copyright 2013 Faeriemage
Mirror, Mirror on the web...

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Karen walked through the deserted halls of the school in James’ wake. There were still a couple of kids hanging out in the halls, most of whom just stared at her as she walked past.

“You’re going to be okay,” James said over his shoulder.

“Hmm?”

“At this school. And if it doesn’t really work out here, you’ll be going to a new school next year.”

“Do normal people really change schools this often?” she said, a little bit of her former life filling her words.

“More often, actually. They go to the same elementary school, usually, go to a middle school for 6th and 7th grades, a junior high school for 8th and 9th and then high school for 10th 11th and 12th.”

Karen actually smiled at this. “Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I’m in 8th grade now.”

“Some school districts work it a little differently. They have junior high school start at 6th grade and go through 8th grade, and then have 9th through 12th in the same school.”

“Why the differences? Doesn’t it make sense to have everyone follow the same division?”

“Oh, you mean like just putting everyone from kindergarten through twelfth grade in the same building?”

“Sure…”

“When you’re asking about a private school, yes, it makes sense, of course your private school controlled how many students there were. There aren’t many schools that want to do that, though. Too much opportunity for abuse. When you mix things up, or so the conventional wisdom holds, you limit the possibility for dangerous cliques forming and continuing for long periods of time.”

“It all just sounds silly to me,” Karen said.

“Me too, but then again, I’m just the bodyguard.”

The walk to the office wasn’t that long, and they were there quickly. The secretary, who had her purse and coat at the ready, handed the map of the school and her schedule to Karen and then walked out.

“That was it?” Karen said. She looked at the map and schedule in her hands in confusion.

“What did you expect? An interview with the principal? Some one on one counseling?”

“I don’t know...maybe?”

James laughed. His was a pleasant laugh that involved his entire body. Karen began to smile. “There’s my girl.”

“James, does any of this ever get any easier?”

“Dealing with death? No, it doesn’t.”

Karen sat down in the dark office and just looked into space.

“You know who I was before your dad hired me?”

“A soldier of some sort.”

“I was an army Ranger, and proud of it.”

“Did you kill people?”

“Karen…”

“Sorry, it’s just…”

“You want something to take you away from this pain you’re feeling. I am a ready target for hate…”

“No, I wouldn’t hate you,” Karen said with a frown.

“Hero worship, then. You need to connect with people your own age.”

“They don’t understand,” Karen said, with a bit of a whine in her voice.

“Then make them. Show them how difficult life is, and help them to really see what you’re going through.”

“It hurts too much to talk about it.”

“Well, you can’t begin to heal until you get the thorn out. All leaving it in does is to make the flesh around it all red and puss filled...really nasty.”

Karen giggled a bit. She really wasn’t the sort of girl to stay down for a long time, which caused James to worry about this depression she was forcing herself into even more.

“Your father wouldn’t have wanted you to feel sorry about yourself.”

“We’ll he’s dead and doesn’t get to have a say in my life anymore,” she said with a little bit of anger. James just shook his head and smiled.

“Hi, I’m Thomas. Would you like me to give you a tour of the school?”

James almost dropped into a defensive stance before he realized it was just another kid. He shook his head at his own reaction. It’s not like he was back in a battle zone with Mr. King.

All of the animation bled out of Karen’s face. “Hello, Thomas, that won’t be…”

“Necessary? Of course it’s necessary. You’re new here…”

Karen looked at him, wondering why he paused.

“I think he wants your name,” James prompted.

“Karen King,” Karen responded in a dead voice.

“I’ve got it from here, Mr. King,” Thomas said as he smiled up at James. Thomas wasn’t a short kid, for a fourteen year old, but James towered over him.

“I’m the bodyguard. Will you be ok, Karen?”

“Sure, just go wait for me at the car, James.”

“Ok, Miss,” James said with a smirk. Karen giggled again before turning her attention to Thomas. Again all emotion fled from her face and she just nodded imperiously toward the hall.

