Beyond World's End

by Mercedes Lackey

  "Way of the world, my friend," Jimmie said. "When I started out on the Force— Look, I'm up for another round—let me get you some coffee and something to go on with. You look like you could use it." Before he could answer, she got to her feet and headed over to the counter.

  I wonder what she was going to say? Eric thought. One thing that Beth—who'd been Wiccan for as long as Eric had known her—and the Elvenmage Dharinel both agreed on was that there were no coincidences, especially for those who were the least bit sensitive to magic. The more you attuned yourself to the invisible currents of Power that underlay everything, the more you moved in harmony with them. And the more you end up in places like this, having coffee with your fellow magicians. Though it was hard to remember that Jimmie—practical, down-to-earth, New York street cop that she was—was a magician as powerful as any in Underhill. A line from one of his favorite Gilbert and Sullivan operettas came back to him suddenly: "Things aren't always what they seem/Skim milk masquerades as cream . . ."

  A few minutes later Jimmie was back, balancing two tall containers of coffee and a couple of Danish wrapped in bakery paper. They were still warm from the oven.

  "I got you decaf, because of what you said at the party about not drinking coffee much any more because the Sidhe can't tolerate it."

  "You're right there," Eric said. "Before I met Kory, I couldn't even get up in the morning without that first cup, now I hardly ever touch the stuff. Caffeine in any form acts like the worst kind of drug for them—like a combination of cocaine and LSD. If you're ever having problems with a mad elf-lord, just pitch a can of Coke at him."

  "I'll remember that," Jimmie said, sounding tiredly amused. "You never know; it might come up. But they roast and grind their own beans here. It's a special blend—you won't miss the caffeine. And Papa Lombardi only makes these pastries at Christmas. It'd be a crime to miss them."

  She handed one to Eric. The golden crust was fragrant with almond and cinnamon, and when he bit into it, Eric could taste citrus and currants as well. His stomach awoke with a growl, reminding him he'd missed breakfast by several hours, and he had to restrain himself from wolfing the whole thing in a few bites. He set the pastry down and took a sip of the coffee. As Jimmie had promised, it was rich and fragrant. No sugar, but it didn't really need any.

  "Oh, man," Eric said, around another mouthful of pastry. "This is heaven!"

  "When you're out on the front lines, it's important to remember the little pleasures. Without them, sometimes we forget who we are," Jimmie said gravely.

  "Do you have that problem often?" Eric asked. He hadn't meant to ask such a direct question—it seemed almost hostile—but Jimmie didn't seem to mind. She smiled gently.

  "I've lost my way a few times," she said. "Even after I became a Guardian. I've seen too many good people go down into the belly of the beast and not come out again. Out here—on the streets—every day good people die, and bad people walk away smiling. And sometimes there's nothing you can do about it."

  "Is that why you became a Guardian?" Eric asked.

  "That's why I became a cop," Jimmie said, correcting him gently. "Being a Guardian came after—sort of a natural extension of the badge, don't you know? When I was a kid, I always wanted to grow up to be Batman. Well, sometimes I wanted to be the Green Hornet, but usually it was Batman. Fight crime and evil, always come out on top. It didn't hurt that my dad and my—my brother were both cops. I just sort of always knew this was where I'd end up. Not the Guardian part, of course."

  "Do your folks still live around here?" Eric asked idly, still thinking about Christmas.

  Jimmie sighed and shook her head. "Dad caught a bullet about fifteen years back. El—my brother, well, we kind of lost touch. A long time ago."

  Even through his shields, Eric could feel the flare of raw pain when Jimmie talked about her brother. She'd said he'd been a cop, and she hadn't said he was dead. But a lot of things could happen, some of them worse than being dead.

  "I'm sorry," Eric said, meaning it.

  "Don't be. He made his choice, and I made mine. You can't undo the past. But I didn't mean to bring you down. When you walked in here, you looked like you'd lost your last friend."

  "Not quite," Eric said. More like I remembered how few of them there were. "I had kind of a rough night, and so I went out for a walk this morning to try to clear my head. And from the look of things, I'm not the only one who had a rough night."

