My brain wanted to follow the Nörglein home. Fortunately, three other published writers sat with me and carried much of the discussion.

“Tess, did the injury interrupt your career badly? How do you cope with personal problems that rob you of writing time?” About the only question I felt qualified to answer.

“Actually, the bad fall woke me out of a long depression. I’m happy to say I’m writing again, even if I am overdue on my deadline. I didn’t cope with personal problems. I let them consume me. And my career suffered. So now I’m playing catch up.”

Scrap had told me time and again I needed to get back to work. I didn’t listen. I wallowed instead.

We went on to discuss ways to make time for writing around busy schedules, how to channel anger and frustration into characters, how to recognize the symptoms of clinical depression and when to seek help. Just as the audience members began comparing antidepressant prescriptions, Allie came to collect me.

“Is the car packed?” I asked, my mind already on strategies for removing the Nörglein from my neighborhood. How I’d deal with his children, I had no idea.

“Yeah, all packed up and checked out. I’d like to take one last cruise through the dealers’ room first,” Allie said. She adjusted her gait to match mine.

“What are you looking for?”

“A corset.” She blushed. “It’s white brocade with a lily of the valley pattern. I was thinking of my wedding night.”

I swallowed my smile. “Okay. There’s a rapier I’d like to fondle again. My collection is in mini storage and I’d like something trusty but inexpensive to keep in the house. I feel half naked without a backup weapon.”

“Me, too,” Allie said quietly. “Tomorrow morning, first thing, I’m going to buy a gun and get a carry permit. I feel so vulnerable without one. Last night ...”

“A gun wouldn’t have worked on demon hide, or bark, or whatever.”

“But it will make humans stop and think twice about snatching your purse because you’re in a cast and can’t move fast.” She slapped the hand of a grubby teenager (couldn’t tell if it was male of female in generic jeans and a black Tee, with short hair gelled into hornlike spikes) away from my belt pack.

The kid slunk away grumbling about life not being fair.

“It’s not just here. Most of the con community is well behaved. Out in the real world we are both in greater danger. I’ll feel safer with a gun. I’m trained when to use one and when not to.” Allie veered off to the costume racks of capes and corsets, hats and feathers.

Oooooh, Tessie, look at this! Scrap popped into view directly in front of me and led the way to a different table in the crowded room. Two dozen dealers with twice as many tables or racks lined the walls of the large ballroom. Another dozen filled in squares in the middle. Scrap zoomed in on a display of crystals in the back corner. Hanging sun catcher crystals, crystals in jewelry, candlestick dependents. And a crystal ball.

From twenty feet away I felt the power pulsating from it. A real crystal ball made of beryllium or goshenite, not blown glass or rock crystal. Three inches in diameter, it would fit nicely in the palm of my hand. Mineral traces made it a bit milky. As I approached, the imperfections seemed to swirl and coil, giving peeks at something beyond the here and now.

At least I now knew what fascinated the Nörglein père in the dealers’ room. If the kids had broken away from the gaming long enough to look, they’d know too.

My pearls grew warm and my scar throbbed.

“What is it?” I asked Scrap out of the side of my mouth as he landed on my shoulder. He turned bright green with lust.

Imp Haven is cold. Nearly freeze-dry cold. Magical artifacts tend to get dumped there. No one other than imps and the occasional gamer goes there by choice. The cold preserves the magic but makes it inert. Otherwise, the power within would broadcast their location across every dimension. So they remain jumbled up with the rest of the Universe’s garbage until someone like Scrap finds them and brings them out.

I understand Scrap lands in the middle of the dump frequently when his Mum swats him out of the house for being inadequate, a runt, or too smart for her to understand. He’s lost more than one of his hard-earned warts to his mum’s broom.

The merchant peeked out from behind her display boards filled with earrings and pendants.

“Starshine,” I called to the familiar figure.

