Josie checked her watch before knocking on the door of the house in the center of the
city. She looked up in the sky. She wasn’t at full charge yet, but she didn’t feel like
she needed it. She wondered why Lewn hadn’t bought a bigger house with the money
he had stolen.
“Doesn’t look like much,” said Jack. He scanned the street. “I wonder why he didn’t
spend more money.”
“Maybe he spent it on things we can’t see,” said Josie. She listened at the door. “I
don’t hear anyone coming to the door.”
“Maybe we should knock louder,” said Jack. “We could just knock the door down.”
“He might be scared of coming to the door,” said Josie. “A lot of criminals would
want to get their own back here.”
“I’m going to knock on this door with Thor and see what happens,” said Jack. “I don’t
want to spend a lot of time on something that we’re going to have to leave unless we
have to do something horrible to clear the tax bill.”
“How long will your shrinking last on those guys at the apartment?,” asked Josie. She
could see them reverting to full size and hurting the girls while she was out chasing
this down.
“Until I turn it off,” said Jack. “Permanent change is better than a holding spell
according to Magick.”
Josie knocked on the door again. She frowned as impatience crept up on her. She was
giving this guy thirty seconds and then she would use the Human Bomb on this door.
The door opened. A tall man in a robe and slippers looked down on them. He was less
than impressed by the unwanted visitors on his doorstep from the expression on his
face.
“What do you want?,” asked the man in the robe.
“Go ahead, Josie,” said Jack.
“Magistrate Lewn?,” asked Josie. Looking at the house, she figured she had a good
chance of talking to the man she wanted to be talking to.
“He’s in bed,” said the servant. “Could you go away?”
“We have business with him,” said Josie. “We expect the Duke might have business
with him in the next few days. Could you get him for us?”
“And what can I say is your business?,” said the servant.
“We exposed his tax fraud to the Duke, and before his head is rendered from his
body, or whatever the maximum punishment for defrauding the Duchy is, we would
like his signature on a order returning property he fraudulently stole,” said Josie.
“We also would like to know what he was thinking trying to rob us, and how he
found out we had gold in the first place,” said Jack. “He put our adoptees in danger
which means that we might be doing worse than the Duke unless he can straighten
things out.”
“We understand that you might not have a clue about what’s going on,” said Josie.
“But I think you should get the magistrate and let us iron things out before it gets
worse for him.”
“Are you threatening an authority of the city and the lands beyond,” asked the butler.
“I got this one, Jo,” said Jack. “Are we threatening an authority of the city?”
He touched his watch and a ten foot tall wolf stood on his hind legs. A growl escaped
the werewolf as he stepped closer with clawed hands. Then he was a man in short
sleeved shirt and blue pants.
“Not yet,” said Jack. “I think you should get Lewn before we start resorting to actual
threats which might end in violence.”
“If you want, we can talk in his bedroom so he doesn’t have to get ready to see us,”
said Josie. She wondered if she had a werewolf on her watch. That might be
something she could use herself. “But we are going to talk to him, one way, or the
other.”
Josie gently pushed the butler back in the house. She followed, looking for threats.
Just because they had watches that let them do things, that didn’t mean they couldn’t
be clocked by a lucky shot.
“Which way should we go?,” asked Josie.
“He’s upstairs,” said the servant. “His room is at the end of the hall.”
“You can wait down here if you want,” said Josie. “Our talk won’t be long.”
“Put some tea on to boil,” said Jack. “My mom says it’s good for the nerves.”
Josie led the way up the stairs. She didn’t have to do anything to the judge if he
signed the orders like they wanted. They could go home, release the tax collectors,
and she could go to bed so she could be ready to go out to the airship and pick up the
adventurers in the morning.
“Magistrate Lewn,” said Josie. She knocked on his door. “I’m sorry to bother you,
but I have business that can’t wait until the morning.”
“Go away,” said an old voice. “The court will be open in the morning.”
