B ecause I didn't want the mage in my loft upstairs, I bought him takeout from the Chinese place down the street and led him to the workroom behind the shop. Unconsciously, Cheran moved mage-fast when he entered the workroom, eyes darting to the far corners, as if for possible threat. His speed made my heart ache with something akin to loneliness. I didn't want to look too closely at that emotion. Fortunately, he grimaced at the food and that restored my antipathy to him.

He set the ridiculous hat and cloak to the side and we perched in ugly, mismatched, but really comfortable cast-off chairs, paper plates on makeshift tables Rupert had knocked together out of discarded lumber years ago, the gas logs turned on high to heat the frozen room. In an uncomfortable silence, we ate heaping portions of three mostly vegetarian dishes with chopsticks.

The fare wasn't up to a visiting mage's palette. He'd probably expected state dinners or something. I hid a smile as he inspected a chunk of meat. Even with a mage's increased need for calories and protein, I don't eat meat. It tends to disagree with my digestion. Eggs - costly in midwinter, in a mini ice age - and dairy provide some of my protein, but the bulk of it comes from soy and other beans, which I didn't try to foist off on him. The town citizens eat a lot of pork year-round, and I figured the nibblets in the fried rice were chopped, spiced pork, which should have made him happy from a strictly caloric viewpoint. It didn't. Fortunately, we ate in silence and he didn't complain.

However, he did seem to like the Dancing Bear Brew, which he complimented by drinking three. The Appalachian Mountains are famous for guns, quilts, pottery, and especially beer, and are infamous for moonshine, not that I had any on hand or even knew where to purchase it. Kirk elders tend to punish hard drinkers by branding. I had enough scars without adding to them.

When the meal was finished, he sighed and relaxed in the padded wingback chair. Cheran Jones, like most mages, was smaller than an average human, standing a little more than five feet and less than a hundred twenty pounds. He should have looked innocent and childlike in the big chair. He didn't. There was something calculating about him, and it set my teeth on edge.

I'm a bit shy of five feet and haven't weighed myself in years. My size usually doesn't bother me, but in the presence of the mage, I really wished I was bigger. Which meant that, on some level, I was afraid of him. Being afraid ticked me off.

I'd have been a lot more afraid if he had been a stone mage instead of a metal mage and whatever else he was, the parts of himself he had kept hidden when I searched through his mind. A stone mage would have felt the pull of the special amethyst kept in metal boxes in the stockroom.

I had a moment of discomfort. I hadn't thought about the possibility that the stone could charge the metal. If it had, then a metal mage might be able to sense the power so close by, even power so drained. And Cheran was awfully close to the metal boxes. Stupid to have put him so close to that much power. I wondered what else I was overlooking about my unwanted visitor. But Cheran hadn't looked toward the stockroom even once.

The amethyst hidden there had broken off from the wheels belonging to the cherub, Holy Amethyst, and though the living ship had been healed, or repaired, or whatever had been done to it to make it whole, the pieces had been left to me. They were bound to me on a psychic level, and just the thought of the large purple crystals sent a soft crooning into my mind. I was really glad the stones were in the stockroom down the hall, the distance adding more protection from the mage before me.

"Tell me about the Dragon," Cheran said.

"So much for segues," I said, fear making me snarky. "Thanks for the meal. It was tasty. You're welcome, it was my pleasure. The weather's awfully nasty out. Indeed it is. I'm so glad we're cozied up here by the fire."

"Cozied. You and me." His lips twitched. He laced his fingers across his chest.

"It means sitting with ease and comfort."

"I'm familiar with the term. But I've never 'cozied' with a consulate general on such sort acquaintance. In fact I can't say as I've ever cozied with a consulate general."

"Fine. So let's toss the fine points of manners out the window and be frank. I don't like you. You don't like me, this town, this assignment, or much of anything at the moment. This is the first time you've been on a mission alone, and the last time you were let out of Enclave, you screwed up something important."

Cheran's eyelid twitched the tiniest bit. Bull's-eye.

I plowed on. "I'm betting the reason you were charged with this one has to do with the secondary clandestine mission you carry in the back of your thoughts. How's that for frank?"

