Page 87 of Wicked Deeds

I tracked down Gwen’s location in the game, but hesitated again. What if she thought I was being too try-hard? We were still strangers, even though we were sisters, and there was still distance between us. Suddenly uncertain, I procrastinated for a moment, and pulled up my messages.

I didn’t keep in contact with many of the gamers I’d known through Nat anymore, but I played with Benji and some of the other Righteous developers every so often and hung out with Lizzie watching Zee train.

Damon, Lizzie and Zee wouldn’t use game messages to get hold of me, but some of the Righteous crew might. I’d dropped them a note before all the nonsense with Ajax and Jack had come up, telling them I’d be beta testingInfinite Riseand there’d been a trail of messages ever since.

I checked the latest chat in those, added my two cents and then ran my eye over the short list of other messages. A coupleof administrative things from the system and one message request. From someone I didn’t know. Interesting. My profile was private. Though, I wasn’t impossible to get to. No one was truly unreachable if you wanted to invest enough time and effort.

The username was Night&Mirrors, I snorted to myself. Gamers had been around for a long time, and yet their ability to pick silly usernames still amused me. Gwen’s was BritDontQuit33. Damon’s was simply Righteous when he gamed publicly. At home we used our names. The status bubble next to Night&Mirrors showed they were currently online. I flicked open the message.

I would like to talk to you.

No signature. Just the one line.

I snorted again, preparing to consign it to the depths of the spam filter. Then something pinged in my brain.

Night&Mirrors. Usuriel’s territory was sometimes called the Court of Mirrors.

It couldn’t be, could it? SurelyUsurielwasn’t gaming?

I mean, he could, of course. Callum did, and no doubt Usuriel could put his hands on tanai who could explain to him how to game and get him whatever equipment he wanted, barring a chip. But what was he doing in the game and, more to the point, how did he find me?

My first instinct was to disengage and get the hell out of there. But that would leave Gwen logged in while Usuriel was online. It wouldn’t take me long to pull her out, but the Fae moved fast and a few seconds might be all the time he needed.

But he hadn’t approached Gwen. He’d approached me.

What the hell did he want? Surely his charming photo had been enough to let me know he was still watching. I tried to figure out his angle, dialing down the sensory feedback to myavatar so the instinctive fear died down to unease, letting me focus.

While I was hesitating, another message pinged.

The system informs me that you are online. I would like to talk.

Well, that was certainly arrogant enough to be Usuriel.

Who is this?

The response came almost instantly.

Lord of the Night.

Lord Usuriel?

Is there another Lord of the Night?

I rolled my eyes so hard I risked spraining my eyeballs. Arrogance at its finest. Damon might pull his master of the universe attitude at times to get things done, but he didn’t tip over into outright arrogant. He didn’t think he was better than other people.

Usuriel, on the other hand, did. But if he wanted to talk, in-game might be safer than in person.

Yes, he could probably use magic here, but he could hardly lock me in. He might have a viddeck, but I doubted he’d figured out Jack’s nasty little trick. Callum knew how to get out of it, but he didn’t know how the system was locked down in the first place.

I thought fast. I didn’t want to join Usuriel in a game. Cerridwen had managed to get someone to plant a summoning in a game. I didn’t want to end up under another compulsion, forcing me to meet Usuriel wherever he was hiding.

But here, on Damon’s home system, I had access to quarantined environments that I controlled completely. I sent Madge a request to try to identify the user of the account and pulled up a new sterile test space. Those weren’t connected to anything else, other than a quarantined server, and they had multiple levels of firewalls and security around them.

The test space formed around me, another plain white box, only differentiated from the foyer by the fact I used a different, less-stark shade of white for the walls. I double-checked all the security and sent Usuriel an invite before I lost my nerve.

I’d barely taken a breath when he materialized on the other side of the small room.

His avatar wore a long black velvet coat over tight leather pants and a black T-shirt that had enough sheen that it was probably supposed to be silk. The hair was lighter than it had been at Decker’s, but still not as light as in the realm. And the face was handsome, but not alarmingly so. The eyes, while dark, almost startlingly so against the blond, were not fully black. Definitely trying to pass as human.

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