It was one of those twins. The blondes, the ones at the wedding, the ones from Germany who looked as if they had stepped out of a Nazi breeding program.
Jonni looked over at him with shock. There were all sorts of people who might want to kill Lucius. His son, trapped as a mute servant--the most obvious choice, if the fact that he had taken precautions to keep him from speaking wishes didn't imply he also had taken precautions to keep her from taking his life. Any gang members who he had crossed in his ascent to the top--and leaving behind a trail of such enemies was simply business as usual for Lucius. Business rivals. Government agents. Police.
"You killed him," said Jonni.
"Of course I did," replied the man, his voice oddly soft, but flat and creepy. "I killed him for you. Aren't you grateful?"
It was such an out of the blue thing, thought Jonni. He killed Lucius for her? That couldn't possibly be true. For a stranger to just come in and shoot the man who had tormented her and taken her and impregnated her, just like that. Not even someone who had talked with her and sympathized with her plight--just a killer out of nowhere. People weren't like that.
"Your name is Jonni," he said. "Mine is Johann. It's male and German for Jonni, you know. Your child was going to become a tool of Lucian. A god, he would say, but not the kind of god who stands on a mountain surveying the Earth with amusement at what his creations have made. No, more the kind of god who lies on a mountain eternally bound by the father of the gods while a monstrous bird gnaws at his liver day after day."
"Uh-huh," replied Jonni. "I don't know about the metaphor stuff but you're right about Lucian."
"Then you must be grateful. For helping you and especially your child."
"No, really, I am," replied Jonni. "Seriously. I don't know if you'd even believe my whole story. It's just that I don't know what I'm going to do now that Lucian's dead. And anyone's going to be nervous with someone with a gun around who just killed her husband no matter what a terrible person he is."
Johann considered what Jonni had said. Then he said "You really are grateful. You've met my expectations, though my experience is that not everyone is grateful to have their obstacles removed. And perhaps you don't know this, but I was the only person in this world capable of killing him. He once had his hands on a magical idol that granted wishes. In a moment of weakness he left it alone and I wished that he could always be killed by my bullets."
He knows about the wishing stone, thought Jonni. The stone, or the idol as it was back then. And Jonni had almost let slip that she knew about it, and even that she was transformed by it. Johann had killed someone in a way that helped her, but this Johann was still obviously not just a benevolent vigilante. He was a dangerous killer who just happened to be on her side. If Johann didn't know that she knew, or just didn't know that she was transformed, Jonni would be better off not giving him the information.
"I'm sure he protected himself from danger," continued Johann. "I would be surprised if he had not wished something of the sort to protect himself from you, for instance. But no such wishes could reverse my previous wish."
Jonni recalled the wish that she not hurt him, and there was something else. Wait a minute... He had wished that he and Jonni raise their children together! That wish should have made it impossible for Lucius to die at all, or at least to stay dead. The only way he could be killed was by some crazy person who considered killing to be such an obvious option that he would wish for it years ahead of time just in case he needed to save it for a rainy day. And that was, in the end, how Lucius was killed. "Well, er... thank you," said Jonni, lamely.
"You're welcome," said the man, and left. Jonni wondered if some guards would die that night, at Johann's hand, in the name of helping her. Not that she could feel too sorry for them, unless they had been magically enslaved to guard duty--any normal guard would be a willing conspirator in his evil. In this environment there wasn't much that a killer could do that was against her interests, and in the time spent talking to Johann enough of the shock had worn off that she knew what she had to do. She took just a few minutes to search Lucius's discarded clothes. Not finding the magic stone, she then quickly grabbed a book of matches and some clothes and shoes for herself, picked up the fossil key that Lucia had shown her, and headed into the secret passage.
It closed behind her and she put on the clothes and stumbled into the darkness with her baby inside her and with only a flickering match to show the way. Half the wishes were gone--she wasn't going to raise children with Lucius, she isn't sharing a bed with him (meaning she could leave without being magically bound), and it didn't matter that she couldn't hurt him. It was time to find the stone--or at least, to find any other artifact Lucius might have had, and to find out if Lucia was trying to show her more than just an escape route.
