Death by Chocolate (3 page)

Epsi stared, fascinated and a little stunned by the easy teasing between them.

"When are you free?" Lanie continued, not reacting at all as her coloring faded back to
normal. "I'm on my lunch break. Got to get back to work soon."

"Epsi's along your route. Why don't the two of you walk together?" Angela suggested.
"Don't say it," she added quickly, and shook her finger at Lanie.

"Say what?" Epsi asked, after the two of them had made their farewells and headed out
the front door. She had been fascinated to learn that Lanie had some telekinesis. She opened the
front door of the shop by "remote control", and used it to slide her wheelchair down the shallow
steps of the front porch of Divine's Emporium.

"What do you-- Oh, you mean Angela telling me not to say it." Lanie gave her
wheelchair a hard push and glided for a dozen squares of sidewalk as they headed into the center
of town. "What she said, about walking together. I usually shoot off a smart-alec remark about
'don't you mean walk and roll?' And that usually gets me a slap on the back of my head or
someone groaning or whatever. Since you're new here, she probably wanted to spare you getting
your brain bounced around the room." She pushed again, and this time Epsi felt the tingle of
power at work that kept the wheelchair going without physical effort. "That's my specialty,
actually. Playing with people's minds. I have a regular gig at a local comedy club, doing a
sit-down routine." She gave Epsi a sideways glance, obviously waiting for something.

"Sit-- Oh, I get it. Instead of stand-up." Epsi chuckled with her.

"What did Angela want you to ask me about?"

"How long do we have until you're back at work?"

"I'm just a couple streets over, at the
Neighborlee Tattler
. Maybe ten minutes at
a brisk roll. I usually try to get out of the office on gorgeous days like this and zip around town,
just to get my blood pumping. How big is this thing she thinks we should talk about?"

"She said you're the expert on alien mating--"

"I learned a little about Need last winter, when Will and Phill were going through their
crisis. Is that it?"

"Kind of."

By the time they reached the door of the local newspaper, Epsi had barely begun
explaining her mixed feelings about Need and choosing a lifemate versus having one chosen for
her, the pros and cons, the happy couples she had seen on both sides of the question. She didn't
know whether to be encouraged or worried that Lanie didn't say anything, just listened and
murmured, "uh huh," and "okay, makes sense," a couple times.

They made arrangements to meet for dinner at Lanie's house that evening and parted.
Epsi decided she did feel better, just getting her concerns out into the open. There were benefits,
she decided, in talking to someone who was unaffected by the situation, but who understood it,
albeit from a different and unexpected angle. At the very least, she wouldn't have some old
auntie or uncle who had gone through the rigors and terrors and ecstasy of Need insisting that his
or her personal experience was the only answer or solution or tactic.

She felt so good, in fact, that she ventured into the grocery store and bought enough
supplies to last through the end of Lori and Brick's two-week honeymoon, and into the next
month. Just in case she was forced to stay in Neighborlee for a long time, while she waited for
the investigative team to make its next move. Most of the groceries were chocolate in one form
or another, and two twelve-packs of diet cherry cola, but those could be considered medical
supplies.

When she came out of the grocery store with her cart piled high with bags, she realized
she had a problem. She didn't have a car, and there were too many people moving around the
shopping area to simply pop out and teleport herself and her haul to the house. There were all
those meddlesome rules established by the Ministry of Invisibility to Humans, after all.

By the time she got home, after having had to duck into the alley where the delivery
trucks parked to teleport unseen, Epsi's mood had dropped from eager anticipation to irritation.
She treated herself to an entire can of diet cherry cola, and then lay down to take a nap before
going to Lanie's for dinner. She hoped Lanie knew enough about Fae to serve chocolate--dark,
and in large quantities.

* * * *

"Cosmic," Guber sighed, watching the Bubblemaniac bouncing around the tiny screen of
the handheld video game. "How come they didn't have stuff like this when we were kids?"

"Maybe because when we were kids, electricity wasn't even invented yet?" Kevyn kept
his head bowed over the pile of papers he was studying.

