Dropping the phaser, Ree pulled out her lightsaber and thumbed it on. In an instant, the metal-and-plastic prop hilt sprung to life, blue blade almost white in the weak light of winter. Ree cut forward in a figure-eight pattern, drawing the panther’s attention away from Drake. The monster leaped, sinking its claws into the wall. It turned in place and climbed horizontally. The creature bound across the ten-foot alleyway to the opposite side, then leaped over Ree’s head, twisting in the air, as if to land with all four paws in her back.
Ree bet that most magical panther-monsters could pull off that attack against normal mortals.
But most mortals were not lifelong Star Wars fans with impossible laser swords. Ree spun in place, crunching as snow packed beneath her boots. She sliced through both a fore and hind paw. The monster hit the ground, as ungraceful as she’d ever seen a feline be. It scrambled back into a fighting posture, snarling and baring its fangs.
“Smile,” Ree said, ducking to the side.
As she cleared the line of fire, Drake’s rifle lit up with green energy, exactly as they’d practiced six months ago.
The sound of zot filled her ears. It was a risk to jump right in with a move like that, but Ree still had the lightsaber to dissuade the panther from jumping her shit if Drake missed the beat. When the burst of light cleared, the panther was nothing more than a pile of ichor.
Part of the reason why most people didn’t believe in monsters anymore was the fact that they didn’t leave any remains. Dead creature = sticky ichor, which dissolved within an hour. Unless you got it on you, which Ree often did. Theoretically, this meant that she had valuable materials for thaumo-biologists or whatever, but no one had come asking about her stained, tattered-ass clothes, so she tended to just burn them if she couldn’t get the stains out.
She’d been going through a lot of clothes this last year. Even her geeky T-shirt collection was running low, a feat that would have been unthinkable before last Halloween. Many brave shirts had given their lives to protect the people of Pearson.
Ree offered a high five to Drake as she turned. “Nice. Knew that practicing that would pay off.”
Drake met her gesture. Despite the practice, he was still the whitest boy in White Town when he high-fived. Dude could tussle with monstrosities the size of an SUV without losing his cool, but try to get him to give a smooth high five, and all of a sudden he was as square as they came. It was kind of cute, to be honest.
Checking on the street, Ree saw that they hadn’t attracted any rubberneckers. The Doubt had the tendency to make people just walk on by, interpreting monster attacks as muggings, or just erase them from people’s memories entirely. A backhanded fuck-you to the magical world from a bunch of Enlightenment Technomancers that had caught on like a viral video, then set itself up as the global cultural default everywhere it could get purchase.
“Looks like we’re clear,” Ree said, extinguishing her lightsaber, the blade retracting into the hilt, which returned to its cold metal and plastic form.
“So it seems. I do believe that that creature was the same one that assaulted Priya and I this autumn. Good to be rid of it.”
“Oh yeah? I was wondering. You come through okay?” she asked, replacing the lightsaber in her coat pocket.
“Once again, the jacket has served its purpose well enough.” Drake pulled out his pocket watch and clicked the face open. Half-four. Shall we adjourn for milkshakes?”
“You read my mind.” They might be able to scare up something else in the next half hour, but doing so would take them farther away from Grognard’s, so this was as good a time as any to call it. And she was not one to turn down a post-fight milkshake.
The Burger Bin was relatively quiet, which was to say that the line was only ten minutes long, mostly families brave enough to venture forth into the ridiculous wintery weather in search of glorious sweets and juicy burgers. Ree ordered a small of her might-as-well-be-patented Milkshake of Victory, which had chocolate, peanut butter, caramel, and nearly everything else included, with whipped cream on top because reasons.
As always, Drake had vanilla.
The low flow of traffic meant that they were easily able to find a table in the corner, away from prying ears.
Ree shed several of her outer layers, and Drake followed suit. Their coats and gloves and Drake’s not-umbrella bulked up so much that it looked like their booth was seating four rather than two.
Drake combed back his sweat-slicked hair and set his goggles aside.
“You need a haircut, hippie,” Ree said.
“I rather think that I lack the tie-dye required for that accusation to bear any weight.”
“Informed comeback burn.” Ree usually got those pop culture digs across like fastballs over home base. But Drake had been studying up.
“You’ve made it to the sixties and seventies in your history, then?” Ree asked, mixing her shake with the spoon provided. She scooped herself a heaping bite with whipped cream on top. The taste of sugar and fat hit her taxed system like a drug. Sugar addiction was no joke, but it was way more fun to feed than heroin or anything involving needles.
“Enough to fake a greater degree of cultural knowledge than I actually have.”
“Welcome to the club. That’s all any of us ever do. Except when it comes to nerdy shit. Then you better know your crap.”
“Fortunately, I am still granted a pass on that by the Underground. The doorkeeper gave up on me after the third straight month of asking me to name the dwarves in The Hobbit.”
“That’s easy. It’s all about clusters of assonance.” Ree set the spoon down and started counting off names with fingers. “Bifur, Bofur, Bombur. Balin and Dwalin. Oin and Gloin, Fili and Kili. Ori, Nori, Dori. And Thorin, who doesn’t rhyme because he’s the king.”
Drake chuckled. “I know Professor Tolkien was a philologist, but it just sounded like you were speaking an entirely different language then. And not even the one that I imagine the good professor was intending. These stories are powerful, that much is clear given how important they are to you and your friends. I can see that power, but it does not speak to me in the same way that the call of steam and aether do.”
Ree sipped her milkshake, then returned to spooning it out. It had been mixed thick today, and a chunk of something was stuck in the straw. “No reason it has to. For all the talk about ‘universal storytelling,’ when push comes to shove, you are from a different universe.”
