by Karen Chance
Or half ones, in his case.
John sat at a small table by the “window”, a projection from up above that gave the prisoners down here the illusion of space and fresh air. It had never worked for him. His eyes had always seen through it, and all they showed him now was a steady reflection of the room behind him with a flickering illusion on top.
It made him dizzy, so he turned it off, only to be left looking at his own reflection in the mirror instead. For a moment, he searched the familiar green eyes, the slightly square face, the too thin lips and the prominent nose. Everything looked the same—disturbingly so.
He’d expected some differences, after everything, even if only small ones. But he didn’t see them, just as he hadn’t after Cassie brought him back. Yet there had been changes—so many that he didn’t even understand them all yet. But he knew one thing for certain: the old John would never have trusted his demon side, even in extremis, not to betray them both.
And the thing was, he still didn’t.
He knew it had had an agenda, back in Hong Kong, part of which had doubtless involved saving its own skin. And the rest had centered around weakening his resolve, making it harder to resist its siren song the next time. He knew exactly what was going on, and yet . . .
All he could think about was that heady rush of power, right at his fingertips.
It had been explosive, effervescent, wild. But unlike the real wild magic he’d captured earlier, it had also been controlled. He could use it, form it, make it do almost anything he wanted. It had been mind-blowing.
And almost immediately addictive.
No wonder Dagon had risked so much—his place on the council, his freedom, even his life—for another taste. And it wasn’t just the thrill that was dangerous. They were in a totally different stage of the war now, and as much as John hated to admit it, he needed his other half.
So, it was a balancing act, one where even a single slip could mean disaster. Or possibly not even that. His demon side had been showing signs of increased autonomy, able to give him help, even before he asked for it, numerous times.
It was getting stronger.
Three days ago, his demon half had saved his life, and that of countless others. But tomorrow? What would it do to him tomorrow?
The mirror flickered and Betty’s face appeared, looking exactly the same as always, except for a small cut above her right eye. “You have messages, mage.”
“Messages?”
“Several have come in over the last few days, whilst you were recovering. You also have a real time communication. Do you wish to take it now?”
John nodded. The screen went silver, and then a couple of familiar faces appeared. One was large, with a prominent tiger tat prowling around the neckline, and one was—
“You’re real,” John said, blinking at the little dancer currently draped over Zheng’s naked shoulder, who wasn’t so little anymore. She also wasn’t dressed like a temple dancer, although the shorty white silk robe she had on didn’t conceal much more.
“Of course, I real.” She frowned prettily at him. “What you expect?”
“He means you’re too pretty to be believed, darlin’,” Zheng said, and smiled back at her.
He was lounging on a bed in front of a window showing supernatural Hong Kong’s strange skyline in the background. A few distant rickshaws zipped past, while the lights were on in at least a couple of skyscrapers. From this angle, it was easy to imagine that nothing had happened.
From what John heard, the reality was somewhat different.
The dancer smiled lovingly at him. “I go get whiskey,” she said, and he kissed her hand and let her go.
The door closed, and, suddenly, it was all business.
“Did you tell them about the bullets?” Zheng demanded.
“The vamp killing bullets your ex-master wasn’t trading in, yet you suddenly had thousands of?” John asked, sipping his coffee. “Those bullets?”
Zheng swore.
“I didn’t, actually,” John said, forestalling an outburst. “I didn’t have to.”
“Meaning?” The dark eyes were sharp.
“That there were only a few thousand war mages crawling around the city once the enthrallment was broken. They found them all on their own.”
Zheng swore some more.
“It’s better this way,” John pointed out, when he could get a word in.
“How is it fucking better? And for the record, my master wasn’t involved in this, not of his own free will. He was enthralled and the family used to smuggle the damned flowers and then the bullets made from them, so if anybody was caught, we’d catch the blame! We found a shit ton of those things in one of the family warehouses in Hong Kong, but it was Zhu who was the traitor, not him. He set us up—”
“Precisely.”