"Hey, man, you're really boring." Guber looked around the recreation room in Kevyn
and Sophie's home, realized he was hanging upside down in mid-air again, and turned himself
right side up. "If Sophie wasn't so cool, I'd say being married did it to you."

"It's called being responsible." Kevyn finally raised his head and tipped back in his
chair, stretching his arms out to his side. "And it's called being up to my ear points in
pro
bono
work. You thought it was rough being a Fae advocate? Try earning your parallel
dimensions JD degree and passing the bar in four dimensions, as well as in the Human
realms."

"Why'd you do it?" Guber tapped the screen and it paused the game. Something it
normally wouldn't do in the Human realms, but a lot of laws of reality were twisted into knots
inside the spell-woven walls of Kevyn and Sophie's house.

"It's the right thing to do." He chuckled and leaned forward to rest his elbows on the
table again. "And yeah, because I'm a boring old fogie, now that I'm married and degreed and
practicing and responsible. But you know what? It's kind of fun, being responsible."

"Yeah, well, if I had a babe like Sophie looking up at me all adoring and trusting, I'd be
responsible, too." Guber thought back to the day he had met Sophie, during a crisis when an
academic rival thought she could actually kidnap Kevyn and use him for her doctoral thesis on
magic. He sometimes wished he had made a move on Sophie, tried to get her attention and
interest. Every time he had that thought, he realized it was a waste of time. Sophie and Kevyn
were meant to be together. They were in love with each other long before the fact hit them
between the eyes.

"What do you think of the game?"

"Cosmic. So your cousin Glori is into video games now?"

"Her and her husband, Lance. They're devising them with the kids in her daycare. Lance
has a talent for stuff like that, now that he's gone through the Changeling process and he's out of
the extermination business. What's really cool is the factor built into them to encourage kids who
have latent magical talent, reinforce it with subliminal programming, and send out a signal to any
Changeling Detection Squad members who might be in the general area. Meaning in the
surrounding ten thousand miles. And for the kids who are just ordinary kids, generating the usual
magical flow, it channels that energy into a collection grid, for Human realm-dwelling Fae to tap
for emergency purposes. It's ingenious."

"So what's the problem?" Guber settled down at the other end of the table and put his
feet up on one of the few clear spots.

"Deciding if it's legal. Getting clearance to establish the grid. And the hardest
part--setting up a dummy corporation here in the Human realms, along with a fake factory and
assembly line and inventory, so whenever they get inspected, they'll pass as the real thing. It's not
like you can build such technology in the Human realms without a good boost from magic to get
it started."

"Uh huh." Guber grinned, understanding now why his good buddy from their bad old
days of running rebellious and hiding from the horrific aspect of growing up, had finally grown
up. "You want me to do my thing and try to set up a link between the Fae dimensions and the
Human realms, so we can have an actual working factory, and get around all those
problems."

"You're the wizard of Human tech."

"Yeah, and I'm also trying to keep a low profile. It really sucks worse than gravity on
Jupiter, having to hide from the Revisionists."

"Did I mention I'm working with a few people who are working on your little problem?"
Kevyn grinned.

"Little problem?" Guber shook his head, returning the grin with a wry twist. "It's no fun
having a bigger percentage of purple blood than ninety percent of the Fae population in any
known dimension. When slimy old Theodosius got tossed, you wouldn't believe how many
people tried contacting me, wanting to start up the old saw about re-establishing the hereditary
throne. They would have found me, too, if they could have traced the messages that did make it
through to me."

"Except you have more rerouting routines crisscrossing through the Ether than a dozen
Fae put together." Kevyn snapped his fingers and the refrigerator at the far end of the room
swung open, allowing two cans of diet cherry cola to leap out and float across the room, to land
on the table in front of each of them.

"Yeah, well, it's a good thing I like being among Humans, and I like adapting the tech."
He leaned back in his chair and let out a long, deep sigh. "So I'm kinda not all that thrilled about
getting involved in a project like this, no matter how cool, if it might give people a hint how to
find me."