Like most dealers, she made the circuit of cons, Renaissance Faires, harvest festivals, small town celebrations, Highland Games, and pagan gatherings. We ran into each other frequently. Today she wore her usual uniform of long, gathered black skirt, pink peasant blouse, and laced gray bodice. She contained her springy black hair with a pink scarf worn Gypsy style. A few tendrils escaped showing traces of silver. She also displayed samples of her jewelry on her wrists, at her ears, around her neck, and dangling from the scarf. She sparkled in the artificial light. In full sunshine she’d near blind the unwary.

“Tess,” she said brightly, immediately moving a tray of unset crystals toward me. In years past I’d made some of my own jewelry from her wares.

Much as I tried to find something interesting in the tray of aquamarine and morganite—colored forms of the goshenite—my eyes kept wandering toward the little ball anchoring a stack of silk handkerchiefs in a basket.

Starshine laid a possessive hand atop the polished crystal, covering it from view.

The power within it still vibrated on my own personal frequency. I think I could locate that ball anywhere in the Universe now.

I picked up a pair of drop earrings with rough heliodor beads. That’s the greenish-yellow variety of beryl. Not my favorite color, but a useful distraction. Now if she had emeralds, the rarest and most precious of beryllium colors, I’d jump on the beads in a minute.

“Where are these from?” I asked.

“You know I can’t tell you that. My rock hounds would skin me alive if I revealed their secrets.” Her deep whiskey sour voice almost chanted. She bustled back behind her table.

Hmm, the ball no longer sat in the basket, and the top silk square—a red one—had gone with it. The silk dampened the crystal’s aura but didn’t entirely mask it.

I put down the beads. “Actually, I’m looking for something larger.”

“Oh?” That almost tenor voice rose to an alto. She opened her eyes wide feigning innocence. “I have some crystals still in the rock matrix in the back. I didn’t know you collected them.”

“I don’t. What about the crystal ball?”

“The what?”

“The crystal ball you had in the hankie basket.”

“Oh, that old thing. You don’t want that.”

“I think I do. It speaks to me.”

She froze in place; blinked several times; remembered to breathe again. “Do you hear it?”

“In my own way.” Yeah, it was sort of like a distant chime calling me to Mass or reminding me of a banquet waiting.

Only the banquet wasn’t of food. With that crystal ball I could eat and drink of spiritual journeys and quests. I could fill the empty places in my soul left by my mother’s death and Gollum’s desertion.

I needed that hunk of beryllium more than I needed food.

“It’s not for sale.”

“Everything is for sale.” I mentally calculated the balance left on my credit card.

“Not for one thousand dollars.”

I gulped and did some fast math in my head. I’d have to tap some of Mom’s inheritance to cover it. “What about two?”

“Um.”

Could I survive on salad and peanut butter until I conned Donovan into cutting me a check? “Two-five will cover all your table rentals and percentages for the next six months. Everything you sell will be gravy.”

“Make it three.”

I gulped.

I hesitated, fingering the card in my belt pack.

“I can’t. I just can’t. That’s too expensive.” My credit card would bounce faster than Scrap caromed in and out of his mum’s dump.

As I turned away from the table I hesitated. Starshine looked a bit stunned. “Here’s my card in case you change your mind.” I handed her the one I reserve for business contacts with landline and cell phone numbers as well as private email and Web site addresses, the same card I gave to Oak.

So I slide inside and peer out at her, making faces until she acknowledges me.

Actually, she hit the delete key and that kicks me out of the system as fast as Mum’s broom.

“Starshine wants too much for the crystal ball,” she mutters and types another short paragraph.

“We’d have found a way to pay for it,” I insist.

“I won’t go crawling to Donovan for money.”

“What about Gollum? He’s got that mega trust fund for Warrior expenses while on quest.”

“That crystal ball is not part of the current quest. Besides, I’d almost rather take money from Donovan than Gollum. And I won’t call either one of them.”

“But ... but ...”

“No buts about it. I can’t afford a crystal ball. No matter how much you want it.”

“But we need it!”

“How can you tell?”

“I just can. I’m an imp. With that ball we can spy on the forest elf and his band of juvenile delinquents.”

“We can?”

