
Chapter 14
The Oregon State rock is the thunderegg,
actually a geode. It looks like an unassuming lump until you break
it open to reveal marvelous agate or crystal cores.
SUNDAY MORNING I SAT on two writer
oriented panels with fair attendance for the last day of a con. If
the topic of discussion had been fan based, like “Are virgins the
natural prey of dragons?” no one would have been awake. Unpublished
and under-published writers are a different breed, even if they
come out of fandom. I looked out on eager faces primed with
notebooks or lap-tops, willing to drink deeply of my well of
knowledge.
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.
The real thing. If I didn’t know better, I’d say
it came from Mum’s garbage dump—you know where I found your magic
comb, the dragon skull gargoyle, and the Goddess brooch.
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.
Do it, babe. We’ll find a way to pay for it
later.
I hesitated, fingering the card in my belt
pack.
With that ball, we can bypass the chat
room.
“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.

“You should have bought the rock,” I tell my babe
for the umpteenth time. She doesn’t even look up from her computer
screen.
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....