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  And all Ria could do was scream silently within her own mind, fighting uselessly against what Perenor had made of her.

  She had not seen Terenil die, though die he had. Before that moment, the Witch Kentraine had realized the truth, and had struck her own blow against Perenor and his nightmare allies.

  Ria remembered that last moment: Kentraine standing over her, her Fender guitar raised like a club. She had willed the girl not to flinch, to do what had to be done to stop the madness and slaughter. And Kentraine had—striking with all her strength, smashing her guitar down on Ria’s head, shattering the magical link Perenor had forged, saving them all. Saving the Nexus, and the Sidhe foothold in this world.

  Ria had only learned the details of the end of the battle long afterward—how the dying Terenil had slain Perenor with his last breath, how Eric had reached beyond himself to pierce the Veil and anchor the new Nexus in a place beyond harm, how when Korendil would have slain her, Elizabet and Kayla, healers who had been drawn into the conflict on the very morning of the war, had claimed her life in payment for their help.

  Together the two, Healer and Apprentice, had brought her back on the long slow journey from the edge of death, piecing back together Ria’s shattered body, mind, and soul. She owed them a debt she could never repay.

  Even when she was well at last, it would have been so much easier just to slink away and hide herself forever. As Perenor’s heir at law, everything they had built together was hers. She never needed to work another day in her life if she didn’t want to.

  But when she’d tried to offer Elizabet money, the Healer wouldn’t accept it. “You’ll repay me best by taking up your life again, Ria. I don’t Heal people so that they can hide from their lives. You have responsibilities in the world. Go see to them.”

  So now she was here.

  But that was old news, and Ria preferred not to dwell on the past. Perenor was dead, his bid to claim the power of Elfhame Sun-Descending a failure, thanks to a Witch, a Bard, and an elven knight. She’d never figured out by what twisted mercy the three of them had spared her to claw her way back to memory and sanity once more. She tried not to think about it.

  Ria had other things to think about.

  She reached the end of the corridor, and the uniformed LlewellCo security guard opened it for her.

  There was an audible hush as she entered the boardroom. Nine men and three women were gathered around the gleaming oak table. A breathtaking view of Los Angeles and the Valley was visible through the enormous windows that filled one wall of the room, but most of those at the table were sitting with their backs to the view. An oil portrait of Ria—done in Early Hagiography, she’d never liked it—hung over the head of the table. She’d been wearing black when it was painted, but today she wore red. Phoenix red, the color of rebirth.

  She shut the door behind her.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen. Ladies. I hope I’m not late?” she asked with a warrior’s smile.

  Several of the people sitting around the table glanced from Ria to the portrait as if confirming her identity. Ria smiled inwardly. She didn’t look a day older than she had when it was painted. One last advantage of her elven-Blood heritage—she wouldn’t age as fast as mortalkind, though she didn’t share the elves’ immortality. In the mortal world, especially in these rarified corporate circles, her prolonged youthfulness would be taken for the work of an excellent plastic surgeon, nothing more.

  Jonathan Sterling had gotten smoothly to his feet as she entered—of all those in the room, he was the only one who had been expecting her arrival here today—and stood aside as Ria took his place at the head of the table. The seat at her right was unoccupied—how had he managed that feat of choreography? a small part of her mind wondered idly—and he settled into it, trusted courtier to a grand prince. Only a shadow of a smile marred his perfect corporate mask, and you would have to know him very well to be able to see it. An answering flicker of amusement in her own green eyes, Ria took her seat.

  She let her gaze sweep slowly up and down the table, taking careful note of who flinched, who looked angry, who looked relieved—and there were one or two—and who couldn’t meet her gaze at all.

  “I understand that there was some doubt about the extent of my recovery,” she said dryly. “Thank you for your concern. Now, if you will all direct your attention to point one on the agenda. . . .”

  For the next three hours Ria worked them unmercifully, probing for signs of timidity and unsoundness in LlewellCo’s interim rulers. It was primarily a display of power, proving that no matter how long she’d been a bed-ridden basket case, she was back now, and as much to be feared as ever. It was easy enough to know what buttons to push: their minds fairly shouted out their deepest fears and reservations, allowing her to leaf through their eddying surfaces like the pages of a high-fashion magazine. Only Jonathan, beside her, was a still pool of well-organized calm.

  There had been lapses and attempted coups, of course. She’d hired the cleverest and most ambitious corporate sharks, and one had to expect a little feeding frenzy now and then. Baker and Hardesty, in particular, had taken advantage of her absence to do things they knew she wouldn’t approve of, and that Jonathan would be hard-pressed to discover. Several of the companies they’d bought had been bleeding money for years, with precious little to show for it.

  “So we’re all agreed on breaking off the courtship of TriMark Pharmaceuticals?” Ria said, looking Sabrina Baker right in the eye.

  “Of course, Ms. Llewellyn,” Baker said. She put up a good facade, but the TriMark deal had been all Baker’s idea, and everyone here knew it. Most of them didn’t know that TriMark was substantially funded by certain South American investors, but Baker did, and if she didn’t, she should have.

  “And the leveraged remortgaging of our Far East assets?” she added, turning to Colin Hardesty.

