by M. J. Scott
"Stuff that is not good," Lizzie said patiently. "If you need a scale, well, let's call ten what happened with Maggie's demon, and you can work down from there."
Damon shook his head. "There hasn't been another demon. I would have noticed."
Lizzie's mouth quirked. "Okay, so work your way back from there."
"What if there hasn't been anything bad?" he asked.
"Then maybe the person doing this is clueless and it's not working," Lizzie said. Then she straightened, her face, for once, deadly serious. "But something must be tickling at the back of your intuition for you to ask Maggie to call us in."
He looked as though he was regretting that decision now. "There's been nothing major," he said. "And it's hard to know what was fallout from the recall and what’s just life. I was in a fender bender a few weeks ago, but Boyd and I were both unhurt. I dropped my datapad into a pond a few days ago. But that's just a minor inconvenience. It's always backed up, and I had a new one within an hour. Oh, and there was a power outage at my house last week when we had that tremor."
"You don't have batteries?" I asked. Anyone who could afford secondary power sources and storage had them these days. The damage to the grid done in the quake had shown up the flaws in relying on the power companies to get things back up and running quickly. I couldn't imagine that Damon didn't have multiple layers of backup.
"I do," he said. "But something glitched. It took a while for them to come online."
Hmmm. A system of the kind he could afford shouldn't glitch.
"How long?" Lizzie asked.
"Ten or fifteen minutes, maybe? But as far as we can tell, no one came onto the property during that time. There was no damage, and nothing was stolen."
Lizzie and I frowned in sync.
"I assume if your power glitched, all your security systems glitched, too. So no video?" she asked.
He nodded, his expression completing a trifecta of frowns. I wondered whose head had rolled over that. Damon didn't like screwups. And he wasn't enjoying this conversation.
"Were you home when it happened?" Lizzie asked
"No. At Riley. I haven't been home much at all leading up to the launch. I've been sleeping on campus mostly."
"Right. The launch. Your new game. Archangel. I saw the trailer. It looked pretty chill."
I bumped my leg against hers under the table, hoping she'd get the message not to say anything about the character looking like me.
She glanced at me quickly, amusement lurking in her eyes. I busied myself with my datapad to avoid both her and Damon.
"How has that gone?" she asked.
"It's only been out a couple of days, but so far the reception is positive." He tilted his head at her. "You game, don't you? I could arrange for you to try it if you want. I can get a private suite at Deckers, or you can play at Riley Arts."
Lizzie lifted her arm in its sling. "Maybe once this is better. But thank you, that would be amazing." She smiled approvingly.
He nodded. "Maggie, how about you?"
I couldn't tell if he genuinely thought I might like to or if he was just being polite. "I don't game much these days," I said, trying to keep my tone neutral. "So, I'll pass, thank you."
He glanced down at my wrist, where there was only a fine silvery scar to show where my interface chip had been. His hand flexed a little, and his own chip glinted in the light. "Of course. But let me know if you change your mind."
He'd be waiting a long time. I tapped on the screen of my datapad, pretending my notes were fascinating.
"So there were no problems with the launch?" Lizzie asked, steering the conversation back to the more important topic.
A shrug. "All launches have issues."
"I didn't mean bugs in your game. Anything else?"
“No.”
"And there've been no issues with any of the testers?" Lizzie said.
His jaw tightened. Strange behavior in his beta testers had been one of the first signs of the demon's influence. One that no one had picked up at the time. "Not so far. Ajax and his team have been keeping a close eye on everyone, we helped those who needed treatment—you know that, Lizzie—and we established new protocols in our selection process. Other than one guy who managed to play for ten hours straight and ended up dehydrated, everyone has been in perfect health. Even Edward Greenstone has been doing great since he was discharged last month. Ajax has been checking up on him."
Lizzie nodded at that, so I guess she knew who he was talking about.
"That all sounds good." I managed a smile. Ajax was someone else caught up in my memories of Nat. She'd had quite a crush on him, I'd thought. But it hadn't had time to develop into anything.