“—while his buddies used them to lure as many senators to the city to die along with the rest of us as they could manage!”
“Quite.”
Zheng scowled. “Don’t get all British on me. If you have something to say—”
“Just that what someone told me recently was right. No group is a monolith in this fight. There are going to be vampires who choose the other side. We may all be happy to have those bullets someday.”
“Talk to me when you can be killed by them!” Zheng snarled.
John raised an eyebrow.
“Don’t try it,” Zheng snapped. “I saw what I saw. I don’t know what’s going on with you, but you aren’t just some war mage.”
“And have you . . . told anyone?” John asked, trying for lightness.
The dark eyes gleamed. “Slipped my mind. Guess you owe me a favor, ‘war mage’.”
The screen abruptly went silver again. John drank coffee and waited, feeling relieved. And then almost spurt it out when another familiar face popped up, this time in a recorded message.
“Er, Mage Pritkin. I . . . just wanted to let you know that, er, that we made it through and are all back safely. Your, er, that is, the demon lord you sent us to was very helpful. He said we weren’t the worst things you ever dragged home.”
The boy—the one John had sent through a portal to his father’s court, along with several dozen other mages, smiled suddenly, as if remembering. John did not. Because he and his father shared more than a bloodline. Some people who had seen them together said they might have been twins.
Fuck!
The boy’s smile faded after a moment, as if the implications had not escaped him. And then he shook his head. “I, of course, did not actually meet Lord Rosier,” he said, with a straight face. “He was unavailable. I only talked to some of his servants, who conveyed his wishes.”
John narrowed his eyes at the screen, because the boy was a terrible liar. Or maybe he just wasn’t trying very hard. Because he suddenly glanced over his shoulder, and then leaned closer in to the mirror.
“Everybody else was still enthralled,” he said rapidly. “They don’t remember much, and I doubt they ever will. And I . . . I just wanted you to know, I understand what you risked to save us. I thought we’d never see you again, that we were leaving you to die! But then I realized, you can’t die.”
The boy had been looking down, almost as if embarrassed to be talking to John directly. But he suddenly looked up, and there was hope in the shining eyes, and other things John couldn’t decipher and didn’t want to. Oh, he knew, all right.
Because there’d only ever been one mage ever born with an incubus father, and his name hadn’t been Pritkin.
“I will never, ever, say anything,” the boy whispered fervently. “But sir, this is war. To know who we have fighting on our side, to know that you’re with us . . . you have to understand what it would mean. I just think—”
He abruptly looked over his shoulder again, and then back at John. “I’m sorry; I have to go. That’s all I wanted to say.”
The screen went silver.
John sat looking at it for a long time, until when he next tried
to take a sip, his coffee was cold. He drank it anyway, needing the caffeine more than the taste. It was one of the few drugs that worked on his metabolism. Well, one of the few non-lethal varieties.
He thought about the other kinds, the ones he’d been taking more and more of before Jonas came to drag him out from under his kitchen table that morning. Because the boy was wrong; he could very definitely die, and nearly had several times. But he’d fought his way back, out of the pain, out of the depths of despair, wanting to do some good before the inevitable came to pass, to repair some of the bad and have a life that meant something!
And he had; he’d done some good through the years, things he was proud of. Yet, all the while, he’d known what else lay within him. What else he had the capacity for.
And, certainly, all people did. There was dark and bright in everyone, a chiaroscuro of the soul, with the dark making the light so much brighter, a testament to what it had triumphed over. And the light making the evil so much starker, allowing a glimpse of what could have been, had different choices been made.
But that was just it: other people chose, deciding their path every day through a thousand little interactions. He simply was, having never had a choice, the dark and light having been locked in mortal combat ever since he was born. And which would win out . . .
Was an open question.
John set his empty cup very carefully down into a table, so he wouldn’t be tempted to throw it across the room. If other people went bad, and gave in to their baser instincts, they could do harm—possibly a lot of it. But if he did? With all the power his nature could summon at times?
