No subject

of cheering and laughter as Liam and Anna hammered it out against C-55s 
and BU-12Bs on two BGC-Knights, while Sonya and Angela screamed insults at 
one another with as little real animosity as usual, and the others milled 
about, waiting for other games to be free, and all keeping an eye out for 
one another. It was useless to try overtly to watch their leader's back -- 
she was as likely to flatten anyone who suggested she couldn't cope with 
anything that came her way, especially now.

Crystal's helpless whimpering had stopped as she had reached a hand to her 
shoulder, then the blue eyes had opened to look up at her. For a moment 
they had regarded one another, her own emerald gaze frigid with the 
promise of revenge. Then she was on her feet, flying back towards the 
arcade, screaming for the others.

That had been a mere ten minutes ago.

She had not waited for the ambulance: she could not afford to wait. She 
had headed straight for Fagen's, hoping to reach the drug-hole before they 
realised the mistake they'd made in pushing her this far, and went to 
ground for the duration.

She had been lucky. Gema and her little party of thugs were still there, 
probably waiting for Harrison to call to let them know what she and the 
others were doing, after he had finished with Crystal. She had found that 
idea amusing. Harrison would never talk again. Rianna, and Michael should 
be just about finished with him by now; just about.

It had been easy. All she needed to do was to remember little, fiery 
Crystal's helpless broken form, and that she was dealing with 
drug-trafficking, gutter-licking filth, and she didn't have to hold 
anything back.

She had smashed the first of the hired help (a Korean, she noted 
fleetingly) into the brick-work of the club's entrance with such force 
that the impact had shattered his spine like kindling. Kicking the 
semi-automatic from the hand of a huge jamaican with a snap that smashed 
his wrist to pulp, she leapt, flipped and landed, slamming the Maori who 
was still in the act of turning to help him, bodily through the 
plate-glass door, flicking out the tiny stiletto even as she followed, 
driving the fine dart-like blade to the hilt through his spinal chord just 
below the neck before twisting it free, and diving over him, already 
running before his body had tumbled to a stop. She was through the club 
and out into the darker passages behind, almost before the panic had 
begun. Then there was the dimly lit stairway, and the voices from the room 
at the smaller passage's further end.

Racing for the closed door, she had slammed it open, leapt through, and 
hurled the blade into the throat of the first of Gema's personal guard, 
even as he looked up in stunned surprise, turning only to smash the other 
over a table and through the window on the room's further side to plunge 
screaming to the alley below, before she was beside Gema, another blade 
already at her throat.

"Lock the door," she snarled softly.

The little bitch ducked, trying desperately to twist towards her, a knife 
in her hand. Dropping her own blade, she slammed her to the table and 
slapped the knife to the further side of the room. Something cracked, and 
Gema screamed. She ignored her, pivoting to the door in time to flick her 
last blade through the left eye of the gunman in the doorway.

"You should have used that, you know," she commented conversationally, as 
she retrieved his weapon and the tiny knife, pitched the dying body from 
the room, and slammed and locked the door.

"Now then, where were we?" she inquired almost pleasantly, moving to 
Gema's groaning form, pausing to retrieve her other blades and re-sheathe 
them, before dragging the dealer-hit-girl up by her hair. "Oh yes; I was 
about to slit your throat."

There was a crash at the door, then another, and a moment later it burst 
inwards. She smiled as three blades flew, and three men screamed and fell. 
Then the fourth entered with a pistol in his hand.

"Put that down," he snarled quietly, jerking a finger at the last blade 
she held to Gema's throat.

"We'll go together, your little pay-mistress and I," she said calmly, her 
eyes never leaving his face, her own expression utterly devoid of fear.

"If that's how you want it. Doesn't matter to--"

The knife opened his neck before he'd finished, embedding itself in the 
door-jam behind him. He screamed, a thin gurgling sound, even as she 
whirled, pausing only to crack Gema's neck with a quick twist of her hand.

Flipping over the table, she landed, snatched her blades from the three 
dead bodies and the door-jam, then spinning she leaped for the shattered 
window.

"Jesus! Fr***in' bitsh," Came a gurgling, horror-stricken slur from behind 
her.

In the midst of her leap, she half turned, the stolen semi-automatic 
already up and firing, in time to see the man, blood pulsing between his 
fingers as he clutched uselessly at his neck, stagger up, the pistol still 
in his hand. Her feet hit the sill, and she hurled herself forwards, 
somersaulting towards the alley below. Then there was a crack from behind, 
and her world exploded in a brilliant, fiery red, even as she plunged 
towards, then through the street, to fall, choking back a scream of shock, 
into the oblivion beyond.