“You will be under investigation in the morning,” said Josie. “And I expect you
will have legal problems of your own by the end of that. I need your official power
before you are removed and sentenced by another magistrate.”
“What are you talking about?,” asked Lewn.
“May we come in?,” said Josie. “Your servant is downstairs making tea for you.”
“Why didn’t he keep you out of the house?,” said Lewn.
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“Because my partner threatened to rip him into little pieces,” said Josie. She frowned.
She decided that he was going to try to hold her off. Maybe the servant was some
kind of killing machine the judge trusted to kill them. Maybe there were other guards
that could be gathered to stop them.
She stepped to one side. She gestured for Jack to open the door for them. He could
do a lot to a door designed to keep them out.
Jack turned in his green giant and blasted the door open with a fist. The door might
have been made of metal with a wood veneer. That didn’t stop the persona from
just knocking it into a bent spindle holding on to its hinges.
“There you go,” said Jack in a voice that sounded like gravel. He switched back
to normal.
“How is it going, Magistrate?,” Josie went to a chair next to a reading table and the
bed and sat down. She noted the shaking hands of the man in front of her. He was
ancient, with almost no hair and one cloudy eye. He would be dead soon whatever
happened in the next few minutes.
“What do you want from me?,” said Lewn. “I don’t know you.”
“You signed a bill to send tax collectors to our place because you heard about the
brick of gold we gave the Exchange,” said Josie. “We talked to the Duke and he
showed us the ledgers for the Treasury, and it seems you have been doing this for a
long time. And now the Duke knows.”
“The Duke has always known,” said Lewn. “That’s not a threat to me.”
“Which Duke?,” asked Jack.
“What do you mean?,” asked Lewn.
“The old Duke is dead as a doornail,” said Jack. “There’s a new Duke in town.”
“And he seems like a very serious man,” said Josie.
“So we need you to vacate the bill against us,” said Josie. She locked her hands
together.
“And we need you to refund Lord Cilt’s land back to him,” said Jack. “I told him that
I would look into it, and it looks like you stole his land from him. So I need you to
sign that order too.”
“What if I don’t?,” asked Lewn. “There’s not much you can do to me.”
“We can give you more years and send you somewhere else,” said Jack. “You can live
part of your life over and do better.”
“I doubt that you can do anything like that,” said Lewn.
“Sign the orders and we will send you out of the city,” said Jack. “Then you’ll have
the rest of your life to do with what you want.”
“Can you guarantee that?,” asked Lewn.
“I can guarantee that you will be set up somewhere else,” said Jack.
Josie glanced at his face. Her partner didn’t wear his habitual smile. Whatever he was
offering was not as good as he said it was.
“You can do this?,” said Lewn. “I suppose that would involve some kind of alchemy.”
“It would involve some energy buffering,” said Jack. “Don’t worry. You will be as
healthy as any man, in a place where you can start over, with no problems on the
horizon.”
“If you can do that, I would be glad to sign any order you need,” said Lewn.
“What do you need to sign such an order?,” said Josie. Something was going on with
Jack. She could see it in his eye. She wanted to say something but thought that they
should get what they wanted out of this before they gave Lewn what he wanted.
“Some paper, a quill, and my official seal,” said Lewn. “The orders would have to be
registered with the Royal Archives.”
“We’ll fix that when we have the order,” said Josie. She pulled paper and pen out of
the bag. She handed it over to him so he could write out what he needed. “The seal?”
“It’s downstairs in my office,” said Lewn.
“I’ll get it,” said Jack. “Maybe the tea will be ready by now.”
Josie watched as Lewn wrote out each order. She took a second to be Zatanna to
make sure the orders were right. She didn’t want to put things in the files if they
were false.
Jack returned with the seal. He handed it over. Lewn poured wax from the nearest
lit candle on the two orders. He pressed the seal down. He handed the papers to Josie.