  "Can't put anything over on you, can we, Banyon?" Jimmie asked with a rueful smile. "Actually I haven't been to bed yet—Toni and I were chasing around the city all night like Starsky and Hutch because of some stuff, and I'm back on shift in another few hours. I do hate working nights. City gets crazy then. It's like it turns into a whole 'nother place, you know?"

  You don't know the half of it . . . or do you? Eric thought.

  "What kind of stuff?" he asked aloud. "I got—well, I don't know if you want to talk about it here. But I was going to try to get ahold of Toni. There's some things I need to tell her. But she was out when I came downstairs."

  "Probably up in East Harlem, seeing if the santeros know anything about what's going down. You don't have to worry about talking here, Eric. I told you. This is one of the Good Places. And nobody's going to overhear our conversation unless I want them to. Sort of one of the fringe benefits of being a Guardian," Jimmie said.

  "Okay." He liked Jimmie a lot—and more, he trusted her judgment. When you spent a lot of time on the street and the RenFaire circuit, you got to develop an instinct that helped you tell the good cops from the bad. And Jimmie was definitely one of the good ones.

  "So shoot. What's got you walking the streets on a day like this?"

  "Well . . . ." He was stalling, and he knew it. But one of the things that Dharinel had drummed into him during his magical training was that words had power, and it almost seemed to Eric that by telling Jimmie the problem he'd be making it more real than it had to be.

  "I've already told Greystone most of it. And, well, it's a lot of different things. Some really personal. Some I've been told to stay out of at all costs."

  "Too bad that's the kind of advice that nobody ever takes," Jimmie said. She sipped her coffee, and for a moment her eyes were cold and far away, focused on some secret pain. He noticed that whenever she was thinking intently, her black eyes lightened almost to yellow. It was a startling effect. "The good people . . . they always try to help. And sometimes they get killed. But that's what I'm here for. If anybody takes a bullet, it should be me. I chose to put myself on the line, knowing the risks ahead of time." She took a deep breath, consciously shutting away the pain. "But that's old news. Anyway, it's one of the reasons I'm kind of touchy about civilians on the fire-line, if you hadn't noticed already. Good people, who just want to help. But it's my job to protect them—even to take a bullet if I have to. They never asked to be in the kinds of situations I run into. All they want to do is live their lives. And it's my job to make sure they can. I don't want any more deaths on my conscience."

  Eric met her gaze squarely, thinking of his own dead. Of the people who hadn't gotten out of the way in time when the magic got loose. Or—worse—had been dragged into situations by people who didn't care who they hurt.

  "Understood," Eric said. "I don't like it either." He shook his head.

  "Yeah," Jimmie said, with a long sigh. "Looks like you know how it is. I lost a partner once, a long time ago. Because my gun was loaded with silver bullets and his wasn't. Because I knew what we were chasing and I couldn't find any way to tell him that it wasn't his fight. Never again! I guess that's one of the reasons why I never married—though the old joke about being married to my work has some truth in it. What about you, Eric Banyon? Any hostages to fortune?"

  "I guess not." The answer sounded wrong, and he examined it. "I have—I mean, I'm going to have—a daughter. But she isn't really mine. She's Beth and Kory's. They just can't have one together, so it's more like—I mean, she'll be theirs,
not mine."

  "No one else?" Jimmie asked.

  Ria. "No. At least, not that I know of. I mean, other than everyone. I'm not going to walk away from a problem just because nobody I know is involved."

  "Good answer. Or a bad one. Some things you've just got to walk away from, Eric. It hurts, and you feel horrible, but if you got involved all you could do would be to make things worse."

  Eric shook his head stubbornly. On one level, he knew what she said was true, but in reality he didn't know if he had the detachment to just walk away from people in trouble.

  "I'm not sure I could ever do that," he said slowly.

  "Then be glad you're not a cop, because we have to do it every day," Jimmie said fiercely. "But I didn't mean to lecture you. You look just about all in."

  "Bad night," Eric said. "One of the worst, actually, but not really relevant to the business at hand." Once more he hesitated about conveying Dharinel's warning. He'd told Greystone. Surely that was enough?

