• Chapter 1
    Ello Mommy
    The night was hot and muggy. The lingering smell of rain and hot asphalt still hung heavy. Humming street lamps illuminated a thin misty veil blanketing a deserted road below. Bale Street was quiet. Unusually quiet. On the north side, the row houses stood dark and lifeless. Up and down the line, porch lights were off; stoops were left deserted. There were no fights or screaming mothers or drunken fathers, none of the normal commotion and chaos, which, for the most part, defined The Grove. Crickets chirped while beetles hummed and buzzed, barely conscious of the clickclick clickclickclick clickclick slowly but steadily stirring through the stagnant air.
    Across the road, Center Gardens had closed for the day. Its massive wooden gates chained and padlocked shut beneath its towering 35-foot stone archway at the center of Bale Street's Southside. There, in the light of the street lamp, a woman danced alone through the puddles on the sidewalk. She began to spin pirouettes, watching the hem of her skirt lift and float like a dark halo hula-hoop while her long amber hair flung madly around her face. There was the clickclick of her boot heels hitting pavement. She stopped spinning and laughed. A malnourished rat, startled by the sudden noise, scurried from around the corner of the archway. It quickly retreated along the base of The Gardens' wall, keeping the left side of its body securely against the marble.
    Dani didn't notice. She was staring across the street at the line of cramped shotgun tenements butted side by side. They looked so vacant and benign. The heat and lack of access to Coolers had driven the residents of The Grove to seek cooler, more affluent environments weeks before. Marc would still throw a fit if he knew I danced my way through The Grove to meet him for dinner, Dani thought to herself. His scolding rants on her 'self destructive and impulsive' behavior were legendary in almost every social circle of Noridge. Dani sighed. A breeze blew through the stillness, catching up the stray locks of hair still dangling her over eyes and gently pushed them back exposing the softly crafted features of her face to the night.
    "If he could hear it sing..."
    Dani turned and faced The Gardens' Gate, lifting her eyes skyward. 20-foot tall black marble walls stood on each side of the archway. Oil lamps, space 3 feet apart, ran along the top of each. Dani glanced first to her left then right. The lamps she could see were barely flickering. She straightened her blouse and tie, then closed her eyes and tried to catch one last clean moment.











    a symphony... universes collapsing into a harmonic calliope... Stories within Stories... Worlds within Worlds... beyond what’s been known... beyond what’s been said... Eyes in the back of your head...Just behind the gate...
    The bells of Saint Moemin began to chime. Shaking her head, Dani took a deep breath and opened her eyes. If Marc couldn't hear it, she'd never be able to explain it coherently, sanely. And she didn't need another unscheduled stay on the LMU's third floor. Dani looked at her watch. She had promised Marc she'd be at Nikki's by 7:30, her watch showed 7 straight up. The restaurant was less than half of a mile away, but she needed to stop by Birdges to get a pack of cigarettes and she wasn't up to rushing herself into a sweat. So she skipped her way into the archway, snatched up an age worn leather bag and an olive green fedora, then skipped her way back out again. She headed west down the sidewalk with an easy, almost careless gate. Above her head, the oil lamps burned bright and fierce as she passed. Pale blue flames were licking at the sky like anemic tongues writhing on a black canvass. Still spinning in her own mind, Dani kept her eyes on where she was going and didn't have the slightest inkling of the pyrotechnic sight she was leaving in her wake.
    Ahead of her, under a weathered wooden bench, sat the rat Dani had frightened by the Front Gate. Its gray body almost completely camouflaged in the shadows, it sniffed the air trying to find a single whisp of anything edible. A brief cooling gust of wind curled the rat's whiskers forward. The rat's eyes widened. Its nostrils twitched spasmodically.
    A scent. Familiar. Not food. Important. The rat scurried to the backside of the bench and peeked out its head. It could hear a low unsteady clicking coming closer and getting louder. Following the scent, it turned its head to the left. In the distance, it saw the flames shooting out from the top of the wall as a figure it could barely discern traveled beneath. It sniffed the air again. The natural instinct to silence the hunger crying from its belly pushed asides for something more immediately necessary. Not bothering to survey things further, the rat ran out from under the bench to the middle of the sidewalk. There it sat and waited, watching intensely as the flames and the figure came ever closer.