"How about legislation being processed right now, despite the death of Mellisande,
legally and magically divesting you, and everyone else descended from the former royal family,
of your purple blood status?" He barked laughter when Guber fumbled his can and got some
liquid up his nose.

"You can do that?"

"Bureaucracy can do almost anything, even if--especially if--it's totally illogical. We
technically erase all the legal records, overwrite the historical documentation, and change the
registration of the genetic code. Once that's done, it doesn't matter how many samples the
Revisionists get from you and anybody within ten generations of you--you're not royal
anymore."

"Man, the things you'll do to get me to run some tech for you." He held out his can and
the two friends tapped rims in salute.

"Besides." Kevyn shrugged and offered a lopsided grin. "Sophie thought of bringing you
in to do the flim-flam for the video games, so even if you said no, I was duty-bound to talk you
into it anyway."

"Hey, pal, I might say no to you, but I'll do anything for your sweet lady." Guber tipped
back his can and took a big swig. He grinned as the carbonation fizzed in his sinuses and the
sweet intoxication swept down to his toes. "And maybe if we succeed in this, she'll find another
cool chick among her
Star Trek
friends who'd be interested in me and won't get her
brains fried by finding out Fae are real."

"If you're lucky, she'll kidnap you and take you home to study for a few weeks," Kevyn
said, and raised his can in a toast to him.

"I should be so lucky."

* * * *

"Safety in numbers, right?" Epsi said under her breath. She leaned back against the wall
and watched the friendly insanity transpiring in the community theater building where Lanie's
Star Trek
club held their monthly meeting.

In the last week, she had made many new friends, thanks to Lanie including her in her
ramblings and activities around town. She had met Maurice's Holly and been talked into reading
to the children during afternoon story hour at the library. She had tagged along with Lanie's
childhood friends, Felicity and Kurt, and Kurt's sweetheart Jane, who ran the local spa. All of
them had unusual gifts, and a mutual goal of unraveling the mystery of where they had come
from, how they came to Neighborlee, and how they were born with their strange gifts. They also
had a bizarre, fun sense of humor and outlook on life, and weren't above using their talents to
play nasty tricks on the bullies who ran across their path.

And now Lanie shared her
Star Trek
friends with Epsi. That took a lot of trust,
because they were a wild, slightly crazy, and fun bunch. Take for instance the current
activity.

It was a game that remotely resembled Tag and took place mostly in the dark. She
gathered that the object was to move around the room as quietly as possible, and for one person
to sneak up behind all the others, whisper, "You're dead," and then move on to the next "victim,"
while the person just tagged would "die" in as loud and as dramatic a fashion as possible. Those
who were just slightly more insanely creative than the others managed to take down tables and/or
chairs or tumble down flights of stairs when they collapsed.

Since Epsi could see in the dark, and really didn't know how to turn off that particular
talent, she elected to stay on the sidelines and observe. Harry, another Fae visiting Neighborlee,
joined her while his fiancée, Bethany Miller, participated with gusto.

Epsi reflected that Bethany was guaranteed to have fun. She was part Fae, way back in
the past, and part whatever Lanie, Felicity, Kurt and Jane were. That heritage combined to give
her the almost unfair ability to move without even disturbing the air. If she hadn't seen the
popular young actress stumble over a backpack left lying on the floor, Epsi might have accused
Bethany of being able to see in the dark. She was the current "murderer," and she wore an
expression of almost unholy glee as she sped around the room, "killing" one victim after another.
At this rate, the game would be over before the last ice cube melted in the soda in Epsi's
cup.

"Look at it this way," Harry muttered. "Lots of witnesses, lots of defenders. No matter
what happens."

"Oh, you're a big help." She turned to him and they exchanged grins.

Finally, someone stumbled over one of Bethany's victims and shouted the ritual call of
"Body!" which allowed the few "living" participants to turn on the lights. Epsi giggled with the
rest when the living--numbering five--struggled to haul the "dead"--numbering twelve--into the
little anteroom of the community building, which had been designated the "morgue."