The holographic proctor welcomed me as an adjunct member of Bluestar 7 and sent me a contact number I could call with questions, really just an automated help line that was there to remind new arrivals of all the shit they weren’t allowed to do.

The process had taken about three hours, and Denise didn’t want to risk running into anybody, so I sent her a quick message and had her pick me up on the roof.

She handed me coffee and a breakfast sandwich and said we were probably going to be too busy to eat during lunch. She said our busiest times would be when people were driving to and from work, or overnight, when pedestrians were likely to get hit by legacy ground cars.

The automated squad car lifted into the air, flying over the highways and bridges in some special police lane one notch lower than the usual air traffic.

Ordinary city airspace had three air lanes over it. A slow lane for delivery drones and cars about to land, a cruising lane for ordinary air traffic going about a hundred miles per hour, and a fast lane for people crossing over the city at high speed, sometimes up to five hundred miles per hour.

Moving up and down between lanes was incredibly tricky and dangerous, so only automated vehicles were allowed to do it. Every now and then a daredevil human pilot would try to play Top Gun in his flying sportscar, but most of them ended up dying in dramatic fireballs when their stunts went wrong.

Emergency vehicles had access to a super slow patrol lane under the slow lane and a super fast priority lane above the normal fast one. The squad car had a special transponder that would override the standard civilian autopilot and move everybody out of our way, but I had been strictly warned to never abuse that privilege for personal reasons, and to never use the siren or the emergency lights unless we were responding to a call on the radio or making a promo appearance at a disabled kid’s birthday party.

The only thing using the old streets and highways were legacy ground vehicles like vintage cars on rubber tires, and automated freight haulers, basically pilot drones attached to the front of standard shipping containers, using heavy duty hover fields to keep twenty tons of cargo just high enough to get over bumps and potholes.

I came out of Bluestar headquarters ready to take on the world with a new t-shirt and a trainee badge. Then I climbed in the car with Denise, and we did… nothing. Absolutely nothing, for a very long time.

We were cruising around our designated patrol route, listening to the police radio. It wasn’t really a radio anymore, but it worked the same, as everybody on active duty shared the same audio channel, turning their microphones on or off with gesture commands.

I set Jeeves to translate service codes and police jargon for me and maintained a state of catlike readiness as I heard calls for shots fired and dead bodies found.

Denise had promised to let me turn on the siren, so I lunged at the button every time I heard a call, but every time, Denise just said, “Nope. Not for us,” and made me pull away.

Denise assured me our board would light up if somebody called for us specifically, and all we had to do in the meantime was look out the window.

I didn’t know how we were expected to see any worthwhile details from this high up, but she said police drones would relay anything we needed to see.

We exhausted ourselves talking about breakfast food and Denise said, “Tim, can I ask you a personal question?”

“Of course.”

“You said you had sex with Lydia after about six weeks, about five weeks after you met me. And when you did that, when you first had sex with her, were you a virgin?”

“What?” I shouted. “No!”

“It’s okay if you were. I’m not trying to embarrass you, I’m just trying to figure stuff out. After you walked away from me, I spent a long time trying to figure out what I did wrong, and this was the first thing that made sense.

“I know I took your virginity, in a way, when I introduced you to magic, and I was afraid you ran away, because you thought I was about to take the other kind, too.”

“No, I was not a virgin!” I repeated. “Why on Earth… No! I was with Judy for like five years!”

“Who the hell is Judy?”

“Judy, my high school girlfriend. We lost our virginity together when we were like eighteen.”

“Tim, in the time I’ve known you, you have never said a word about anybody named Judy.”

“Really? There’s no big secret there. All through high school, I was in a perfectly normal relationship with a normal person. We graduated together and got an apartment, and we would have gotten married if… if I hadn’t fucked it up. Why on Earth did you think I was a virgin?”

“I just thought… The way you imprinted on Lydia, the way you reacted to me, I felt terrible for weeks after that night, afraid that I moved too fast and scared you away.”

“No,” I shook my head. “That wasn’t it. I ran away because I was afraid you’d find out about Lydia, and if you found out, you might try to fight her, and she absolutely would have tried to kill you, and at the time, I didn’t realize what a badass you were, and even after I did…”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Tim, you didn’t tell me about your demon problem because you knew I would solve it. And you didn’t want me to solve it, because you wanted to keep her. You still want to keep her, and I think you need to admit that to yourself.”

“It’s not about what I want,” I insisted. “I have an obligation to her and… Denise, she loves me. She straight up loves me; doesn’t that count for something?”

“Of course she loves you,” Denise said. “It’s her job to love you. Her entire reason for existing is to love you. I can’t even imagine the temptation of that, but Tim, loving her is a trap, and eventually that trap is gonna close on you, whether she has a Master or not.”

“I just want you to know,” Denise said, leaning over to squeeze my shoulder. “When you’re ready to solve this problem, all you have to do is ask.”

I backed up and shook her hand off. “Are you offering to kill her?”

Denise shook her head. “I’m not gonna kill her and I’m not gonna let Mom kill her. I’m just gonna send her home, just like she asked you to do. It’s obvious how much you care for her, but you don’t have to be the one to do this. I’m ready to do it for you, and then I’ll do my best to… help you through the rest.”