Thomas just shook his head. He could tell from the few unguarded moments he’d seen that she was...alive. The thing was every time she turned away from her bodyguard her emotions seemed to shut down completely.

As they wandered the halls, the rest of the AV club joined them in ones and twos. Without Karen ever realizing it, she was in the center of a group of smiling and laughing teens as they walked her through the halls, telling her trivia about the individual rooms.

“Who are all these people?” Karen said quietly to Thomas.

“We’re the Seven Dwarves, of course,” Harry said with an incorrigible smile plastered to his face.

“You’re not short,” Karen replied, confusion suffusing her features.

“No, we’re not short,” Brad said, “but we make up for it with behavior. We’re subterranean.”

“You live underground?” Karen said getting more confused.

“In a manner of speaking,” Candy said. “I’m Candace, by the way. Everyone calls me Candy, though, I don’t know why,” she said just before tossing a hard candy into her mouth and beginning to suck on it.

For a moment Karen thought to laugh at what she assumed was a joke, but David shook his head slightly with a scared look on his face. Apparently Candy really was that clueless about some things.

“Who are you all?”

“We’re the AV club. Well, after a manner of speaking. Each of us have skills that we bring to the table,” Thomas said, smiling at the others and Karen equally.

“We’re seamstresses and designers,” Mindy said. “I’m Mindy.”

“They’re more than that,” Thomas continued, “they’re the art portion of our group. We don’t often have any sets to make, but they do those as well.”

“Abel and I are brute labor and lighting,” Brad said.

“Harry and David manage wiring and networking.”

“And anything electrical, like the microphones and such,” David whined.

“So, that’s them, what about you, Thomas?” Karen said.

“Me, I’m the ringleader. I make sure everything comes together.”

Karen smiled.

“So, that’s the school,” Thomas said,” see you in school tomorrow?”

“Why not?” Karen said getting more serious once again. Like most rhetorical questions it went unanswered, as expected. She waved goodbye and then walked out to the front of the school to meet James.

***
Karen was not the sort of girl to really get into shopping. Girls, in general, are social. Getting together with friends and relatives in order to spend hours trying on clothes is one way that they can bond socially. It is only one way.

The problem is, with no friends or relatives willing to go out and spend time with her doing anything everything becomes a chore.

New clothes, however, were definitely something that Karen liked. There was something about the ability to reinvent your image with every new outfit that Karen could easily get into. Her closet was filled with clothing of different styles. She had workout clothing in three styles. She had light skirts and denim skirts. There were the dresses of varying cuts and fabrics. Each outfit said something to the people around her about who she was and what she was feeling.

There were the happy outfits in pastel colors with flouncy skirts and flirty tops. There were the comfort outfits that encased her in a hug.

The clothing that she hung up now wasn’t anything like the other clothing that was there. It wasn’t different in cut from really anything that she had in her closet, at least not in any extreme way, but the colors were different. It was burgundy and black and bruised plum. While a pink or two might have crept its way in there occasionally, for the most part is was a shadow across the sun that was her wardrobe.

When she was done adding the new clothing she went about clearing up her makeup table. She packed it away in the drawers. What wouldn’t fit in the drawers she slid into boxes and banished to the darkest corners of her closet. When she was done she placed a single lipstick onto the table in a deep blood red.

***
“How could you do this to me? Moving her to public school was supposed to save me money, not cost more!” Jean screamed at James. Her plan was so perfect. There’d been media attention on the girl following her father’s death, but if the media had no real clue where she was, if her circumstances went down, then there was no reason to believe that she would be a threat.

For now, with the girl being thirteen, there was no real worry that she would be competition. Luckily most people were still a little disgusted with the idea of a young teen being desirable. Her outfits had been detestably normal. Sure, they might have been a little perkier than other girls her age were willing to submit their peers to, but at least they screamed kid.

These choices were something else entirely.

“You already separated her from her friends. Isn’t that enough?” James replied. This type of behavior was baffling to him, which could explain the reason he’d never kept a girlfriend more than a few months. He had a tendency to dismiss any behavior he couldn’t understand as irrelevant. No one wants to be considered irrelevant.