Cheran tilted his head in a "Good for you" gesture, but he didn't reply.

"What about the Dragon?" I almost snarled.

"That I can talk about." Cheran slouched deeper in the chair and tucked one foot under the opposite thigh, looking relaxed. As befitted a self-styled fashionista, he looked elegant in the black, well-tailored suit, even while sprawling out comfortably. Suits costing more than I make in a month can have that effect on a man. "I know you're aware that there was a major battle in the heavens a few weeks ago."

I nodded.

"It's come to the attention of the Enclaves that you know more about it than the rest of us. I'd like to hear your story."

"Is this an official request?" I asked, meaning, Is my butt in the wringer?

"It could be someday, but isn't now."

"Audric," I said, without raising my voice. My champard stuck his head around the corner so fast I knew he had been listening, keeping tabs on me. And so did my guest. Good. "In your official capacity as my champard, I require your legal counsel."

Cheran rolled his eyes and sat up in the chair. "Fine. Everything you say here today is off the record. It was never spoken and will not result in legalities."

"This is acceptable," Audric said, invading the emissary's space and seating himself on a tall stool. Cheran ignored him. The man claiming to be here to teach me diplomatic etiquette needed a serious lesson in common manners. I was tempted to teach him one, but I already knew he was faster and a better swordsman than I. The tutorial could wait for another time. Like when I had the drop on him again.

"Tell me what happened," he said to me. "The Dragon started to break his chains and then was halted. How and why?"

I had wondered when someone would find a way to blame me for the Dragon's partial freedom and I was pretty sure Cheran was here to prove that the Dragon's escape attempt was my fault. Which it was and wasn't.

Dragons are Major Darkness. In the hierarchy of evil, they rank right up there beneath the chief bad guy - if such really existed - the beast called the Lord of the Dark, the Great Red Dragon, or Satan, a name never spoken aloud for fear it might call him. He hadn't been seen in the Last War, but then neither had the Most High God. Smart people didn't mention that. Fools who did sometimes died on the spot.

Some theologians label Dragons satanels. According to scripture, they had been chief angels or seraphs in heaven until they followed Lucifer's lead and rebelled against the Most High. The First Battle recorded in the Revelation of John between the ArchSeraph Michael and the followers of the Light, and the Great Red Dragon and his followers - the Powers and Principalities of the Dark - was near mythic. In it, the Red Dragon and a third of those who had followed him had been swept away. They had landed on Earth back before humans started to keep written records, and continued the fight.

The battleground of Earth got a lot more bloody in the Last War between the Dark and Light, which took place a little over a hundred years ago. Some scholars say there were twenty Dragons rechained back then. Some say a hundred. But everyone agreed they were bad business, impossible to kill, and almost as difficult to imprison. The total followers of Darkness, counting spawn, still number in the hundreds of thousands, if not the low millions. Not that there's any kind of intel to back that up.

I opened a beer and studied the label. On it was a big bear, standing on a hind leg in the midst of a jig, a foaming mug in his paw and a big grin on his face. "The binding of a Dragon sometimes requires blood," I said. Cheran nodded. I turned the beer, inspecting the bottle, putting my thoughts together.

I could have told the story with all the dramatic wiles at a mage's beck and call. Instead I said baldly, "In the campaign of the Last Battle, a key skirmish was fought here in the mountains. The ArchSeraph's lieutenant, Zadkiel, was losing to a Dragon, and was nearly drained unto emptiness" - the correct wording for the deathlike state suffered by an immortal being. "Several of his winged warriors had already been drained to husks.

"Benaiah Stanhope, the several-times-great-grandfather of my partner, Rupert Stanhope, and my ex-husband, Lucas, went underground with the winged warriors and gave his life saving Zadkiel. His blood coated the chain that bound the beast. The locals called him Mole Man."

Cheran made a little rolling motion with his hand to indicate I should continue. I put down the beer and locked eyes with the slouching, elegant, bored mage. "The Dragon's second in command took over his territory when the Dragon was bound, and spent the following century creating new beasts and gathering power. You saw some of his handiwork on SNN a couple of weeks back when the skirmish in Mineral City was filmed by a news crew and went out live."

