Tales from the Magitech Lounge Page 4

  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 goi
ng 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.