Free Justice Calling (The Twenty-Sided Sorceress Book 1) by Annie Bellet

wherever I went, I could probably find gamers. We are legion, after all.
    I did my dishes and vacuumed all the floors. I was walking out on my lease, so I figured the least I could do was clean up the place a bit. I looked around. This was my life. And now it was over. Again.
    I walked down into the shop and flicked on a light. My orc miniatures sat on the counter, primed and ready for paint to bring them to life. I could almost hear the echo of my friends’ laughter from the back room where the game table stood empty, could smell the traces of a hundred pizza deliveries and spilled soda pop. The concrete floors were scuffed around the counter where Harper’s combat boots always left marks when she stood there for hours on end chatting away with me while playing Hearthstone on her laptop.
    I walked behind the counter and took a single framed picture off the wall. It was the only thing I still had from my last real home, twenty years ago.
    It was just a pen sketch. Four figures done up comic-book-style and a small Korean signature in red ink at the bottom. Ji-hoon, one of my surrogate parents, had been an illustrator for Marvel back in the Comics Bronze Age of the late seventies and eighties. He’d done a family portrait for me as a high school graduation present.
    There was Kayla with her usual side ponytail and giant smile. Sophie with her 1980s punk band Mohawk and one hand flipping off the artist. Todd with his hair over his forehead, his oversized glasses, and his favorite Pi tee-shirt on. Ji-hoon with his carefully cut, short black hair, and slight stature which he always exaggerated in self-portraits. And an awkward girl named Jessica Carter with waist-length black hair, big cheekbones, and a huge glowing D20 pendant around her neck.
    That had been me. I’d been Jade Crow when I was born. Then Jessica Carter to my second family. Jade Crow again to my third.
    I didn’t know who I would be next. I just wanted to be myself, whoever that was. But I’d chosen the wrong boyfriend in college and any normal life after that was game over for me. Alek had been right about that. I had to be in survival mode, always. I’d forgotten that truth these last few years, making a home here in Wylde.
    I’d been stupid.
    “And this, kids, is why we can’t have nice things,” I said to the picture before tucking it into my duffle bag.
    I looked around again. Dammit. I didn’t want to leave. Maybe my car wouldn’t start and I’d be stuck. Maybe Samir had given up on me. The last time he’d gotten anywhere near me that I knew of was over a decade ago. Maybe he wasn’t still looking for my magical signature, waiting to trap me. Maybe he was dead.
    Fat fucking chance.
    I had to leave. Tonight. Putting it off would make the leaving tougher. My friends were pissed at me. I was pissed at me. Would using more magic to help Alek have been so awful?
    I wasn’t sure. I didn’t trust what I might do if faced with a choice between saving Rose and Ezee and letting them die.
    Alek had said his vision showed me standing at a crossroads between shifters dying and living. I’d killed one shifter, a man whose name I might never know. It didn’t matter it that it was a mercy killing. I didn’t want to kill anyone.
    Lies. I wanted to kill Samir. Sometimes I dreamed terrible and explicit revenge fantasies when I couldn’t sleep on the worst nights. I wanted to rain hell upon him in the worst way. And yet. He had a couple thousand years of practice on me and only in my deepest nightmares did I even speculate how many sorcerers and human mages he’d eaten over the millennia. There was no way I’d ever be strong enough to face him.
    And you grow stronger while you run away? Alek’s words ran through my mind.
    I hadn’t grown stronger. The magic I had used in the last two days felt pretty weak to me. My power was still there, but I’d grown out of shape, out of practice. I was getting weaker.
    “All the more reason you can’t stay,” I