The smart thing would have been for me to grab Annalise and head for the door. Move fast. Move on.
I’m not always smart. When I saw that guy point at my boss, I stood and moved toward him.
He was sitting at a big table with seven of his buddies, and I had to circle around to get to him. They all had fresh, expensive haircuts, and maybe half had bushy beards that were shiny with oil. The other half looked like they had shaved in their cars in the parking lot outside. They wore polo shirts that were tight enough to advertise their gym memberships.
Were they on a team of some kind? Karate club? I didn’t give a shit. It didn’t matter if they worked out. To me, they looked like victims, and that one guy with his stupid, oiled-up beard was going to show me what was on his phone or I was going to take it from him.
It took him a moment to realize I was coming for him, and his eyes went wide. Maybe I had an expression on my face that he didn’t like.
I stood over the guy. “Show me what you showed him.”
From behind me, someone said, “He doesn’t have to do that.”
Oily Beard seemed to take courage in his friend’s support, moving his phone closer to his chest and turning the screen away from me. I moved my left hand through his field of vision as though I was going to clap his shoulder, then snatched the phone from him with my right.
A video loop played on it, only five seconds long, showing Annalise punching a muscle-bound guy in the chest. The guy went backwards onto a table, splintering it. It was the sort of thing you see on TV shows all the time, a punch that’s exciting to watch in the moment and would be followed up with plenty more punching, kicking, and broken furniture.
Watching it now, as it had really happened, it looked like a killing blow.
I hadn’t seen every part of Serrac’s house, but the carpet and curtains were identical to his. This was the fight we’d had today, which meant this video was not even two hours old.
And it was obvious that I was looking at Annalise. She was tiny, with her skinny arms and torso bundled inside an oversized fireman’s jacket, her red hair cut short to her scalp. She was protected by her twisted path spell, which meant that any evidence she left behind—including photos, fingerprints, and DNA—would slowly change over time so they would exonerate her.
Well, the evidence she left behind would change, or we would. I still wasn’t sure which.
But two hours wasn’t a long time for the spell to do its work, and the twisted path had no effect on shit like clothes and haircuts. The magic couldn’t change her outfit.
As the video played, a message scrolled across the bottom. It read, Do not approach this woman! Call the police if spotted!
I dropped his phone onto the table. “That’s the fakest shit I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t even look like her.”
Oily Beard couldn’t help himself. He had to argue his point. “She has the fireman’s jacket right there, on the back of her chair.”
“That’s the new look,” I said. “In her circles, I mean. It’ll trickle down to you people eventually.”
“And her hair. And her…”
His voice trailed off. What was he going to say next, that her bare, tattooed arms were as thin as mop handles? “Look at her, genius. The guy in that video is over two and a half bills. That woman over there would be a buck fifteen if you forced her to eat a big sandwich. This video is ridiculous. It looks like micro-budget TV bullshit.” I leaned closer to him. “Leave her alone.”
I heard the click-and-wind noise of a photo being taken. One of the men sitting at my two o’clock was holding up his phone, and the smirk on his pale, shiny face told me he knew I could hear him snap my picture and that there was nothing I could do to stop him. He turned toward Annalise, about to take her picture, too.
I snatched Oily’s half-full pint glass and threw it at the picture-taker. The phone flew out of his hand. Beer splashed onto his lap and the floor, and his phone cracked when it hit the tile. Everyone in ten feet heard that screen break.
Every guy at the table, including Oily, jumped to their feet.
Back when I made my living by stealing other people’s shit, this would have been the moment when fists—or worse—started flying, but these victims held back. They had lines, and crossing those lines would take more than a thrown drink.
“Let’s go.” Annalise came up beside me carrying our bags. Her firefighter’s jacket hung on her shoulder.
“Yeah,” Photo Taker said, “you better get out of here.”
I wasn’t in prison anymore. I didn’t have to stand down every asshole who tried to intimidate me. That part of my life was over, and I was in the part where I did what Annalise told me to do, and where I had more important shit to deal with than my rep.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that letting these shitheads strut like big dogs and walk away without a beating—no matter how petty their bullshit—was like drinking poison.
Prison may have been behind me, but it was hard to be smart when being smart felt like weakness.
Annalise was talking to our waitress and an older woman with a name tag. A manager, maybe. Both nodded at her, and Annalise turned to me. “Let’s go. Now.”
“Okay, boss.” I turned my back on them and followed her. I expected to hear a chorus of jeering at my back—an insult I wasn’t sure I could swallow, no matter what Annalise said—but I heard a different kind of argument instead, as the polo-shirt boys pleaded with the staff about who started what and how completely innocent they were.
