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yourself to the invisible currents of Power that underlay everything, the more you moved in harmony with
them. And the more you end up in places like this, having coffee with your fellow magicians.
Though it was hard to remember that Jimmie practical, down-to-earth, New York street cop that she
was was a magician as powerful as any in Underhill. A line from one of his favorite Gilbert and Sullivan
operettas came back to him suddenly: "Things aren't always what they seem/Skim milk masquerades
as cream..."
A few minutes later Jimmie was back, balancing two tall containers of coffee and a couple of Danish
wrapped in bakery paper. They were still warm from the oven.
"I got you decaf, because of what you said at the party about not drinking coffee much any more
because the Sidhe can't tolerate it."
"You're right there," Eric said. "Before I met Kory, I couldn't even get up in the morning without that
first cup, now I hardly ever touch the stuff. Caffeine in any form acts like the worst kind of drug for
them like a combination of cocaine and LSD. If you're ever having problems with a mad elf-lord, just
pitch a can of Coke at him."
"I'll remember that," Jimmie said, sounding tiredly amused. "You never know; it might come up. But
they roast and grind their own beans here. It's a special blend you won't miss the caffeine. And Papa
Lombardi only makes these pastries at Christmas. It'd be a crime to miss them."
She handed one to Eric. The golden crust was fragrant with almond and cinnamon, and when he bit
into it, Eric could taste citrus and currants as well. His stomach awoke with a growl, reminding him he'd
missed breakfast by several hours, and he had to restrain himself from wolfing the whole thing in a few
bites. He set the pastry down and took a sip of the coffee. As Jimmie had promised, it was rich and
fragrant. No sugar, but it didn't really need any.
"Oh, man," Eric said, around another mouthful of pastry. "This is heaven!"
"When you're out on the front lines, it's important to remember the little pleasures. Without them,
sometimes we forget who we are," Jimmie said gravely.
"Do you have that problem often?" Eric asked. He hadn't meant to ask such a direct question it
seemed almost hostile but Jimmie didn't seem to mind. She smiled gently.
"I've lost my way a few times," she said. "Even after I became a Guardian. I've seen too many good
people go down into the belly of the beast and not come out again. Out here on the streets every day
good people die, and bad people walk away smiling. And sometimes there's nothing you can do about
it."
"Is that why you became a Guardian?" Eric asked.
"That's why I became a cop," Jimmie said, correcting him gently. "Being a Guardian came
after sort of a natural extension of the badge, don't you know? When I was a kid, I always wanted to
grow up to be Batman. Well, sometimes I wanted to be the Green Hornet, but usually it was Batman.
Fight crime and evil, always come out on top. It didn't hurt that my dad and my my brother were both
cops. I just sort of always knew this was where I'd end up. Not the Guardian part, of course."
"Do your folks still live around here?" Eric asked idly, still thinking about Christmas.
Jimmie sighed and shook her head. "Dad caught a bullet about fifteen years back. El my brother,
well, we kind of lost touch. A long time ago."
Even through his shields, Eric could feel the flare of raw pain when Jimmie talked about her brother.
She'd said he'd been a cop, and she hadn't said he was dead. But a lot of things could happen, some of
them worse than being dead.
"I'm sorry," Eric said, meaning it.
"Don't be. He made his choice, and I made mine. You can't undo the past. But I didn't mean to
bring you down. When you walked in here, you looked like you'd lost your last friend."
"Not quite," Eric said. More like I remembered how few of them there were. "I had kind of a
rough night, and so I went out for a walk this morning to try to clear my head. And from the look of
things, I'm not the only one who had a rough night."
"Can't put anything over on you, can we, Banyon?" Jimmie asked with a rueful smile. "Actually I
haven't been to bed yet Toni and I were chasing around the city all night like Starsky and Hutch
because of some stuff, and I'm back on shift in another few hours. I do hate working nights. City gets
crazy then. It's like it turns into a whole 'nother place, you know?"
You don't know the half of it... or do you? Eric thought.
"What kind of stuff?" he asked aloud. "I got well, I don't know if you want to talk about it here.
But I was going to try to get ahold of Toni. There's some things I need to tell her. But she was out when I
came downstairs."
"Probably up in East Harlem, seeing if the santeros know anything about what's going down. You
don't have to worry about talking here, Eric. I told you. This is one of the Good Places. And nobody's
going to overhear our conversation unless I want them to. Sort of one of the fringe benefits of being a
Guardian," Jimmie said.
"Okay." He liked Jimmie a lot and more, he trusted her judgment. When you spent a lot of time on
the street and the RenFaire circuit, you got to develop an instinct that helped you tell the good cops from
the bad. And Jimmie was definitely one of the good ones.
"So shoot. What's got you walking the streets on a day like this?"
"Well...." He was stalling, and he knew it. But one of the things that Dharinel had drummed into him
during his magical training was that words had power, and it almost seemed to Eric that by telling Jimmie
the problem he'd be making it more real than it had to be.
"I've already told Greystone most of it. And, well, it's a lot of different things. Some really personal.
Some I've been told to stay out of at all costs."
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