  “Well, with the Asian dollar going soft . . . yes,” Hardesty said, capitulating all at once. Ria hadn’t quite made up her mind whether he was stupid or just subtle, but what was plain was that he’d overreached himself mightily with this deal. And now he and everyone else here knew it.

  “Good,” Ria purred. “I imagine this concludes all our current business. I’d like to move our next meeting forward a bit, so that I can get an update on your other projects. So shall we say two weeks from today? I’ll have my secretary prepare you a memo.”

  She did not smile now. Smiling was a sign of conciliation, and she had no need of that. There wasn’t any argument—she hadn’t thought there would be—and her staff quickly gathered up their papers and left the room. Ria stayed behind, watching the long blue shadows stretch over the L.A. Basin and savoring the moment.

  Jonathan remained behind.

  “I thought for sure you were going to can Baker and Hardesty,” he said.

  She smiled then, a genuine smile without edge or malice. “So did they. They know that I know, and they know I let them off just this once.” Her expression turned grim. This was not the whole war, just a minor battle in it. Today’s victory settled very little. “And from this second on, they are going to be so careful how they operate that if I get run over by a bus the moment I walk out of here, the two of them would still wait a year before making any moves, just so they could be certain I was dead.” She heard an echo of her father in her own voice, and steeled herself against flinching. Perenor was a part of her—her blood, her bone—and once she would have exulted in that. Now it was only a fact, and one that sometimes made her tired.

  Jonathan chuckled. He’d been the one stuck with riding herd on them over the last several years, after all. “And they aren’t clever enough to hide their activities from that suite of computer hackers you insisted I hire. And I know they know that.”

  “Which puts you safely in the driver’s seat for about a year if anything happens to me.” Ria shrugged. “If you can’t get firm control of LlewellCo by then, you aren’t ever going to.” She owed Jonathan the truth, and R
ia had always valued honesty over kindness. In her world, kindness had always been a feint, a prelude to war.

  “And if I don’t, I’m not the person to handle it in the first place,” Jonathan answered. “Which, by the way, I’d rather not, unless you’re going to be around to pick up the reins again.”

  Ria looked at him quizzically. It was almost an admission of weakness, and Jonathan Sterling was anything but a weakling. If he had been, he could not have survived to rise in the company she had built at her father’s orders, much less managed to keep control of it in the aftermath of her . . . injury. All her life, she’d never depended on anyone in quite the way she depended on Jonathan. Theirs was not a romantic relationship—he was quite comfortably married, and she’d never seen any reason to change that—but it was a partnership that was stronger than any bond formed of bodies. He had always been her trusted aide, but the relationship she had forged in the arrogant assumption of her own invincibility had changed when she had come to truly need him. He had given her unswerving loyalty and trust; even in her weakness, he had given as a gift what she could no longer demand, and that gift had changed both of them. In another age, Jonathan would have been squire to her knight, trusted vassal to her prince, a relationship to endure beyond all testing. She’d trusted him, and had been given his trust in return. In the last six months she’d learned more about his family from a few oblique remarks than she’d learned in all the years he’d been her assistant.

  “I don’t like the feeling of the hounds nipping at my heels,” he explained simply.

  “And you’d rather be married to your wife than your work. I can’t blame you there,” she added.

  “You would have, once,” he replied.

  Ria shrugged, getting to her feet. “Now I just envy you, sometimes,” Ria said.

  She walked to the window to stare out over the Valley. The sunset light painted the scene before her in tones of fire and gold, the light bouncing off the inversion layer that hung over the metroplex. She’d told him the truth. She received truth in return.

  “There’s something you’ll want to know,” he said, and something in his voice kept her from turning back, kept her gazing out over the city. Her unacknowledged kingdom, bought with blood.

  “Eric Banyon’s surfaced. I waited until I had definite word from the PI I hired for you that it was the same Eric Banyon you wanted, but there’s no doubt. He’s in New York, enrolled at Juilliard. After all this time, the Feds aren’t looking for him any more; I checked that too. I suppose he figured that.”

  Eric! She forced herself to relax, and when she spoke her voice was even, neutral. “And?”

  “No sign of his friends. He’s there alone.”

  Jonathan, her trusted champion, knowing what she wanted to know and making certain to tell her those things first. Money could not buy such care. Fear could not command it.

  So Eric was back at Juilliard. She had as complete a file on him as money could buy. She knew he’d been a child prodigy, knew he’d dropped out of Juilliard on his 18th birthday to make his living on the street and at RenFaires, a rootless rebel, as shy as a wild hawk. The Eric she’d known would never have gone back to the scene of his failure . . . much less abandoned his friends.

  But had he? Or had they abandoned him?

  Perhaps the truth was somewhere in between.

  She’d traced the three of them as far as San Francisco, but there they’d vanished. She’d assumed that meant they’d gone to Underhill—the elves would always welcome a Bard, and Korendil and Eric between them could have sponsored the Kentraine bitch—but why had he come back?

  Did she dare go and ask him? His enrollment at Juilliard argued that he’d be easy to find. He must feel safe if he’d been willing to go there. But of course the years in Underhill would have been as good as a disguise.

