moment. And this moment was better than most.