    As Dani sauntered along, subtle changes escaped her attention. Lights blinked on and off behind her. The humidity steadily eased around her. And a rising number of cats were appearing, from out of nowhere all over the Lawn. She was there, but not aware until her eyes came across a small dark spot, no more than five feet in front of her. Rat at the Garden! Suddenly, her psyche pulled itself front and center. She stopped. Cautiously turning her head, she looked back over her shoulder. There were fifteen cats standing directly across the street watching her. She could see the epileptic fit of lights in the windows of the row houses. And the lamps... The sight of those flames struck her with a momentary surge of panic and foreboding. Her pulse quickened as she fought to control her breathing. eight more cats gathered to the pack. A large orange and gold tabby standing at the edge of the curb cried a long and deprived EEEYOOW, silencing the other creatures of the Grove.
    Dani needed to move. She wanted to move. She froze up solid in an Oh-s**t dejavu and couldn’t break herself loose.


    Chapter 2
    Hello Mother
    There was a momentary faltering of reality. A single moment of immediate quiet stillness, pressing down, strangling time. Dani bit her lower lip and smiled. The Genius Pause. Color returned to her cheeks as she realized the glimmer. It was Lillith's signature, but not her hand. Glimmers were for low guards and Dani wasn't nearly as green as she seemed.
    She winked at the rat then lowered her hat to the ground. A desperate din of hissing and yowling rang through the air; the cats had reclaimed voices that were not entirely their own. Before the poor rat could conceive the thought, its legs sprang into motion. It darted the distance between Dani and itself, becoming nothing more than a thin gray line connecting points, then jumped into the hat. Dani took the first two fingers of her right hand and circled the brim of the hat counter clockwise. She giggled softly and placed the hat squarely on her head.
    A howling wind rose up from behind the Gardens' wall. Dani's eyes brightened. The low guards weren't tracking her. They were out hunting one of the Witch's keep. Dani reached up with both hands, grabbed each side of the fedora, and pulled it down securely.
    Quick containment was her first priority. She reached into her bag and pulled out a small dark metallic rod. A tangerine crystal the size of a golf ball crowned one end, while tiny triangular crystals of the same hue encircled a blunt tipped base. Enclosing the crowning crystal firmly in the palm of her hand, Dani snapped her wrist down and outward. The shaft of the rod lengthened until the crystals around its tip skidded across the sidewalk.
    Time to see what we're dealing with.
    She lifted her head and straightened herself. Slowly turning to face Lillith's pawns, Dani cleared her throat and called out, "You little pussies really should run home."
    A blast of icy air shot down Bale Street. Sitting on the curb, the large tabby's eyes began to roll up into the back of its head. It opened its mouth letting loose a hellish shriek. Its companions followed suit in waves. Their bodies trembled and shuddered, as they started towards Dani in haphazard unison. The air was suddenly dank with the smell of over ripe berries and curdled milk.
    "Pookas? Really?" Dani scowled.
    The large tabby slowly made its way to the middle of the street. Its body expanded and contorted, distorting its appearance and movement. Large talons ripped through where paws and claws should have been. The fur around its little face tearing and peeling away as its skull broke out from its skin's containment. Behind it, the others were suffering the same metamorphosis. The noise was maddening. Like the caterwaul of Highland Harpies scratching and grinding at every fiber of Dani's being.
    Rolling her shoulders back and popping her neck to each side, she lowered her head slightly. "Kye in game. Bitches play." she whispered. She slid the shaft of the rod up her hand so the crystal rested in the curve between her thumb and first finger. She raised it straight armed, waist high, then slapped the top of the crystal hard and fast with the heel of her left palm.
    Tendrils of electric orange light exploded from the points of the crystals around the rod's base. Each tendril divided; each division replicated the process until there were thousands of pulsing strands winding their way around her.
