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Citation…”
    â€œRyne Cyratane.”
    â€œRight. Why didn’t he just leave the gate open?”
    â€œBecause that would have been just asking for another Demonlord to come along and try to take it over. And, before you ask, the wizard who had opened the original gate was long dead.”
    â€œDead wizard.” Yeah, that sounded encouraging. “Nice.”
    â€œProbably not. Anyway, Ryne Cyratane figured that I’d be able to stand what he’d done to my people for just long enough for him to finish up his business at home and then grief and guilt would cause me to take my own life. Should I be stronger than my grief, it wouldn’t much matter because time was on his side and a human life is pitifully short to the demon kin—and, back then, pitifully short was even shorter. Unfortunately for his plans, he made a small error—although, to be fair, I was squirming a bit while he incised the protection runes.” She traced the outer ring. “He intended to protect the gate from me, to keep me from defacing the pattern, thus destroying the gate and preventing him from returning, but he ended up writing in a much more powerful and general protection.
    â€œThe gate protects itself and, in protecting itself, protects me. I can’t be injured because that would affect the gate. I can’t age because that would affect the gate. I am held as I was the day he left this world.”
    â€œFour thousand years ago?” And that would make her…“You’re four thousand years old?”
    She shrugged and sat back down on the end of the bed, retrieving her plate and looking to be in her mid-twenties at the absolute outside. Jeans. Sweater. High-tops. “More or less. Probably closer to thirty-five hundred. You lose track after a while.”
    Given the whole vampires, wizards, other worlds, sentient shadows, trapped ghosts deal, he saw no reason to doubt her. Precedent suggested the world was about a hundred and eighty degrees weirder than most people suspected and, these days, nothing much surprised him. Besides, hers wasn’t the kind of story a sane person would make up. On the other hand, she did fall off buildings and set herself on fire for a living, so perhaps sanity wasn’t a given here.
    â€œSo…” He groped his way back to the beginning of the story. “…this Ryne Cyratane slaughtered everyone you knew?”
    â€œEvery single person. Even called the goatherds in from the hills.”
    â€œI don’t want to bring up old shit, but…” Tony pushed a cashew around his plate until it slid off the edge, bounced across the table, and off onto the floor. Only then did he look up and meet her gaze. “He slaughtered everyone, and you don’t seem too upset by that.”
    â€œWhat do you expect?” Her shrug was perfect twenty-first century ennui. “It happened a very long time ago. I’ve dealt. You should have seen me right afterward, I was a mess.” She widened her eyes, raised both hands, fingers spread, and shook them from side to side. “I was the crazy lady who lived in the wilderness for about three hundred years. One day I was a warning to misbehaving children, next thing I knew I was being fished out of the Nile by the servants of a priest of Thoth. He cleaned me up, brought me back to myself. He was a wizard.” Her eyes unfocused and the corners of her mouth curled into a smile as she examined the memory. “And kind of cute in a shaved head, totally fanatical sort of way.”
    â€œWhat happened to him?”
    â€œHe got a little too ambitious and the governor fed him to the crocodiles.”
    Crocodiles? Tony wished the threats on his life were so mundane. “Couldn’t have been much of a wizard.”
    â€œThey were very large crocodiles. And there were a lot of them.”
    â€œWhat happened to you?”
    Attention snapped back onto Tony’s face. “Do you