Lizzie sighed. "All right, nothing major, then. But we'll do a sweep of your house and poke around Righteous again."
"We?" Damon asked.
"Maggie and me," Lizzie said.
"What happened to Lewis?" Damon asked, eyebrows lifting again.
Lewis, I assumed, must have been the guy who'd helped Lizzie last time.
"He's unavailable. Besides which, Maggie knows your business better than he does. I'm guessing she knows your house better, too. Win-win."
I kicked her again under the table. Damon just pressed his lips together, eyes on me.
I studied my datapad, acting like I had no idea he was staring at me.
"All right," he said eventually.
I glanced at him, and our eyes caught a bit too long.
"I guess that's settled, then," Lizzie said.
I tore my eyes away from Damon with an effort. "Settled. That's good," I managed.
Damon was still watching me. I could feel his gaze on my skin. Really, my body was an idiot when it came to this man. Which just meant I needed to shove my hormones back in their box and use my brain.
Silence stretched in the room. I could feel my cheeks heating and widened my eyes at Lizzie, trying to send her the telepathic message that we should leave. Pity I had no telepathic powers. I wasn't sure if any witches did. If they did, Cassandra's book hadn’t mentioned it.
Lizzie, however, seemed unsympathetic to the awkwardness I was feeling. Or else she had decided to have a little fun with me. Or Damon. Or both of us. Her inner matchmaker was as unruly as my hormones. "I, er, have to make a call," she said, smiling at me. "I'm just going to step outside for a few minutes. You two can talk computer nerd stuff." She practically jogged out of the room, leaving Damon and me sitting in silence.
I decided to give him a minute, picking up my datapad and pretending to check my inbox. After all, it wasn't every day you found out that maybe someone was trying to curse you. Or that the cavalry you'd called in was going to include your ex-girlfriend.
The silence stretched. I poured myself a glass of water. The meeting room was swanky but apparently didn't come with caffeine—real or fake.
I sipped and waited, but Damon didn't say anything. I decided to just acknowledge the problem. "If you don't want me to do this, just tell me. Lizzie can find someone else to help her."
"Did I say I didn't want you to do this?" He rubbed a hand through his hair, looking irritated.
"Not yet. I thought maybe you were working up to it."
"I hire the best." He stuck out his chin, giving me a flash of the old lord-of-the-universe Damon I’d thought I’d known. "You're the best. And Lizzie is right, you know more about Righteous than anyone else she's likely to bring in."
"I only worked for you for a short time. And I was looking at very specific code." And that was straying into territory that wasn't good to stray into. Like his damned game and why someone in it was wearing my face. "This is bigger than that." I didn't know whether I was trying to talk him or me out of doing this. Maybe both.
"You're still the best at what you do."
Damn it, he kept saying that. And if there was one thing I was damned sure about, it was that I wasn't going to lie to him. I didn't know if we could ever be more than exes, if maybe one day we might be friends,
but I did know that it wouldn't happen if I kept secrets from him. He'd told me the truth when he'd needed to. It had broken my heart, but he’d told me the truth. He couldn't accept my magic. He didn't trust it. So if he was going to trust me to work on solving this for him, I needed to be honest with him.
I gulped water, steeling myself. Then put the glass down, folding my hands together so I wouldn't fidget. "Right now, I'm not so sure about that."
"What does that mean?"
"It means I mostly haven't been working since Nat died."
"I heard you'd taken on a new client."
He had? Where had he heard that? Was he keeping tabs on me? And why? "I have. But so far I haven't been able to fix their problem."
"You're telling me you're rusty?"
My hands tightened. "I'm telling you I might have lost whatever knack it was that made me good at my job."
"It's not a knack. It's skill and instinct. Stuff like that doesn't just vanish."
"Yeah, well, maybe not. Or maybe it does. Because the other thing you need to know is that right now, I can't use my magic either. And if Cassandra and Lizzie are right, then those two things are very much related."