    Dani brought the tip of the rod down, tapping it gently in front of her. Untethered, the threads of light spread and gathered, knotting and weaving themselves into 12 distinct forms circling her. In the back of her head, a little girl jumped up and down chanting 'Firedogs!Firedogs!Firedogs!' with giddy delight.
    Dani's smile broadened. Her tongue skimmed the bottom of her top teeth. "Hate to crap on your party and run, but I've got a date." She pitched the rod into the air and shifted her weight. The rod fell, its tip hitting her line of sight, the light refracting off the crystals flickered reflectively in the pupils of Dani's eyes. Her left arm shot out and snatched the rod, bringing its descent to an abrupt halt. She took in a long deep breath. She threw her head back and puckered her lips, barely allowing the top to part from the bottom. She then slowly and softly exhaled. A glistening goldenrod fountain erupted from the heart of the crowning crystal and rained down around Dani, wrapping her in a shimmering bubble. The bubble rose and lifted her off the ground. She found the silence a sweet relief as she watched the carnage unfold around her.
    Chapter 3
    Sometimes
    The Great Lady once said, “Certain facts are pretty muchly undeniable and sound solid through out Creation.” Even though the ‘pretty muchly’ was based on her own adamant assertion that no one being could ever know absolutely everything about anything, Geian and Houle alike hounded her far and wide across the face of TiaNiche trying to ascertain and record as much as possible of what the Great Lady did know. Several of her favorite listed ’facts’ were proving themselves true on the very night Dani set out to meet Marc for dinner.
    “When you prepare for a shower, you often find yourself swept away in currents of a flood.”
    “Best laid plans will blow up in your face 7 out of ten times, 9 if you hang on too long.”
    “Hungry creatures are not happy creatures.”
    And finally, “Things in distress seldom work their best.”
    At Nikki’s, with every table in the main dining hall seated, the waiting room so packed there was barely room to turn, and as an ever growing line of sweat soaked tired, hungry potential patrons lingered out the front door, the Great Lady’s words hung with weight over Nova while she tried hard to keep herself focused and professional.
    None of it was her fault. And even if she had known beforehand of the circumstances leading to this sudden boom in business, there was nothing she could do to alter their actions or repercussions. An unscheduled ID Profile Check on the hottest day in twelve cycles, right before payouts. The citizens of Noridge were tired and hot and frustrated, with full wallets. There was no way to predict or control such things. All she could do was try to deal with it.
    It had been nearly twenty logs since Nova had seen business so good. For the past four logs, she was lucky if she was able to seat ten paying customers from the time she opened the doors to when she bolted up and cut the lights. The nights take so far would see her through almost a half a cycle. She should have been happy. She should have been ecstatic. She wanted to be shot.
    For nearly a quarter cycle, the reservation lay scrawled on the calendar. Marc Nobles (guest)/161510LD(5.30?)/AUXRESVRM/PP(special instructions). She stood behind her podium looking down at the notations written in her own handwriting. At the back of the restaurant, down the hall just past the kitchen, the door to the auxiliary room was shut tight. A large sign reading “Reserved” with 5:30 chalked at the bottom, hung from the doorknob. Now, with half of Noridge’s population spilling out her front door, bitching and moaning every step of the way, she wished she hadn’t hung it quite so early.
    There was so much paranoia, so much stress. Times like these, Nova hated her Houle blood. If she had hair, she would rip it out, strand by strand. If she had nails and skin, she would dig the nails into the soft tender parts of her flesh until her entire body was furrow lined. Something, anything to release the tension building and swelling in her small grey frame. But Houle were not hair or nail or skin creatures. Houle were mind, scale, and tooth; sharp, quick, and hard. No fleshy tenderness to poke and prod. She placed both hands on the back of her skull and rubbed against the lay of her scaling. It was not painful, but the sound of the scales rubbing as they began to lay back flat did cause small electric impulses to flash down her spine, which provided the smallest nudge of relief. She glanced over at the small clock sitting at the back corner of the podium. Seven on the lines. KiKi still hadn’t returned with the last item off Mr. Nobles’ list. She couldn’t afford to screw this up. She would be left stuck with the cost of all the odd world contraband being secretly chopped, prepped and cooked in her back kitchen, she would have to forfeit her contractually held double log take , and if her instincts were right, Caretakers would be raiding the building before she’d get the chance to explain the situation to Mr. Nobles.