Sometimes, he thought it would be better had Jonas shown up a little bit later.
The mirror dinged, letting him know that he still had a message waiting. He sighed and stabbed the surface. And was greeted by a single, huge blue eyeball.
It was bigger than Jonas’s magnified version because it was right up next to the screen. It was also immediately familiar. “I don’t know how to use this thing,” Cassie’s voice said, after a minute. “Don’t they have phones?”
“Wards interfere,” someone replied, from offscreen. “And they probably got the big boys up right now. But it’s no big deal—”
“The fact that I can’t talk to him is a big deal!”
“You can talk to him. It’s just like a pad. Like skyping.”
“Yeah, only I don’t really do that, either,” she said, whilst giving John a look up her left nostril.
“Why are you mushing your face up against it?”
“I’m not! I’m just trying to figure it out—”
“You completely are.” A small man, portly, balding and badly dressed, came into view in the background, what little John could see of it. “Give me that!”
The mirror was wrestled away from Cassie and held about three feet in front of her. Giving John a view of a pajama wearing Pythia sitting cross legged on her bed, her hair tousled from sleep and her cheek smeared with what looked suspiciously like powdered sugar. Breakfast time, he thought, doing some mental math. And without him there, she was taking full advantage.
In spite of everything, he felt a grin tug at his lips.
“So, talk,” the portly man said.
“Don’t point the camera over there!” she stage-whispered.
“It’s not a camera, and where? At the table?” the mirror swiveled some more, and Cassie squealed. Probably because a table near the bed was currently piled with bacon, eggs and fruit—all untouched—and a sadly depleted pastry basket that still held a few sugar dusted—
The mirror was abruptly jerked back. “Pritkin!”
Cassie must had snatched it from the small man, because her face was smushed up against it again. Or perhaps that was a belated attempt to block the view. “Um, I just wanted to say that, uh, that we all miss you a lot and hope you’re taking it easy!” She stopped and rolled her eyes. “Okay, I know you’re not taking it easy—”
“Why wouldn’t he be?” the small man asked.
“He doesn’t know how to take it easy and shut up,” she told him.
“Just trying to help.”
“Well, you’re not. You’re not helping!”
“Well, okay, then. You wanna figure this thing out by yourself, be my guest. I don’t have to stay here and be yelled at.”
“I wasn’t yelling!” she yelled, but John heard a door snick shut.
“Vampires,” she told him, with a sigh. He could relate.
“Um, so. I didn’t really have anything to say, except that, I, uh. I hope you aren’t letting the Corps work you too hard. And you know, you shouldn’t be letting them work you at all. You were dead for two weeks! What does a guy have to do to get a vacation around there?”
She blinked at him, and while all he could currently see were two big blue eyes, it was enough. For a second, they were filled with irritation, although whether at the Corps, at him, or at the mirror, he wasn’t sure. But a second later that melted, and she managed to look giddy and uncertain and happy and worried, all at the same time.
“Come home soon,” she whispered, staring directly into John’s eyes, and he was hit by a rush far stronger than anything he’d felt in Hong Kong.
She accidentally cut off the transmission a second later, leaving him looking at a frozen image of Cassie’s “oops” face. He looked at it for a long time. “You’re going to lose,” he told his demon, and for the first time, he believed it.
Even when the old, hated slither moved underneath his breastbone.
We shall see.
~ The End
Author’s Note
If, like John, you would like to read more on Dorina’s side of things, check out the companion novella “Dragon’s Claw.” And for even more Dory, pick up the Dorina Basarab series, starting with Midnight’s Daughter.
If you’d like to read more about John Pritkin, he can be found in the Cassandra Palmer series, starting with Touch the Dark. There are also a number of free shorts/novellas featuring the grumpy war mage on the official webpage: KarenChance.com. Just visit the “freebies” section.
Happy reading!
