I’m not the hero type. And I didn’t think I could handle being around the Reincarnist all of the time.
Now things were back to normal: me in the bar, them in their gilded tower in Megolopolis. Yet . . . in the short amount of time they were here, I got used to it. I got used to having people around. I normally wouldn’t dare say or even acknowledge it, but in my current hungover state, I had to: I’d had a taste of a family for a short time, and I was craving it.
I cursed my weakness. I know what needing people leads to: disappointment. My father especially. He had a new life—literally, again—and a new family. He didn’t need me in it. I hadn’t seen him much in the year or so after his stay, just on a few rare occasions of magic-related questions.
Lainey, his new wife, actually brought their daughter and my half sister Emily over to visit while they went out hero-ing or to movie premieres, or wherever it was they spent their free time. I didn’t know if this was from a wish to build a relationship with me, concern for my young sister’s safety, or just because I’d elicited a promise to bring her at one point. Emily was the only one of my half siblings over the many years that I’d ever taken any interest in, though I have to admit it’s in large part because I know what supposedly lies in store for her. It wasn’t necessarily sisterly affection; it’s more of a morbid curiosity to see what this person prophesied to save the world or destroy it would do next.
I sighed. If all I was going to do was think about the EHJ and Emily, there was only one thing to do. My bar was a bit out of range for transmitters, phones and the like. That was really no problem: while I really do try to update my speech to the popular vernacular so that people around me feel more at ease—I’ve done it to the point that even my thoughts have started to sound modern—technology and I have never been friends. I’m always a decade or more behind, and I’ve pretty much given up on trying to move forward. No, if someone needed to get a message to me, they usually came to me personally or went through one of my djinns.
Sadly, Emily and the others weren’t likely to visit me here. That meant I had to leave home to see her.
CHAPTER TWO
Some magic just requires the right words spoken in the spellcaster’s preferred language; others, words and a deed, like a hand motion or a combination of special powders. Still others use all of the above, and a select few can be evoked with just a thought, if the caster is powerful enough. I am. Portal travel is one of the easiest spells for me, and that was the way I made my way between my reality and others. I can appear anywhere, and in this case, I appeared right in the middle of the Elite Hands of Justice war room. Instantly I heard alarms screaming to life.
Mindy Clark-Christian, aka Tekgrrl, was the first on the scene, training a rather large gun of some sort, probably of her own design, on me. Seeing my identity, she relaxed and pointed the weapon away. “Damn it, Fantazia! I’m going to have to reset the alarms.” She sighed. “Computer, override security, per my access.”
The alarms died out in midscreech.
I surveyed Mindy coolly. “I thought I had security clearance here.”
“You do if you come in the proper way instead of just popping into our dimension all willy-nilly.” She walked over to the computer bank on the side of the room and started typing furiously. I caught a glimpse of my name and the words “interdimensional bartender” on the screen. I guess they’re pretty serious about logging in visitors. “Wesley had to up security after one of the Dragon’s cronies tried to fake his magic signature to get in here. Now, anyone sets off the alarm who magically transports inside, regardless if they’re allowed to be here or not.”
I hadn’t heard about that. The Dragon is my father’s archnemesis. He’s a powerful magic-user who wants to bring about the apocalypse by recalling to our world a group of superpowered beings called the Ancient Ones, who had been locked away long ago by a group of magic-users, supposedly forever. The Dragon tried to use