I was trying to control myself, but the anger came anyway, flashing in my eyes. I was about to start my mantra to try and calm down, but Denise responded instantly.

She grabbed my hand and said, “Easy. I got you.” The magic drained out of me and into her, then her power came back the other way and I was instantly at peace, like my soul had just slipped into a hot bath.

“How did you…”

“It’s a witch thing. This is how Mom would calm me down, whenever I had tantrums. I’ve had more practice controlling my power than you have, but I’ll expect you to do this for me, too, if I ever lose my shit.”

I said, “Thank you.”

But before I could launch into my big defense of Lydia, our board lit up, and Denise said, “Here we go.”

* * *

And yeah, I got to turn on the siren.

The call was a Code 14, calling for a tow truck, but dispatch decided the people in the vehicle were at risk of getting hit, so they called us to deal with it.

The vehicle was a van, an ancient ground vehicle on rubber tires, that looked like it had been wrecked a few times before this latest attempt to get it running.

And now it wasn’t running, stranded in the slow lane of the highway, as automated freight haulers zoomed by on either side at a hundred miles per hour.

We landed in front of it and jumped out.

The van had blown a tire and almost veered into the old guardrail, but the damage looked minimal, and the driver was already out, carefully avoiding the freight haulers as she searched in the back for an emergency spare.

I walked up to the van and realized there were children in it; something like twenty children, and several of them were crying.

Denise ran inside and started inspecting the children, calming them down with little jokes and soft smiles, healing bumps and bruises until the crying stopped.

It warmed my heart to see her like this, but my big concern was the driver. No way she could get in position to change that tire with freight haulers zooming by on either side, even if her pathetic emergency jack worked.

“Denise, why isn’t this traffic stopping? This is dangerous as fuck. We can’t even get the kids out!”

“Our transponder is only good for stopping traffic in one lane. If it was just a couple people, we could lift them out in our car, but I wasn’t expecting twenty kids.”

I shook my head. “This lady wants to change the tire, but she’s gonna have to stick her ass into live traffic to reach it! Her jack is a piece of shit, and her spare… Man, this spare is older than I am. We’re authorized to use magic, right? Little stuff to help people?”

Denise said, “Yes, that’s what we’re here for.”

“Okay fine, why don’t I just lift the bus?”

“Tim, there are kids in there.”

“Yeah, but it’s way too dangerous to get them out, and kids don’t weigh much. It’s fine.”

She sighed. “If you’re sure. Do I need to get out?”

“No. Stay in there with the kids in case something goes wrong. But before I levitate it, let me talk to this driver.”

I told the driver she didn’t really need the jack, but my real concern was her spare tire. It was a run flat emergency donut, so it didn’t need to hold air, but this rubber was so old, I didn’t trust it to stay on.

“Hang on,” I told the driver. “I’m gonna try something.”

“Jeeves, pull up restoring material integrity from the Taltorak toolkit.”

The spell came up and I cast it on the tire, relieved to watch it slowly pop back into shape, like the decades were reversing as I watched.

I finished with the tire and the driver assured me she could change it quickly, if we could find a way to use the jack.

I told her we didn’t need the jack and told her to get ready to move quickly once I had it up. I levitated the bus a few feet off the ground, struggling to keep it perfectly level with the kids inside.

The kids cheered like this was the coolest thing in the world, which it kind of was. The driver changed the tire and we gave her an air escort to get her safely off the highway.

We pulled them into a parking lot and jumped out again to keep them company while we waited for a large air transport, borrowed from a nearby school.

The sign on the side of the van said, Good Shepard Daycare. “What are you guys doing out here? Is this some kind of field trip?”

“Oh, we’re not really a daycare anymore,” the driver said.

“You have twenty kids in a van but you’re not a daycare? You should probably explain that before I have to call a real cop.”

“All these kids are homeschooled. Once a month or so, we drive around to pick them up and take them to a science lab. Most of these parents don’t have a lot of money, so we don’t have a lot of money, either. This is the same van my dad used to start this project, back before the Bump.”

The Bump had been a full-on economic collapse in the United States. America signed up to join a United Nations global currency initiative in 2030, and fifteen years later, Americans woke up and found out their money didn’t work, and anything they had in cash was worthless.

I spent a few months on a West Texas ranch while the world went to shit, until corporations took over the government and gave my dad a job.

A lot of people lost everything in the Bump, and a lot of people died. From disease, starvation, lack of critical medication, and simple violence, as looters went through the good neighborhoods door to door.

That’s when corporations started providing food and housing for their employees. Anyone who wasn’t willing to sign up with a major corporation ended up stuck in a kind of legal gray area, like refugees in their own country.

This lady could have signed contracts with HDI or VBC and gotten everything she needed, but these parents were determined to raise their kids outside the system. This is what life looked like for millions of people, struggling to survive in terrible poverty, while corporate employees looked down on them from towers in the sky.

* * *

We waited by the van as the kids climbed into their floating school bus and flew away, then killed another twenty minutes waiting for a tow platform to carry the ancient van away.

The daycare was billed thousands of dollars for the rescue, but I didn’t know that at the time.

Denise came up and hugged me from behind. “Congratulations, hero. You just saved twenty children from… a long day in school.”