On the street, Annalise asked, “What the fuck was that about?”
“Shithead number one had a video of you knocking one of Serrac’s bodyguards through a table.”
“So? We have twisted path spells on us. Any evidence the cops collect will only prove us innocent.”
She was right about that, but it seemed beside the point. But I couldn’t be sure exactly what the point was. I felt like I was missing something, and I hate that feeling. “It had a message about calling the cops if they saw you.”
Annalise’s new phone had rideshare accounts on them, all set up by the society concierges with different names and credit-card accounts. She never used just one. We took an Uber to a middling chain hotel, crossed the street to stand outside a restaurant, then called a Lyft to take us to our actual destination, a run-down motel near the airport. Like most of the places Annalise picked, it was owned by a local family. She did her best to keep society aliases and credit-card numbers out of the databases of the big chains when that was possible.
As usual, I checked us in with the credit card the boss gave me for this job. The pale, chubby teenage girl behind the counter acted bored and resentful—one of the joys of working with family businesses—as she booked a double for me, and I did my best not to take out any lingering irritation at the restaurant shitheads on her.
I convinced the teenager to give me an extra bar of soap before I went into the room. Annalise immediately got on her phone with a concierge at the Twenty Palace Society. It was impossible to follow a conversation by only hearing her side of it, which consisted of questions, grunts, and one-word responses, but when she hung up, she told me the law firm had been arranged and a society investigator had been dispatched and would be in place by the morning.
Then she was done and we were done for the day. Annalise turned on the TV, but before she settled in, I convinced her to take that extra bar of soap into the shower. She could play the Eccentric Rich Girl most of the time—and it was only now, in that conversation, that I realized she wasn’t playing a role, because she actually was an Eccentric Rich Girl—but Silicon Valley was full of money, and the locals would never put up with the bullshit that small-town folk in Oregon or wherever had to. She didn’t even try to argue.
While the shower ran, I set the cheap digital alarm on the table between the beds. Annalise would sleep half the day away if I didn’t set the alarm for nine A.M. The mirror showed me that I needed a haircut. The tiny wall-mounted lamp above my bed had no way to adjust the shade, and since I didn’t want it shining in my face while Annalise paced around the room or stared at a muted news cast until the early hours, I loosened the bulb.
In the past, when Annalise and I finished a mission, we’d go our separate ways for a while. When she had a new mission, which wasn’t often, she called. But last summer, I’d been puked out by a predator and we started going after this Tristan Serrac guy. Not that we’d known who he was at first. We’d spent almost six months together, floating from one motel to another, following leads, wasting our time, trying to nail him down.
And frankly, all the little things we had to do to tolerate each other over the long haul were getting on my nerves. Hers, too.
She sure as shit wouldn’t have taken that bar of soap into the shower for my benefit.
But we’d finally tracked down someone who could give us Serrac’s name, and we’d geared up and made our move.
By morning, there was a note on our door from someone named Daria, who was letting us know she had a room across the parking lot. I had no idea who she was, but I assumed she was our new investigator. Annalise was still getting her shit together, so I went over and knocked on her door.
I’d roused her from her sleep, but she seemed cheerful enough. Her tousled hair was the lightest brown I’d ever seen without any yellow in it. Her skin had a dusky Mediterranean tone, and she had the biggest nose I’d ever seen on a human being. It was narrow, long, and sort of square like the sail of a ship.
“Hi. You must be Ray,” she said. “I’m Daria Soyer.” She pronounced it slowly—Soh-yer—probably so I could hear the spelling.
“Hey. Annalise isn’t fully awake yet. I don’t know how late you got in. Do you need a few more hours of sleep?”
She gave me a sideways look as though I was testing her and she wasn’t going to fall for it. I wasn’t, obviously, but I still liked that look. “Let me put myself together and we can start the day right, with strong coffee and a quick breakfast.”
Daria was ready before Annalise was. I popped in to the office to ask for a recommendation for breakfast, and the chubby old guy behind the counter—who had the same blue eyes and protruding ears as the teenage girl from last night—was happy to recommend a diner around the corner.
Which was big and busy, even late in the morning on a—was it a weekday? I couldn’t remember, but the odds favored it. The place smelled like black coffee and onions frying in butter. We found a booth that would suit us, and Annalise, as usual, sat by the window so she could stare through it at nothing. I took the spot next to her, and Daria, who moved with a loose-limbed clumsiness that suggested she really did need more shut-eye, slid into the opposite side. Her oversized shoulder bag, which was so wide and flat that it had to be a computer bag—no one would lug around a blue-and-orange satchel for fashion’s sake—got its own spot on the bench beside the window, like a fourth diner. Daria hunched forward when she sat, like most people who spend their days at a computer.