  “Does our set of New York interests need a shaking up as well?” she asked. No. Leave it. He’s the past. Let him stay there.

  But Jonathan came to her side, silently holding out a slim leather pilot’s wallet. She took it, seeing the sheaf of paper inside from the travel agency LlewellCo used. Plane tickets. A hotel reservation.

  “I think you’ll just have time to pack and catch the red-eye,” Jonathan said. “Your schedule’s there. There’s a board meeting scheduled for LlewellCo East the day after tomorrow, which should just give you time to get over jet lag.”

  He handed her another folder, this one legal-pad-sized and thick. “This is the PI report and contact information. You’ll have time to read it on the plane. The reports on our East Coast holdings are there, too. Have a good trip.”

  She might have kissed him then, but such gestures had never been a part of what was between them. Instead she turned away from the window and favored him with a cool Sphinx-like smile.

  “Thank you, Jonathan. You always know just what I need.”

  His answering smile was only in his eyes. “It’s good to have you back. And now . . . your car is waiting, and I’ve just got time to return a few calls before I hit the freeway.”

  The old yellow-brick building occupied most of a city block, and dated back to the days when there’d been factories in Manhattan. It faced the East River, in an area that was sporadically gentrifying. But no matter how many new glass office buildings studded Hudson Street and Second Avenue, old dinosaurs like the riverside warehouse remained, legacies of the past of The City That Works.

  And as always, they adapted to circumstances.

  The logo in gold on the front door said Threshold Labs, as did the sign over the loading dock doors. It was a cryptic declaration that might mean almost anything. Whatever Threshold did, it was clear that the company—and its employees—valued their privacy.

  For good reason.

  Despite its functional, down-at-heel exterior, serious money had been expended on the interior of the building. The three floors had been remodelled and subdivided into offices, Cray sequencers and the power lines to feed them brought in, microwaves and centrifuges, air scrubbers and clean rooms and serious water purification systems installed, as well as a number of modifications below-street that would never have passed any New York building inspection, no matter how well-bribed the inspector.

  The small clandestine lab three floors below the street was bisected by a wall of triple-sealed glass, and could only be entered through an airlock by technicians in full clean suits. The lab was kept at negative pressure, so that in case its seals were broken, the air would flow in, not out. On the other side of the glass was a windowless office. It, too, was dark, but there was someone there, sitting behind the desk with a guitar in her lap, fingers soundlessly stroking the strings. She was working late as usual, mulling over the last run of tests. It wasn’t as if she had someplace else to go, after all.

  She looked up as the timer cycled the lights in the lab down to sleep-time levels. The sudden darkness in the room beyond turned the thick glass into a mirror, mercilessly reflecting the office’s occupant. She met her own gaze unflinchingly, a woman who prided herself on having shed all her illusions.

  She’d had plenty of help in doing so. If she hated what she saw at 31, she also knew that wishing wouldn’t change it.

  Romantic loners of any sex should be tall and slender and dressed in black. Jeanette Campbell was short and sloppily plump, with thin fine mouse-brown hair dragged back in an unforgiving ponytail, persistent acne, and short stubby fingers that struggled to fit around the neck of a guitar. She was a loner through both arrogance and fate—verbal and opinionated, she had always been the sort of person who, when teased, lashed back viciously, taking no prisoners.

  By the time she reached high school, Jeanette was a full-blown social pariah. Through pride, she rejected the few tentative overtures that were made to her—it was very clear to her that those willing to be kind to her branded themselves worthless by the gesture. She’d yearned for romantic isolationism while longing to be popular. She’d dressed in studs and leather, knowing she made
herself look ridiculous, but still somehow unable to give up the gesture. She was desperately unhappy and worse: bright and insightful enough to know she had woven the tapestry of her sorrows strand by strand through the long years that separated third grade from high school freshman, but unable to find her way out of the web. She would not bow down to the pretty and popular whatever it cost her. She would never admit that their opinion mattered.

  High school was hell, but by then Jeanette had calluses on her soul as well as her fingers. She concentrated on her classes and her part-time job, intent merely upon getting things over with: so fixed upon the destination that she discounted the journey.

  Then something happened. Halfway through her senior year, Jeanette slowly became aware of something that had never been true before.

  Nobody cared.

  Nobody slimed her locker, tripped her in the halls, stole her homework, made crank calls to her house. Nobody mocked her in classes, pasted stupid bumper stickers on her guitar case, cut in front of her in lines, or stole her lunch. She could read any book she liked, in public, without being afraid it would be snatched from her hands and ruined.

  Nobody cared about her at all.

  It took her a long time to believe it could be true, and longer to trust her good fortune. She’d spent more than half her life in a war she’d known she could never win. Nobody had ever told her that it wouldn’t go on forever. And one day, when she wasn’t looking, it had just stopped. The enemy had declared peace and gotten out.

  She didn’t know what to do about it. At first the relief had been so great that she didn’t care about anything else. And when the truth finally sank in, it made room for an anger as devastating as grief.

  That’s it? You ruin my life, all of you, and then you just walk away? You don’t even pretend it never happened. You just FORGET IT?