He blinked at me. "Cassandra thinks you're good with computers because you have magic? But you didn't have magic before we met.” He leaned forward. “Wait, are you saying you don't have magic now?"
I held out my hand. "Stop right there. I might not have had control of my powers before the chip did whatever it did to break the bond, but I still had magic. I've always had magic, I guess. And I still have it now, even if I can't use it. So nothing has changed. Let's be clear on that. If you decide you want me to help you with this, then all this can be is me accepting a professional engagement."
He grimaced. "Maggie—"
"No. You don't get to 'Maggie' me. You walked away. So you stay away. Maybe that's not what you meant, but it's what I mean. I'm still a witch."
His mouth flattened, but then he nodded. "All right. That's fair." He tilted his head, eyes suddenly that laser bright shade that was hard to escape. "You didn't mention this the other day."
"I wasn't sure what was going on," I said. "And I didn't think I’d be seeing you again, so it didn't seem relevant to the conversation we were having at the time. Speaking of which, how are you going to explain this to your security team? Lizzie and me, poking around, I mean?"
"Same as I did the first time. Tell them it's a confidential project that I'm overseeing myself. Mitch will know what's happening. He’ll have discretion as to what he tells anyone else he needs to use."
"And they'll just accept it when you tell them that one of the people you've hired for this project is the same person they thought was sending you death threats two days ago?"
"No," he said. "I expect that Mitch is going to tell me I'm insane and that there will possibly be some shouting, and I'll have to buy him a case of Scotch to get him to calm down, but none of that particularly matters because when it gets right down to it, I own the company and he doesn't."
"Life's easy at the top," I muttered.
His mouth quirked. "So people keep telling me. I keep waiting for the easy part." He glanced toward the door. "Should we call Lizzie back in, or do you think she really had to make a phone call?"
Through the tinted windows of the meeting room, I saw Lizzie chatting away on her datapad. Whether there was actually anyone on the other end of the line was anybody's guess. "I think she's trying for some version of ‘If I make them talk to each other, they'll get over the awkward part.’" Well, actually I thought it was more like if "I make them talk to each other, they'll fall back in lurve," but no way was I telling Damon that.
"Is it working?" Damon asked. His eyes were still very bright, the faintest hint of a smile flickering over his face.
"You tell me." I lifted my chin.
"I don't want things to be awkward," he said softly. "I know I made a mess of things at the end. I could have been...kinder."
"Not sure there is a kind way to dump someone," I said. "It's fine, Damon. I'm a big girl. The past is the past." Except for the way it was currently dragging me back into his present.
He blew out a breath. "Okay. Then let's be not-awkward." He pointed at my wrist. "That looks like it healed well."
I wasn't sure how bringing up my chip removal fell into the category of not-awkward, but maybe he was right. We had to be able to talk about what had happened. Particularly if what was happening now—if anything was—had any connection. "It did," I said. "Dr. Barnard does good work." I flexed my hand to demonstrate that I had full range of motion. Apart from the faint scar, the chip might never have existed.
"I'm glad." He squared his shoulders. "We've been working on that technology, added some safeguards to how the chip interacts with the nervous system." He held out his own wrist. "I had mine upgraded about six weeks ago. I know you said you don't game, but if you wanted to try again, then I'd be happy to pay for you to get the new model. You said it helped with your work. With the new tech, you should be fine."
It was a generous offer. Interface chips were still expensive, and having a top-of-the-line neural-cyber surgeon like Dr. Barnard didn't make them any less so. And I had to confess, the thought of having the added abilities to interact with data that a chip offered were tempting despite how badly wrong it had gone last time. "Have you tested it on any witches?"
He shifted in his chair. "Not directly. But Dr. Barnard did consult with several healers when he was working on the upgrades to the sensors and the interface. In theory, there's no reason it would interfere with your magic or have any adverse effects on someone with power."