  Thinking like that is what gets people killed, Eric told himself roughly.

  "Anyway, here's the deal. I talked to Greystone when I got home last night. He said you were having kind of a situation, but I didn't know about that until I got home from the concert. Before that, I got a warning from my friends that they wanted me to pass on to you."

  "A warning?" Jimmie asked, suddenly alert. "For me by name?"

  "No. For the Guardians. In general. Dh—my teacher seems to know a lot about you folks. Anyway, he said this was your kind of problem, something that you were equipped to handle. He didn't tell me much, but I'll give you all the help I can. Apparently, Manhattan Island is one of those places that Sidhe just don't go. Only last night I heard that an Unseleighe Lord—that's one of the Dark Sidhe, and pretty much bad juju all the way around—is planning to move in and take over here. They say he's going to try to open a Nexus to Underhill here in New York City. If he can do it, he'll have quite a lot of power to play with, and from everything I've heard the Unseleighe Sidhe tend to play pretty rough. My friends said I should warn the Guardians, let them handle it."

  "That's what we're here for," Jimmie said with a sigh. She held her cup near her face, inhaling the steam. "And since you've been so open with me, I'll pass on a little information in return. The reason we were out last night is that a bunch of people are turning up dead—street people. More than usual, even in this weather, and all with something kind of . . . funny about them. Paul thinks it might be a case of serial possession, but it doesn't quite feel right for that. And then there was this kind of . . . blippy thing. Like somebody was powering up and then just . . . stopping. Kind of hard to figure out—not really like anything any of us has seen before, and if Paul can't pull a parallel out of his books or the Internet, it's got to be some kind of really exotic mojo. So we were trying to run down leads half the night, and coming up with nothing. This helps a lot. Now we know one of the things we should be looking for." She finished her coffee with a flourish and tucked the last bite of pastry into her mouth.

  "The important thing from your point of view, I guess, is that my guy's going to be trying to get his hands on anyone with Power to draw on them to build the Nexus, and my teacher thinks that means he's going to be going after humans with the Gift, but from what you're saying, what you folks were following doesn't sound like Sidhe work. Even if he does have a way to find the Gifted, he'd have to drain—kill—thousands, maybe millions, of ordinary people to get enough power to open a Gate here, and I know it sounds awful to say, but that's just too much like gruntwork for their tastes. And . . . the other thing is, last night I ran into an old friend. Only I don't know for sure whether she was there or not—and if she was there, I'm not sure what she wants—or if she's tied up with him."

  Briefly Eric sketched the details of Ria Llewellyn's appearance and disappearance from the concert, explaining that while it wasn't impossible for Ria to have been there—or for her appearance to have been a coincidence—he wasn't completely sure of what it might mean.

  "It's just that she's, well—ruthless. And pretty self-involved. She isn't the type to count casualties if you get in her way."

  "Sounds like a real executive type," Jimmie commented. "But not like the type who'd want to be a street soldier for someone else from all you've said about her. At least from what you say there isn't already a local Nexus, so she isn't likely to be out there trying to buy it up to bulldoze it. Not that anybody'd notice if she did. This is New York, after all, the land of Donald Trump and combat-strength urban renewal."

  "Yeah. I'd kinda figured that out for myself." Eric thought about telling Jimmie about his dream, and hesitated. Just what could he say? He'd had a vision? A premonition? A guided tour of a place that he wasn't sure existed outside his own mind? He knew it had been a warning, but the Guardians were already on alert, and he'd passed on Dharinel's warning. They wouldn't be any more careful just because he told them he'd dreamed of a New York in ruins, presided over by a baleful elvish tower.

  And Greystone hadn't sounded any warning when he'd had the dream. That was the main thing. So whatever had been the source of his dream, it hadn't come from outside Guardian House.

  Or Greystone hadn't considered it a threat. . . .

  "Well, I just thought I'd mention, and to let you know that if there was anything I could do to help out," Eric said hesitantly.