“Thank you for your help,” said Josie. She made copies and sent them on their way
to where they belonged.
“All right,” said Jack. “I’m going to hold up my end.”
Jack touched his watch and became Magick. He gestured for a ring to form around
the bed. Poles formed out of the ring. Years rolled off the magistrate and he shrank
back into his childhood.
“Good luck with your new life,” said Jack.
“You just turned a grown man into a baby,” said Josie. She had known that Jack was
trying out things with his new persona, but that was incredible. “How do I do that?”
“You just have to turn time back to when you want it,” said Jack. He let the persona
go after he took the ring apart. “We have to deal with our mini tax guys, and then I
need another sandwich.”
“If Lewn was most of the jobs on the shadow board, we might have destroyed it,” said
Josie.
“We might have to track down the other notices I saw,” said Jack. “Those guys
will be skittish when word gets around that a baby has been left in Lewn’s place.”
“Let’s let Jeeves know,” said Josie. “He might not want to deal with his employer
being a baby.”
“I had to deal with him trying to call the Guard on us,” said Jack. “We should leave
him a note to tell him what’s going on.”
“I’m sure he will like that,” said Josie. She paused. “Do you know what this means?
We’re immortal.”
“No,” said Jack. He started down the stairs. He looked at the back of the house.
“We’re not.”
“I don’t understand,” said Josie. “Why wouldn’t we be immortal?”
“Because the spell erases the years, which means the memories, which means our
personalities as they are now,” said Jack. “Every time you used it on yourself, you
would be physically resetting everything about you. You would forget the kids, how
to use the watch, or even how the world works.”
“Okay,” said Josie. She had done things she regretted, but she didn’t want to forget
the good with the bad. She didn’t need to throw the baby out with the bath water.
“There are things we might be able to do to become immortal, but I don’t want to try
them and find out we were like crickets,” said Jack. “Better leave this guy a note to
let him know the new Lewn is his responsibility.”
“I don’t remember the crickets story,” said Josie. She dug out some paper from
her bag and wrote a note for Jeeves that his boss needed whatever help he could give
him now that he was an infant.
“One day this guy wanted to be immortal,” said Jack. “He won the love of a girl that
was special to the gods. They gave him immortality, but he still aged and eventually
turned into a cricket because he had become so old and wrinkly.”
“And that’s where crickets came from,” said Josie. She looked around the kitchen.
She put some conjured milk in the ice box in one corner. “A curse from the gods.”
“Do you think you can find Lord Cilt?,” said Jack. “I have to give him the order that
the land is his again. And then I have to take care of the mini guys.”
“All right,” said Josie. “I didn’t get a ding for the shadow board so someone is still
going to try to use it.”
“I would like to see them try it,” said Jack. “I need to let Cilt know, and I might have
to go out with him to evict anybody sitting on his land.”
“Here,” said Josie. She transformed and sent out a scry bird. “I’ll deal with the tax
people. Don’t forget the dinner tomorrow and the show.”
“Don’t forget how to lift off out of the pit,” said Jack. “I installed a lever to pull to
move the roof off the hangar. All you have to do is hover straight up and set the
course.”
“This could be excessive,” said Josie. She had an idea on who she could use as a pilot
if she needed it. “People will see that and run in fear.”
“It’s the fastest thing I could think of to build,” said Jack. “Just bring it back.”
“I will,” said Josie. She grabbed him in a hug. “Go out on this date and make me
proud.”
“Okay, Mom,” Jack said. “I don’t know if we’re doing the right thing, but I love
being able to throw spells and fly and build weird contraptions. I didn’t have anything
back home, and now I have a circle of people I know.”
“I think friends is the word you are looking for,” said Josie.
“I guess,” said Jack. He looked up at the sky. “I’ll see you in a bit.”
“Be careful,” said Josie. “People are going to start looking out for us to bust up the
game now.”
“It’s what we do,” said Jack. He turned into the Falcon and flew away.