He'd actually thought about users with magic. I hoped my surprise didn't show in my face. But maybe I shouldn't be surprised. He was, after all, a businessman. There were magic users like Lizzie who gamed or had other jobs, like mine, where an interface chip would be beneficial. The technology, like all technology, would become cheaper and more widely used with each generation, so he had to be thinking of limiting any risks. Ending up in another situation like the game recall had to be his worst nightmare.
"Who knows, it might help with your problem," Damon said.
"I'm good without for now," I said. "But if I change my mind, I'll let you know." A chip wasn't going to be my first choice in solving my magic issue, but I filed it away in my brain in case we ran out of other ideas.
I caught Lizzie's eye and beckoned. I'd had about as much one-on-one with Damon as I could take right now.
Lizzie nodded and came back in to sit beside me "So, good chat?" When neither of us replied, she just powered on. "So let's figure out how we're going to do this. Damon, we'll start with your house. It's smaller, so my arm won't be an issue. Then we can move on to the Riley campus."
Which was huge. Checking out all the buildings was a massive task that would take days for two people. And that was before considering the computer systems, if we needed to cover those. I hoped Lizzie had a spell or something up her sleeve that would speed up the process for the buildings, at least, or we would be there for weeks. How to explain that to my actual paying client was another thing I hadn't considered.
"That makes sense," Damon agreed. "Do you need me to be at the house while you're there?"
"It would make things easier. You would know if anything looks unusual."
He tapped at his datapad. "I have a press day tomorrow. I'll be doing interviews back to back virtually all day. But I can clear a few hours the day after."
"Works for me." Lizzie reached into a pocket and pulled out a chain with a familiar-looking pendant. "Cassandra said you should wear this." She pushed it across the conference table. The sunshine glinted off the black and purple stones.
Damon stared down at the necklace as though it might bite him. "I still have the first one she gave me," he said eventually. "Do I need another?" He didn't sound as though he wanted to need even one.
"Can't hurt," Lizzie said cheerfully.
"It di
dn't seem to help much with the demon last time," he pointed out.
"Well, you're still here," she countered. "So wear it. You don't want to have to explain to Cassandra why you don't want to."
Chapter Twelve
When we arrived home, Yoshi's skinny figure unfolded from the front steps. Lizzie gave him a quick hug hello. I contented myself with a complicated high-five handshake thing, not sure he was ready to be hugged by a relative stranger.
The night before, we'd set him the task of coming up with a plan for analyzing the quarantined messages. Lizzie had decided it should be safe enough if he didn't read the messages themselves. I wanted to see how he got around the various traps lurking within them.
"Have you eaten?" Lizzie asked.
Yoshi nodded. "I had lunch."
It was after four now. I suspected "I had lunch" was nineteen-year-old boy code for "I could eat again." Looking at the way his bright green Hawaiian shirt and red-and-yellow plaid shorts hung loose, I suspected I was right.
"Well, I'm hungry," Lizzie announced. "So I'll make you something, too."
Yoshi picked up his battered backpack and followed us into the house. Once he was seated at the kitchen table with a bottle of orange soda, a pile of sandwiches, and a bag of corn chips, he extracted his terminal deck from his bag, then pulled out a somewhat battered-looking datapad as well.
I blinked at it. "Is that a X30 Yingen?"
He nodded.
"And it still works?" I'd spent a lot of my teens trying to keep my gran's datapad lurching along, and it had been an X50. Several gens younger than the relic in Yoshi's hand. The Yingens were one of the early gen datapads that evolved from smartphones.
He nodded again, looking pleased. "It would be more exact to say at this point, it's an X30 shell with massive interior modifications."
"Even still, that's impressive." Getting old tech to play with new wasn’t easy.
A shrug. "The retro geeks love this sort of stuff. If you can find the old stuff that still looks decent and mod it, then it’s a sure sale. But the beauty of this one is it's manual load only. I've killed all its connectivity. So it's a good safe sandbox to test those messages you've quarantined."