  "No!" Jimmie said, too quickly. "I mean, you're a nice guy, Eric, and a helluva magician from what Greystone tells me, but you didn't come to New York to join the Guardians and fight evil. You know what they say about old age and treachery overcoming youth and skill? We've got a few tricks up our sleeve that'll probably come as quite a shock to somebody from the Old Country," she said, sounding just a bit pleased with herself.

  "And most of all, if four Guardians need help, Eric, the people of New York are in more trouble than we thought. But I'll pass the word to the others," Jimmie said, smiling at him. "Maybe the two cases'll end up tying in together. Sometimes they do. But I hope not." She glanced down at her watch, and got to her feet in a hurry. "Aiee! Two o'clock already and I'm on duty at four—that leaves me just about enough time to get downtown and get suited up." She held out her hand, and Eric took it, standing as well. "I've enjoyed this, Eric. It isn't that often I can find somebody to talk to. You know how it is."

  "Me, too," Eric said. "Meanwhile, I've got a paper to write, and I guess ought to be writing it. Thanks for the coffee. And the conversation."

  "We'll do this again," Jimmie promised.

  "It's a date," Eric answered warmly.

  * * *

  He walked the few blocks back to his apartment in a far better mood than he'd been in when he left it. Jimmie Youngblood was definitely a nice lady and a good cop, and Eric hoped he'd be able to see more of her. Not romantically—Jimmie'd made it clear she wasn't looking for anything like that—but as a friend. How many people were there, after all, that he could talk about the magical part of his life with and have them accept it so matter-of-factly? Not many, and you could take that to the bank.

  The phone was ringing as he opened the door to his apartment, and Eric dived for it without thought.

  "Hello? Hello?" Just my luck this will be someone trying to sell me aluminum siding or The New York Times. . . .

  "Eric? This is Ria Llewellyn."

  Pure surprise held him speechless for a moment. He had almost managed to convince himself that the Ria he'd seen last night had been a ghost, some kind of illusion, or at the very least a non-recurring phenomenon. But the rich sultry sound of her contralto was like a blast of concentrated yesterday, whirling him back to his mooncalf idyll—in her home, in her bed—when she had tried to turn him from a knight to a pawn, nothing more than a reservoir of Power to be tapped . . . just as Perenor had meant her to be.

  Or maybe into something more?

  "Hello, Ria," Eric said, his voice slightly cool.

  In her own way she had cared for him, Eric knew. Fought for him, tr
ied to protect him, turned on her father in the end. For him? Or for her own freedom?

  " `Hello, Ria,' " she echoed, her voice languidly mocking. "After all this time, that's all you have to say? I admit, I'd expected more."

  "I saw you at the concert last night," Eric said flatly, still too rattled to dissemble. He'd managed to pick up a number of the courtly arts with which the Elvenborn wiled away their time Underhill, but the whole business of saying one thing while meaning another—all in the most elliptical fashion—had eluded him completely, to Kory and even Beth's amusement.

  "You were very good," Ria said. "That solo piece at the end—your own work?—was most impressive. And all done without magic. That somehow makes it even more exceptional."

  "You didn't call me up just to congratulate me," Eric said, sinking down into the chair in front of the stereo with the phone cradled on his lap.

  "No. Not really. I called to see if you'd be my guest for dinner this evening."

  There was a long silence. When Ria spoke again, her voice in his ear was just a shade less confident.

  "Eric?"

  "I'm still here." He was thinking fast, trying to figure out what she meant, not just what she was telling him. In all of his experience with Ria, she'd never been absolutely underhanded. She might try to influence him, overshadow his power with her own, but she wouldn't lure him into a blatant trap. "Yeah, sure. I'd love to." Almost as much as I'd love to know what you're really up to, lady. "Just let me know the time and place."

  * * *

  Candlemas was the new hot restaurant in the Triangle District. What had formerly been the Meat-Packing District was gentrifying rapidly, high-priced boutiques and luxury condos driving out the artists, drug dealers, and fetish clubs that had flourished here in low-rent days. The restaurant and its five-star CIA5-trained chef had recently been anointed by Gotham's reigning foodies, and as a result, even on this raw Saturday night there were people lined up halfway down the block waiting for tables.