    Still standing at the podium, waiting for time to painfully tick by, Nova reflected back to her first and only meeting so far with Mr. Nobles. It was during the second set in the first season of the new cycle. The early morning chill was still turning the warm night’s dew to a hard frost by sunrise. She and her four best prep helpers KiKi, Rui, Vir, and Tador were just beginning to set up for first shifts. Nikki’s main dinning hall and waiting area were dark and empty. The front doors were bolted shut. Nova was in the middle of talking over a few special orders with Tador, when both kitchen doors suddenly flung wide open, startling the small crew. By the time they turned to the source of the commotion, the head and shoulders of the largest man Nova had ever seen, managed to duck under and squeeze through the doorway. As he finally got the rest of his body into the kitchen, and she could see him standing up right, she sized him to be at least seven and a half feet, with a nicely meated mass to match. His waist length hair was cobalt blue save two streaks of copper that fell along each side of his face. His shoulders were broad, his arms and legs were tough toil thickened. He wore a tailor cut suit of obvious odd world design. He had no tag or mark of ID, which made him as a thing that should not be on TiaNiche, or a great man of means. Which would he be? The question helped still her tongue, but she could feel her pulse begin to rev and her nerves were twitchy tingling. Intruders were never welcome in her kitchen, but to storm in during first preps was tantamount to throwing worm bile on her feet.
    While Nova was distracted by the giant standing at the far side of her kitchen, another figure slipped through the door almost invisibly. It was long and lean, considerably smaller than the man who came before him. Its ears were thin and pointed. Its arms extended down past it knees and from each, three fingers dangled just above his protruding anklebones. It wore only a loose pair of short pants made from a heavy black material. Every exposed area of his body was boldly marked with signs and symbols. Each mark bore a different color and a different meaning. Nova new from their number and diversity, he was a very well trained, well traveled, and well-versed Man in Service. That would make him a very expensive man to keep and Nova was becoming more and more certain that the giant in front of her was the owner of the wallet that kept such a prized man. She made up her mind to play respectful and kind. Her Houle blood might take offense at the unscheduled distraction, but to fatten the books, she pushed petty pride aside and would put on the proper professional polite.
    The giant man made his way to the center of the kitchen, the heavy thud of his footsteps reverberating through the counters and ovens.
    “I’ve come to speak with the proprietor. My time is short.” His voice boomed through the entire restaurant. He turned his head as he spoke, his eyes seeming to scan and catalog the entire room. His man was still at the far side of the kitchen, sniffing pensively around the door.
    Nova cleared her throat. “I own this place. How is it I can help you?” She respectfully left out that she was a bit short on time herself.
    He was looked directly at her. She thought his eyes looked like the deep warm waters. Dark and blue with movement beneath the surface.
    “Is there somewhere private we can talk?” When he spoke, his voice had less boom, yet still resonated with a physical force.
    She looked over her shoulder. Her prep helpers stood slack jawed, watching her and the two intruders like spectators at carnival. “Guys, back to work. We’ve still got to open at 6.” She turned back to the giant. “My office is this way.” Noticing his man was still lurking about, she asked as politely as she knew how, “Will your man be following us or will he be poking his nose around my kitchen the whole time we‘re away?”
    “Hodma will be coming with us. You’ll have to excuse him. He has too much of the Cainus blood in him. It makes him obsessively sensitive to aromatics.” He looked over at Hodma and nodded his head in a beckoning motion. Hodma was at his side in a blink. One second at the far end of the kitchen, the next at his Dono’s side, head bent forward submissively exposing the boney like ring protruding from the middle of his neck. The giant reached into his left pocket and pulled out a thin finely milled golden chain. He threaded one end through the ring, then looped the end over and pressed it against the chain being fed in. When the end touched the slack, it immediately fused with the rest of the chain forming a seamless latch.