 				     ** ** **

Darkness Chronicles

An anime-Manga Cross-over

 				     ** ** **

Book I:

Part I: The Gathering

Chapter II:

 				     ** ** **

When he was a boy, Johnathan Liam O'Reilly had loved the journeys home 
late at night, after another visit to one of his seemingly innumerable 
relations. Curled up snug and warm under a travelling-rug on the back seat 
of the family Rolls Royce, he would lie still, eyes almost closed, 
listening to the soothing rumble of the tyres on the road beneath them and 
the gentle purr of the big engine, and drift in a half-dream, watching the 
patterns that danced upon the very edge of sleep, half-aware of his 
parents' quiet talk, and imagining the never-quite-defined brother or 
sister he had always wanted to be settled at his side, or waiting in the 
huge, too-empty house for his return. They would hurry to bed without 
complaint, but after the light had been turned out, they could stay awake 
far into the night, and talk of Middle-Earth or the land of Narnia, or 
some Blytonesque mystery or adventure; and perhaps one day they might even 
find some hidden way that led still to Loth Lorien or the Shire or the 
hidden valley of Rivendell, or perhaps a secret door into the world of 
Aslan, and to the fair castle of Kair Paravel, or the magnificent, 
terrible city of Tashbaan. The days would drift by in endless contentment, 
and nothing could break their friendship, or destroy their happiness.

He would wake a little as the big car drew into the long, tree-shrouded 
driveway, stirring still more as he was lifted, still more than half 
asleep, to be carried into the quiet, echoing house and up the wide, 
curving stairway to his huge yet cluttered attic domain, a domain that 
should have been the nursery for a large and merry family of children. 
Then alone in the dark he would lie awake, listening to the quiet ticking 
of the grandfather clock in the hall (one of four the house possessed), 
and pray silently and with almost desperate fervour to the Lord and the 
holy Virgin, that a brother or sister might somehow be there when he awoke 
the following morning, or that at least there might be some new boy or 
girl at school with whom he could share dreams no one but uncle Rory 
seemed to understand, and for which the other children laughed at him, and 
called him mad Paddy, or threw things, and stepped on his school-bag and 
took his lunch when he was not able to stop them.

How he had hated them then, not simply for their teasing, but for the fact 
that they would not even try to understand him, and that they liked all 
that stupid screaming thrash and rap and other noise, and Star Trek and 
Star Wars and other stupid, rotten American stuff. And it was all such 
utter rubbish that no one but an idiot could possibly like it; and they 
were all just too stupid to understand anything, and sometimes he wished 
desperately that a Black Rider would simply appear to carry the whole 
rotten lot of them off to some black pit from which none of them would 
ever come back.

Things would be different, uncle Rory had tried to reassure him, when he 
began at thirteen in his new school. But then his uncle and his parents 
had had a "falling out" as his mother put it, and Rory O'Reilly had gone 
back to Ireland, and for years Johnathan had thought his uncle had 
forgotten him. It was only very recently that he had learnt what had 
happened: that the quarrel had concerned both his uncle's decision to 
re-marry at last after the tragic death of his first wife (and his 
brother's wife's elder sister) when Johnathan was still very young, and 
what Rory O'Reilly considered Michael's and Elizabeth's neglect of their 
son. Even worse to Johnathan's mind was the fact that he had discovered 
his parents had refused to allow him to receive any correspondence from 
the man his mother, at least, still would not forgive.

With his uncle gone, things had seemed simply to go from bad to worse. 
Johnathan had always been small for his age, and at thirteen he had 
discovered he needed glasses, and that, contrary to his father's 
assurances, his growth seemed to be slowing rather than hitting the spurt 
for which he had been waiting for what seemed to him as long as he could 
remember.

He found friends of a sort at his new school: some few introverted, 
book-bound boys who would at least talk to him. But they had interests 
other than his own, and, being an only child, and forced more often than 
not to play alone, he was no longer capable of any real compromise. Any 
quarrel (and usually it would come down to some music other than the Irish 
and Celtic influences he most loved, or their caring nothing for classical 
history and the epic tales that had become ever more his escape from a 
world he had begun to despise with increasing intensity, or worst, 
comments concerning his own physical ineptitude at sports, and hopeless 
inability to defend himself in a fight) would end almost inevitably with 
Johnathan exploding in a furious flare of fierce Irish temper, followed by 
a protracted sullenness that discouraged any real camaraderie.

Johnathan had drifted through his later school years, his thoughts ever 
more occupied with his own dreams and fantasies, no longer even pretending 
to exert himself. He under-achieved intentionally, both to avoid notice, 
and increasingly to spite the too-rich parents who gave him all he wished, 
save for the praise he secretly so desired, presenting an increasingly 
sullen face to the teachers, who knew his true potential, but in the main 
who would not try to understand him.

His only true respite was the school's extensive library, in which he 
would sit for hours on end, devouring all it had to offer.

It was during his fourteenth year that he first began seriously to build 
and set down a coherent whole from the many worlds of his vivid 
imagination, and with them to imagine her: a wild, intense anima to 
counter his own loneliness, isolation and increasing disillusionment with 
the world around him.

Joanna Marina O'Reilly became for him, part the sister, part simply the 
confidante he was certain now he would never have: an invisible presence 
able to understand his troubles, and into whom he could channel all the 
frustration and anger he had not the confidence to show.