Cheran nodded, his expression steady. "Spawn, of course. But some of the beasts were like nothing we'd ever seen before," he said, finally sounding like the emissary he purported to be. "The light was bad and they moved faster than the camera could follow, but they looked like they were composed of body parts of various creatures."

My eyes went hot and dry, my throat ached. "Dragonets. They were hard as heck to destroy. The Darkness who made them was called Forcas," I said. "The attack you saw, I think, had a threefold purpose. It was a trial, an assessment, to test its handiwork in battle. And it sent them into town to get the blood of Mole Man's progeny. And it hoped to free its master." It also came to get me, but I didn't say that. "Forcas had somehow acquired a link from the chain that bound the Dragon with Benaiah Stanhope's blood. Using that, it made a counterconjure, an anticonjure," I clarified, "and was using the blood of Stanhope progeny to empower it."

The air burned my dry throat and I put a hand to the swath of ugly white scar tissue there. My throat had been ripped away in the fight and been regenerated by the application of kylen blood. I had survived, but the disfigurement wasn't pretty. Not that I was complaining. So many had died in the battles that followed.

Audric popped the top from a cold beer and passed it to me. I drank several sips, the moisture softening my dry throat. "A succubus queen had laid eggs in the Trine and a few of us went underground to wipe out the nest. We were too late, but we did manage to free a Watcher, Barak, one allied with the Light."

Cheran twitched slightly before his face hardened, hiding his reaction. A man with lesser self-control might have sat up straight in his chair, kicking over the table, making a mess.

Watchers were seraphs who had left heaven willingly and acquired sublunary bodies in order to mate with human women. Their pre-historical sin had left them without the ability to transmogrify or to return to heaven. Some had been grievously punished. Many, like Barak, had allied with the Light, while others joined the Dark.

Bluntly, I added, "And we also freed the seraph Zadkiel and his cherub."

Cheran wasn't able to disguise his reaction to that. Shock widened his pupils. I was pretty sure he had stopped breathing. My own eyes went hard and dry.

Only a few local humans, the Administration of the ArchSeraph, and I knew that a seraph and his cherub had been trapped in a lair of Darkness. No one else even grasped that the capture of a Major Prince of the Light was possible, and I didn't know what it might mean in the ongoing war. Over the last century, a list had been compiled of seraphs missing from Regions of Light. How many more were in the clutches of Darkness? And why hadn't the seraphs gone to rescue them? Questions I had no answers for, and the AAS certainly wasn't going to enlighten me.

I watched Cheran, who was once again giving nothing away. "We made it back to the surface," I said, my voice painfully hoarse, my eyes dry as bone. "I was injured. The seraph Raziel joined us battling Forcas at the opening to the hellhole on the Trine. The combat in the heavens took place at the same time as ours. I'm pretty sure it was all tied to the Dragon being set free. I felt something coming." I blinked, looking at Audric, whom I had left in the town with battles of his own, and who had nearly died following my orders.

"With the combined assets of a cherub's wheels and seraphic help, we drained Forcas to a husk. In the heavens, even with multiple winged warriors, they were losing to the Dragon. It was getting free. To stop it, the humans with me went back into the hellhole carrying a shoulder-mounted weapon with a bunker-busting nuclear warhead, something new and lightweight the US Army and mages developed. They used it to help close up the entrance and stop the Dragon. They didn't come back out."

Audric said, "Only the deaths of two brave human males, multiple beings of Light, the use of a nuclear warhead, and my mistrend's valiant warfare prevented the Dragon's freedom. That warfare resulted in Thorn's grave physical injury and the appreciation of the Council of the Seraphim."

Cheran looked at my cheek, and at the whiter expanse of scar tissue on my throat, curiosity finally showing on his face. "We heard that humans died saving you," Cheran said.

"Saving Thorn and the town," Audric said softly. "Nearly four thousand people would have died to feed that thing if it got free."

"If I'd killed Forcas on the first try they wouldn't have died," I said. "I screwed up."

