Lawrence Watt-Evans - The Reign of the Brown Magician

Her car was gone. Amy Jewell had looked out the front door and seen that the curb was empty, and had stepped back inside and closed the door.

Her car was gone.

That had come as a shock at first, but it shouldn’t have. After all, she had left it out front months ago.

It was hard to realize that it had really been months, that it hadn’t all been a dream, that they hadn’t somehow returned to the moment they had left.

But it had been real, and it had been months ago that she had parked her car out front of Pel and Nancy Brown’s house in the expectation of being safely back home and in bed by midnight. She and her lawyer had come here to find out why there was a non-functional spaceship in her back yard; she hadn’t planned on anything more than an evening of explanations.

She certainly hadn’t planned on spending months going through hell in two other universes.

But then, just to see if the stories she had been told were true, she and the others had stepped through a magical portal in the basement wall into a universe she called Faerie, where Shadow ruled-and after that she had been caught up, unable to return, until now.

She had fled from Shadow’s monsters into the third universe, dominated by the Galactic Empire, where she had been captured by pirates and sold into slavery; she had spent weeks as a slave before the Empire had rescued from her master, Walter, and his helper Beth.

At least she’d survived-Nancy Brown was killed by the pirates, Nancy’s daughter Rachel by her master. Walter had killed a slave once, but he didn’t kill Amy.

She was pregnant by that son of a bitch, though. Not that she intended to stay that way. The Empire had hanged Walter and Beth both, and she intended to abort Walter’s child, and be rid of it, as well. She’d never managed to have any children when she was married, not even before she had found out what a bastard Stan really was and divorced him, and she wasn’t about to start now with Walter’s kid.

After the rescue she had spent boring weeks at Base One, the home of the Imperial Fleet, and then she had been sent back into Faerie as part of a raiding party that was meant to assassinate Shadow.

She hadn’t intended to really attempt anything that stupid; she’d intended to use the Faerie magic to go home the minute the Empire’s troops weren’t watching her. But then Elani, the wizard who knew the portal spell, had been killed, and she and the others had been stranded again.

So they’d gone on with the plan to assassinate Shadow, knowing it was suicidal.

And it was suicidal-most of the party had either died or deserted.

But the most amazing thing in the whole adventure was that they had actually managed it, eventually-Pel Brown and Prossie Thorpe had killed Shadow. Proserpine Thorpe, Registered Master Telepath, who had rebelled against the Galactic Empire and was now a refugee here on Earth with Amy, had shot a powerless Shadow dead.

And Pellinore Brown, a marketing consultant from Germantown, Maryland, had set it up, and now controlled all the power, the magical matrix, that Shadow had held.

And he had sent Amy, and Prossie, and his lawyer Ted Deranian, safely back through the portal in the Browns’ basement, and here they were, but Pel hadn’t been able to do anything about all the time that had passed while they were going through hell in those other realities.

So of course the car was gone, after so long.

Amy did wonder what had happened to it, though; had it been towed, or stolen, or repossessed, or what?

She realized then that she didn’t have her keys, so she couldn’t have started it anyway. She didn’t have her driver’s license, or any money, or anything else-her purse, if it still existed at all, was back on Zeta Leo III, where she’d been Walter’s household slave, in that other universe where the Galactic Empire ruled all those hundreds of planets.

Ted’s car was gone from out front as well.

Pel’s and Nancy’s were in the garage; Amy checked, and found them both sitting there, somewhat dusty but apparently intact.

That didn’t help much, though; even if she hadn’t been bothered by the idea of stealing one of them, she didn’t know where any keys were. She supposed one set was still in Nancy’s stolen purse-and that was probably on Zeta Leo III, like her own. As for any other set, well, who knew where Pel kept his keys?

She wondered if Ted might know-or if not, whether he might know how to hot-wire an ignition.

Ted, however, was firmly settled in the family room, in front of the TV, watching CNN Headline News, trying to catch up on what he’d missed, and to convince himself…

Well, to convince himself of something, but Amy wasn’t sure just what. That he’d imagined the whole adventure? That it was all real? That whatever had happened, everything was normal now? For all she knew, he was checking to see whether this was really Earth, and not some twisted alternate version.

Whatever he was doing, he had ignored her ever since he found out that the TV worked, that the power and TV cable hadn’t yet been cut off for non-payment.

Prossie seemed to be wavering between the two of them; she was fascinated by the TV, but she also seemed to consider Amy her lifeline, and whenever Amy stayed out of sight of the family room for more than a few minutes Prossie came looking for her, calling her name quietly into the silent depths of the Browns’ house.

It was hardly surprising that Prossie felt out of place-certainly no more surprising than the car’s absence. After all, this wasn’t Prossie’s native world.

Amy paused in the hallway as Prossie caught up; for a moment both women hesitated, but neither spoke, and at last Amy led the way.

She wasn’t really going anywhere in particular, just looking around; she didn’t want to settle down the way Ted had, she wanted to keep moving, to get on home to her own house up in Goshen, but her car was gone and she didn’t have any money or identification or credit cards, and she was wearing only the filthy, tattered remains of Imperial military-issue pants and T-shirt. She couldn’t catch a bus or call a cab.

She might be able to find something she could wear in Pel and Nancy’s closet-she and Nancy hadn’t been the same size at all, Nancy had been smaller, but there would surely be something, one of Pel’s shirts maybe. She didn’t like taking things without permission, but this was an emergency, and she’d only be borrowing it until she could get home.

And besides, it wasn’t as if Nancy would ever need her clothes again.

But Amy still didn’t have money for a bus or cab.

If the phone still worked she could call a friend for a ride, but she needed to think things through first. Who would she call? What would she say? What had happened all those weeks she was gone? Was the wreck of I.S.S. (for “Imperial Space Ship”) Ruthless still lying in her back yard?

She wished that thing had never fallen out of the sky onto her land; that had been what got her involved in all this in the first place. The Empire had been trying to establish contact with Washington, and had suddenly discovered, when Ruthless popped out of a space-warp over Amy’s back yard, that their anti-gravity drive didn’t work in Earth’s universe.

And no one had believed it was real, so the crew had been thrown in jail down in Rockville, and Ted had bailed them out because Pel had been contacted by people from Faerie who wanted to talk to the Imperials, and then they’d all stepped through the portal in Pel’s basement for a quick look, just to see if it was real…

Well, they were back now, and Amy wanted to go home, but what about Ted, and Prossie? What would become of them, if Amy left? Prossie had nowhere to go, and Ted seemed so out of touch with reality that Amy wasn’t at all sure he could take care of himself.