“That isn’t the point,” Jean sneered.

“Then what is, Jean?”

“You’re being rude. Have you forgotten that you work for me now?”

“Actually, Jean, no I don’t. You and I both know that I am provided for out of a trust. Mr. King wanted me here to guarantee the safety of his daughter no matter what happened to him.”

“I could lock up the funds legally as I pursued having the will overturned.”

“You could try, but what would it really accomplish? You and I both know that when you have a federal judge and a former governor witness a document like this you have a certain amount of assumed clout that even your high priced lawyer friends would be unwilling to challenge.”

She glared at James. Legally, he had a point. The people you had witness signatures shouldn’t matter. As long as you had witnesses then it should be fine. In practice, however, when you have someone currently sitting on the bench of justice, someone whose legal opinion was well respected, then it tended to alter how people viewed that document.

Sometimes it was a good that she had friends that had no qualms about pursuing illegal methods.

“We’ll James, I guess you have a point,” she said with a large smile. It was one of her practiced ones. She even allowed the happiness she felt about the death of her late husband to color it.

“I’m glad you see it my way.” James said and walked out. Jean screamed at his retreating back. It wasn’t enough that he was flouting her authority, but he was so smug about it.

She booted up her computer and logged into the chat program. The person she was looking for was already online, so she created a private chat room and he soon joined her.

Mephistopheles: Well, things are going quite well, your majesty.
QueenMab: Can it. I have a problem.
Mephistopheles: What sort of problem?
QueenMab: More a complication, actually. Apparently the idiot bodyguard my late husband hired is more of an enabler than I assumed.
Mephistopheles: Do tell.
QueenMab: He took the brat out shopping today. They spent close to a thousand dollars on clothing. $1000! What thirteen year old spends a thousand on clothing?
Mephistopheles: Yours, apparently.
QueenMab: That thing isn’t related to me in any way, thank goodness. I may have to take care of her sooner than I thought.
Mephistopheles: School plan not working out like you thought? She only changed schools today, after all.
QueenMab: that is 10% of what I pay for a year at that school, and this is only the first day.
Mephistopheles: You told me she isn’t a big shopper.
QueenMab: She’s not. I tried to bond with the gutter-snipe over shopping when I was first dating her dad.
Mephistopheles: Then you have nothing to worry about. Pay $1000 to save $10k.
QueenMab: But, what if she does this tomorrow...and the day after
Mephistopheles: Then deal with it when it happens. In the mean time get an insurance policy for yourself and the girl.
QueenMab: Myself? Why would I get one for myself?
Mephistopheles: Because if you insure both of you after an accident that killed your husband it is less suspicious than if you just insure her and she dies.
QueenMab: I like the way you think.
Mephistopheles signed off

The individual known as Mephistopheles online sat there in the darkened room, the smile that played across his features illuminated by the screen in front of him. Manipulation was an art form. Sometimes, telling the absolute truth was better than a thousand lies.

Especially if that truth was one that served your own ends more than the other persons. The months he’d spent cultivating this individual were beginning to pay off. The paycheck wasn’t all that bad. Jean was more than willing to pay him to do the types of things he would do willingly for fun. Jean. He shook his head in wonder. The woman was convinced that she’d kept her real identity a secret, but he was so much better than even she gave him credit for.

It had taken less than two hours for him to first find out her real identity. The ‘Jean’ alias had taken no more than ten minutes. He saved the latest chat to his cloud server and shut off the dedicated machine that he communicated with her through.

Given enough time, he knew that she would forget all about Karen and would focus entirely on her own work. Truly selfish people were like that.

No, to meet his own ends, he needed Jean to take a more active role. After all, if he took the money from her account while she was still at large she’d know exactly who to go after.

If she was dead or in jail on the other hand…

There was a lot to do before anything like that could be arranged, and while he was a criminal by any definition you were prepared to apply, killing people was something he didn’t really approve of, so he had his work cut out for him.

Now, how to make his money coming and going, he thought as he opened the file dedicated to Karen King.