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had left—to check Meryl. Other than her dimmed body signature, I detected nothing different from my last visit. “Did you do anything to her?”
    He shook his head. “Why does my friendship with her bother you so?”
    I frowned. “I’ve had your friendship, Nigel. It’s a fickle thing.”
    He considered me with a measured stare. “If that’s the way you feel, I wouldn’t be too sure of your newfound friends if I were you.”
    I pushed Meryl’s chair farther away from him. “Eorla? Is that where you’re going to go? If it weren’t for her, Nigel, things would be worse, and you know it. She’s the only person from the Guild who has done anything to stop the fighting between the Celts and Teuts.”
    The corner of his mouth drooped as he went to the window. “Her role at the Guild is a technical matter. She is as much the Elven King’s creature as Bastian Frye.”
    I would have loved to see him say that to Eorla’s face. Bastian Frye was the Elven King’s master spy and assassin. Eorla liked him less than I did Nigel these days. “And whose creature are you, Nigel?”
    That time he smiled. “I might ask you the same question.”
    “I am no one’s creature,” I said.
    “Really? Do you ever wonder how it is that you ended up fighting the Guild when it was hunting Bergin Vize? Or how it is that you stood at Eorla’s side when the Weird burned down? Do you not find that at all curious?”
    I sighed. “Still seeing Teutonic Consortium agents in the shadows, Nigel?”
    He peered at me with one eye open. “Still pretending they’re not there, Connor?”
    “I don’t pretend anything. I’m trying not to get killed in the cross fire,” I said.
    “You almost killed a few hundred people in the process from what I heard,” he said.
    I snorted. “I figured Ryan macGoren would go running to you. How is the Acting Guildmaster these days? Has he changed his shorts yet?”
    He became solemn, the lecturing old mentor who knew better than I did. “Concerned, Connor. He’s concerned that something potentially dangerous is falling into the hands of the Elven King.”
    “And what might that be?”
    “You.” He smiled at my surprised reaction. “Deny they have offered you asylum. Tell me that old fool Brokke hasn’t whispered his vague portents in your ears.” I didn’t answer him. Both things had happened. Brokke was a dwarf who had a formidable talent for reading the future. Nigel bobbed his head. “Precisely.”
    “So now that I’m supposedly dangerous, you’re interested in me again? Are we friends again, Nigel?”
    “Your petulance is childish,” he said.
    “And your arrogance is insulting,” I said.
    He walked toward the door. “There are fools that believe the Wheel of the World turns, and we hang on until we drop. When you move beyond the framework of someone else’s definition of what the Wheel is, Connor, you stop being a creature.”
    That was the Nigel I remembered, the man with whom I argued through many a night of beer and wine, who expected me to listen to myself as much as him. That Nigel was my mentor and, I’d thought, my friend. That man vanished when my abilities vanished. I was a tool for him before that and didn’t have the brains to realize it. He had even tried to kill me since then, although Briallen, the true mentor in my life, didn’t believe that was his intent. She wasn’t there. She didn’t see the deadly essence strike aimed at my head, blocked only by Murdock’s intervention. “I’m going to ask you again, Nigel. What are you doing here?”
    He paused at the door, glancing at Meryl. “I came to visit a friend, Connor, and perhaps to help her in some way more productive than tucking her into bed.”
    I stared out the window after he left and watched windchopped waves whip past on the Charles River. The warmth of my breath fogged the glass, revealing a circle with a dot in the middle that someone had doodled. I added two eyes and a smile, glancing back at Meryl.