Audric said nothing. He hadn't been there. He'd been fighting the succubus queen I had accidentally bound to me and left temporarily imprisoned in a conjured circle. He'd nearly died keeping the newly hatched succubus queen away from Mineral City. Mistake piled on mistake. Maybe I did need a teacher from Enclave. I had done pretty poorly on my own.

"Let me see if I understand this," Cheran said slowly, his tone a clarification. "You went underground - underground - to fight Darkness."

"Twice," Audric answered for me.

Cheran kept his eyes on me. "The Enclave masters, the ones who made the amulet that keeps you out of my head," he said with a wry tilt of his mouth, "knew something was happening. They figured out that a beast, a Major Darkness, was trying to get free and they tracked its movements from its prison. They were prepared to send battle mages to the fight, but it ended suddenly. It's still trapped, no longer bound, but not free either. According to them, it's in a sort of spiritual and dimensional stasis. You might say it has one foot in this world and one foot in another. But it won't be frozen in place long. We need a plan before it gets free."

"Battle mages would take weeks to get here in winter. If it gets free, we run," Audric said.

Cheran finally looked at him. "Spoken like a true coward."

Audric seemed to shift, to blur, and a knife thunked into the chair, pinning Cheran's oh-so-expensive pants to the wood beneath the upholstery and padding. The hilt quivered along Cheran's inner thigh, a micron from his privates. He went deathly still, his fingertips bloodless.

I drank a long swallow of beer, hiding a smile. Some of my tension eased away. "I suggest you show my champard the respect due a master of both savage-chi and savage-blade," I said, my voice sounding casual once again. "When you insult him, you insult me. And you don't want to take us both on, no matter what else you are besides a traveling Enclave emissary."

"Even a fool does his homework before he travels," Audric said. "You assumed your unexpected arrival, your speed, and a visa would provide you with protection from the humans and answers to your questions. Your teachers in Enclave will be disappointed when I report to them your...sloppy" - he used the mage's own word - "work." He rested a hand on the hilt of a second throwing knife in his belt.

Cheran scratched his chin, fighting a grin. "My speed and skills haven't gained me much, true. But what about the visa? I'm alive and still have my skin."

"The orthodox in this town are sharply divided over my mistrend's presence. Another mage, especially one with so few survival instincts and the wardrobe of a court jester, may not fare so well and may, furthermore, place her in greater danger. I will not permit this. If you endanger her, I'll hand you over to them."

Cheran's brows lifted and he finally looked at Audric. "The orthodox would violate the legal sanctity of a diplomatic visa? You would violate it?"

"Anger the people in this town and they will leave you in tiny pieces in the snow," Audric said, his strong teeth bared. "A mage lived among them in hiding for a decade. Many want her dead. Prejudice and emotions run high here, and most of the town fathers aren't overly impressed with mages."

Cheran worked the throwing blade back and forth until it eased from the chair frame. A tuft of stuffing came out with the tip, which he held up to the light. "Mule, I've known you less than an hour and you've sliced two holes in my clothes." He flicked the stuffing away and tested the edge with the pad of his thumb. It was a vaguely threatening gesture; Audric gave him a "Try it and I'll eat your guts for supper" grin. Territorial play by two males, one an alpha, one a wannabe.

"He's a sweetheart," I said. "Hand him the pretty knife like a gentleman. Hilt first."

"Spoilsport." He reversed the knife and offered it to Audric. "Since it seems I need an income, and your champard's blades need work, do you mind if I set up my equipment in the corner there? I can put on new edges," he said to me. Which told me what kind of mage he was. Not just a metal mage. But one of the few, very specialized, steel mages.

The thought flashed through my mind that I could put him in contact with the Schuberts, who owned Blue Tick Hound Guns. But I didn't trust him enough to provide mage-steel for the family business, not when the guns they made would be used to fight Darkness in defense of the town. Our blades, however, needed attention, and giving them new edges couldn't negatively affect their fighting power. Or I didn't think it could.

"Okay by me," I said, standing. "But you'll have to ask Rupert and Jacey."

He looked horrified. "You let humans make decisions for you? Humans?"

If this idiot didn't watch his tone, I'd save the orthodox the trouble and run him through with a sword myself.