“Yeah, and we can keep an eye on Donovan, and Gollum.”

“No!” she screams at the top of her lungs. “Go do imp things and leave me alone. If I finish this book before the end of the year I just might be able to salvage my career and my credit balance.”

“If you hadn’t let Dad tie up so much of your money in retirement accounts . . .”

“Out!”

So out I go. Allie’s no fun. She’s making phone calls and pretending to read bride magazines, in between petting the matt-black revolver cradled in her lap. Now if she’d let me design her gown we could put together the wedding of the year on a budget. But no. She can’t see or hear me, and Tess won’t interpret for me. I settle for marking a page in a magazine on the bottom of the pile and move it to the top.

What’s this? Allie’s talking to the community college. They’ve got an opening for an instructor in the Criminal Justice Department. Woo Hoo! She and Steve are gonna move here. Tess needs that. She misses her family, though she won’t admit it. She’s been lonely for too long.

I can’t help Allie write up her resume. But I can do something about the crystal ball. I know my babe needs that artifact of power. The Universe or the Powers That Be wouldn’t have put it in her path if she didn’t.

So I pop out to the chat room.

What? I can’t see any demons on guard. Usually, they are visible as the only spots of color in the vast expanse of nothing.

(I’ll tell you a secret. You know that white light people talk about when they have near death experiences? That’s really just the chat room. Imps aren’t allowed to know what happens after death. For us there is nothing. The end is the end. But some races and tribes get to start over again. To do that they have to wander through the chat room from one dimension to the next, or one life to the next. Whatever.)

Eeeeeek! It’s the Politbutts. Big as trees, shaggy with a fur made of lies. See, a Politbutt can’t tell the truth if you paid them to do it. And every time they tell a lie, it shows up as a long tendril of fur, some white, some black, some mixes of colors. The white guys are the worst. They make their lies sound so very believable.

This guy is white, barely discernible against the white-on-white room. It lumbers toward me. I scoot to the right, the opposite direction from where I need to go.

Politbutt anticipates me and snakes out an arm the size of a sewer pipe. It slams into me; I can’t move fast enough to avoid something that big.

The breath whooshes out of me. My mouth tastes metallic—like copper. I hope it’s not blood.

The blow shoots me straight across an acre or two of empty space, down a long corridor with windows into the past. I scream past glimpses of the crystal ball’s origin and history.

I came here with the resonance of that ball in my mind. The windows show me what I’m looking for. But I have no control over my flight. I can’t breathe. I can barely look at the scenes in the life of the Crystal.

I catch pieces of its discovery by a druid in Scotland. The ball changes hands dozens of times, from grandmother to grandson, to distant cousin. A clan of Romany takes it in trade for healing magic. The clan sells it in desperation during the Holocaust where they are hunted down with the same zeal as if they were Jewish. And then ... and then ... our Starshine finds it in a pile of junk at a flea market. She pays a pittance for it. I see another buyer, can’t tell who it is, but she (?) finds it too late. Starshine doesn’t know what it is; she just knows it is valuable. And powerful. She lusts after it with greed, not with understanding.

My Tess understands it. I can show her how to use it.

Then I smack into a solid door. My wings crumple. Pain lances like fire along the full length of every bone and cartilage. I sink down to the floor that suddenly goes squishy and starts to absorb me.

Revelation. Imps don’t truly die or pass into nothingness. We, with our special powers that allow us to travel through the dimensions anywhere, anywhen, become the chat room. We don’t need fixed portals, we make our own. My ancestors have become the walls of this transition place. We live forever, continuing our duty to the Universe in a new way.

Peace and warmth flood me with this knowledge. I can pass into this new existence with ease. It won’t hurt.

Much.

Lingering stabs of fire remind me of who I am and what I am.

I’ve got to find some life deep within me to cling to.

If I die, Tess dies. It’s not her time. She still has so much good she can do.

If she’d just bought the damn crystal ball I wouldn’t have had to chase it through the chat room. I might live to become the Celestial Blade once more.

If I die, she dies.

The white envelops me....