The waitress arrived before we’d even settled into our seats. Everyone wanted coffee, and Annalise ordered three eggs, over hard, with a ham steak and toast. She’d become a more adventurous eater in the years since I first met her, but not at breakfast. I ordered sausage and eggs, over easy, with toast.
Both of us had a golem flesh spell on us, a spell that slowed aging, changed our bodies so we could survive terrible injuries, then let us heal those wounds by eating meat, the fresher the better. But it came with a price. I had to eat meat pretty much every day or the spell would eat me.
It occurred to me that my other spells might come with a price, too. Just because I didn’t know about it—or didn’t recognize it—didn’t mean it wasn’t happening.
Daria had snapped up a menu, then she quickly asked for avocado toast, no bacon or sour cream. After the waitress cheerily promised to be back with our coffees, Daria gave Annalise and me a sheepish look. “I know. It’s cliche for a millennial to go for avocado toast, but whenever I’m in California I just have to order it. It’s sooo good.”
I looked at Annalise to see if she knew what any of that meant. She didn’t look at me. “What are you talking about?”
Daria quirked her head. She was looking at us as though we said we’d never heard of the Beatles or apple pie or something. “You don’t know? There was a big dustup online about it in, like, 2016 after an opinion piece in some Australian newspaper. You missed that, I guess?”
“Guess we did,” Annalise said, then turned to the window again.
Me, I’d spent the last several years trapped inside the belly of a predator, completely cut off from the real world. And even though Annalise bought me a brand-new phone last fall when I escaped, I wasn’t paying much attention to memes or whatever. “We’re not really what you’d call online people.”
Daria slumped her shoulders and sighed. “Oh, my god,” she said, “I envy you so much.” As our coffee arrived, she continued, “But it’s too bad. That’s been a solid icebreaker for me. I’d hate to have to think up a new one.”
I noticed she kept glancing at Annalise, maybe trying to figure out how to win her over. “Do you get to meet many peers?” I asked.
“Ms. Powliss is the second.”
“Annalise,” she corrected.
“Right. Okay. Annalise. Three years ago, after I turned in a report on a guy in Manhattan with a luck spell—because how else could people afford to live in Manhattan, right?—I got called back to continue my investigation. First thing that happened on my return was that I met Callin Friedrich at the Greenwich Hotel for a quiet lunch at, like, three in the afternoon. He wanted to tell me I did a shoddy job. At least the food was good. I stuck around for a few days, proved him wrong, and followed up with a very polite report saying so. He was adult enough to call me and apologize, so, you know, he’s got that going for him.”
That was an interesting way to put it. “How so?”
“We talk. The society’s investigators, I mean. Sometimes, we have to coordinate if the society needs to cover different parts of the country, or if they need special expertise, right? And when we work together, we sometimes chat about who we’ve met and what they were like. Word gets around.”
Annalise shifted in her seat to face Daria directly. “What do people say about me?”
Knowing Annalise, I knew the correct response was Nothing. We would never talk about you.
Daria simply answered the question. “That you’re not going to be friendly to any of us, or anyone, not ever. That you wouldn’t murder us in our sleep but you wouldn’t do much to protect us, either.” She spread her hands. “Hey. You asked, and if I were the kind of person who would hold back information or lie to you about anything at all, you’d be sitting across the table from someone else. But, you know, Callin wanted to know what people said about him, too.”
Did he bite you? I almost asked. I absentmindedly touched my neck just below my ear, where he’d sunk his fangs into me some years back. Not that I could feel my touch. I’d asked Annalise to put protective spells on those spots on either side of my neck, and she had.
Annalise’s phone buzzed as the waitress arrived with our food. While she sorted our plates and promised to return to refill our cups, Annalise glanced at a text and typed a quick reply.
Once the waitress was out of earshot, I pointed at her phone. “Good news?” Not that I didn’t trust my boss to keep us up to date, but I didn’t want to keep talking about gossip in the Twenty Palace Society.
“No,” she said, pocketing her phone. “Serrac’s company won’t book an appointment at all. With anyone. Not me, not someone representing me, and not someone who has nothing to do with me. The concierges have hit a brick wall.”
“There are other options,” Daria said as she cut the corner off her avocado toast, which turned out to be two pieces of regular toast with a bunch of veg piled on them. We started eating. When our plates were clean, she continued as if only a moment had passed. “For instance, we could sue them. Or we could break in. Lots of options.”