    A Binder’s leash. Nova had heard of them but this was the first she’d ever seen. Supposedly, a Binder’s leash, once latched prevented its wearer from doing anything but the owner’s bidding until unlatched. Nova walked toward the front hall wondering why such precautions were necessary.
    “We’re going to have to go out the front and around the building to get there.” She told them. Behind the restaurant proper, stood a terra cobb shack. Its low roof thatched with alba bark. Windowless, the only entrance or exit available was the crimson door facing the three. Nova caught the look exchanged between Dono and servant when they arrived at the door. It was no secret; she had access to the charms of The Ladies of Court. It was one of the many reasons why Nikki’s was able to manage to stay in business during the low times. If you wanted it and could afford it, there was a pretty good chance you could arrange to find it in a relatively short period of time out back, safe and snug in Nova’s little shack.
    She turned and looked up at the massive figure behind her. “It’s bigger on the inside, but you’re probably still gonna have a b***h of a time getting in.”
    “I’ll manage fine.” Nova thought she saw something swimming, bright and sparkling, through the endless blue fathoms of his eyes. She felt herself flush slightly. She quickly turned back to the door and placed both hands on the middle of the door. She then slid her hands together, until the tips of her first two fingers and thumbs met. The door began to shudder, noiselessly. A crack appeared in the space between her first fingers and thumbs. The crack fractured into hundreds of fissures spreading, fracturing, and cracking through the cellular fabric of the door. Nova stepped back as the door began to dissolve away to nothingness. “This way.”
    Once inside, it was apparent the shack was indeed vastly larger on the inside than it appeared on the outside. It was a virtual warehouse. It always took her a second to get used to it. The perceptional shift was a bit of a nerve tweaking experience for all Houle. Nova was no exception, despite her repeated exposure. By the time she shook it off, the Dono and his man were through the opening and it had sealed itself shut with a new crimson door.
    “It’s a required security measure. I’m sure you understand.” She said, trying to keep things as point in fact as possible.
    Neither the giant nor his man replied.
    She couldn’t help but feel as though she may be trying their patience a bit. Who in Good Mother’s name have you let in the back pantry? It was her Dad’s voice from the center bottom of her brain.
    The thought barely crossed her mind, when the Dono spoke up. “My name is Marc Nobles. I’ve come to arrange for a very special dinner for myself and a guest.”
    He tugged slightly on the chain he still carried in his left hand. Hodma stepped up, his head bowed low, eyes on the floor as he passed his Dono, keeping to his left to stand before Nova. He slid his right arm around the back of his head, slipped his middle finger into the crevasse encircling the edge of his left ear and ran it up and down around the entire length. When he had completed the entire circumference, he pulled his finger straight out. A small white dot stuck to the tip of his finger. His arm snaked down then out until he had the dot inches away from Nova’s nose.
    “Instructions. All items must be attained and properly prepared before my guest arrives for contractual completion. If for any reason you default on the contract, all funds retained for this transaction will be immediately refunded. No exceptions, no excuses. For your time, trouble and due discretion, I think a log’s take in deuce plus costs sounds reasonable.” She felt her muscles go soft and her mind go blank with astonishment. Two logs pure profit, for one ‘special’ dinner for two. Oh, thanks and blessings GoodMother. A smile, big, broad and bright spread across Nova’s small dark face, exposing the front two rows of her needle like teeth.
    “So, the terms are agreeable to you?” Marc asked. His demeanor remained unchanged from his first arrival.
    “I usually have to know the job before I accept the terms.” She knew there must be one hell of an addendum hidden somewhere. All the pomp and circumstance these two were taking, the mass financial gain contractually promised. Too much. Much too much to be the normal odd world petty fetish find.
    Marc pulled his shoulders back. He then stretched out and opened his right hand; electric blue waves of light wove in and out of the spaces between each of his fingers. “I’m not your usual clientele.”
    “BOR Kind?” Nova swallowed hard. It was still a ‘can’t say no’ payout, but she knew the Kind all too well; it was definitely not going to be an easy or pretty payout.