“Strange, then, to consider the tall stack of variables that led us to the same place,” he said, face bright, though he was mussed and scuffed. It was how she liked him best, truth be told. Pristine and shiny Drake was a bit too put-together. She wanted him down in the dirt, with her.
Smooch him, her libido cried, bringing back the chorus from another visit to the Burger Bin.
Down, girl, Ree repeated, imagining a miniature version of herself next to a pressure cooker of libido, trying to hold down the lid.
There were two ways forward from here. Take the road open before her, or run the other way and follow the Rhyming Ladies’ code.
No dating friends’ exes echoed in her mind, and she sat back, feeling like she was pulling her way through molasses and pushing against a magnet’s draw at the same time. She reached for her milkshake, standing, and due to extreme distraction, knocked the shake over, plastic lid splitting and spilling the rest of her confection all over the table.
“Shit. Shit, sorry,” Ree said, her server’s instincts taking over as she launched herself toward the napkins.
“Is everything quite all right?” Drake asked, standing as well.
“Just me being a klutz. I swear, it’s like I’ve never been through a winter before,” Ree said, speaking mostly to herself, avoiding looking into Drake’s molten honey eyes as a form of self-defense.
And she was doing that self-effacing crap again, too. Feel nervous,
minimize self.
Bullshit.
“I better head home and get ready for work. Nice job today,” she said, running through a conversational closing formula as fast as she could to veer the conversation away from places she wanted desperately to go but couldn’t.
Ree tossed the massed pile of soiled paper towels and the ruined shake, and grabbed her pile of coat and gloves, nearly falling over herself as she made her way to the door.
Better a dolt than a traitor, she told herself, bracing for the outside.
For once, she looked forward to the cold. It brought clarity. Well, clarity, hypothermia, and eventual death, but she had a short walk home.
Chapter Thirteen
Caveat Venditor
Ree had the time and a pressing need to get her mind off dashing blond men with easy smiles and strong hands, so she arrived at Grognard’s with the left side of her face covered in complex, interconnecting wards straight out of an epic fantasy. She’d add some to her knuckles, but they’d just smear over the course of the evening and get all over the drinking glasses. Not worth the bother.
Eastwood was already stationed at the bar when she arrived, sucking the life out of the room. She could practically feel it as she stepped out of the kitchen.
There were any number of places she wanted to be at that moment that were not where she was:
1) At home, taking a cold shower
2) Anywhere, talking to her dad
3) Smooching Drake
3) Talking to Priya
But in reality, she needed to be:
4) Exactly where she was, earning money to pay the bills and shovel away some of her renewed hillock of debt (downgraded from a mountain, but building its way back up damned quick since the summer)
Rather than facing Eastwood right away, she took a survey of the bar. Uncle Joe sat in a corner booth with a stack of freshly-opened boosters, arranging and sleeving his new cards. A bald and bearded hipster couple sat at a table, holding hands and sipping lagers. She made a note to ask about them, since she hadn’t seen the pair before. Grognard’s was an invite-only establishment, so walk-in traffic was pretty well nonexistent.
A trio including Chandra were setting up a large game of Warhammer 40K in the store section, Chandra arranging ruined city terrain, doubtless to provide lanes of fire for her mighty Orks.
Ree did her best to keep busy, never staying still for more than a moment between refilling drinks, unpacking boxes with inventory restock, cleaning tables, and more.
Around eight, Grognard followed her into the office.
“Go see your friend,” he said.
“Shubba-what?” Ree asked.
“That friend. Priya. The one that dated Drake. You’re too twisted up about her and him and Eastwood. I’m surprised you haven’t asked to take off already. Go sort the shit out. Eastwood’s safe enough here for now; the Strega can wait a day, but not more. You may not like Eastwood, and if you think letting the Strega get him is proper payback for what he’s done, that’s your call. But he’s my friend, too.”
Some of the tension bled out of Ree’s shoulders, more of her neck reappearing after an evening where her pauldrons had been rubbing her earlobes. Over the last months, Grognard had opened up more, talked in complete paragraphs more often. But it was still weird.
“How do you know all of this?” Ree asked.
“Bartender. It’s my superpower.”
“Point. Thanks, boss. I’ll get things sorted out and keep the CW drama away from the store.”
The brewmaster grinned. “Too late for that. You should have seen the looks Inspector Gadget gave you when you weren’t looking. He’d give the puppy pound a run for its money.”
And so Ree cashed out her tips, said good night to Chandra and the gang (and pointedly not Eastwood), then headed out.
Once she hit the surface, she tapped out a text message to Priya with her gloves, getting ready to head out into the winter wonderland once more, the night cast in yellows and whites by the streetlights and headlights, accenting the neon and the dim moonlight.
Got off work early. You free for a chat tonight?
Then she cued up something suitably angsty for her walk home. Go go gadget Civil Wars. From Grognard’s, Priya’s apartment was more or less the same direction, so she wouldn’t be walking fifteen minutes and then need to turn around.
It was late enough into the evening that she wasn’t going to count on the buses, and it seemed like half of the city’s cabbies had fled south to the Bay Area, migrating like birds when the weather rolled in.
She moved through mostly-empty streets, the business district fairly empty on weekends, the businesswomen and office dwellers not around to fill up the neighborhood restaurants and bars.
Two blocks later, her phone buzzed in her coat. Ree pulled it out, snow whirling around fast enough to melt on her screen as she read Priya’s response.
Sure. Come on over. Shall I call the Ladies?
Can this be just us? Ree answered, not wanting to tip her conversational hand, but also not interested in having this conversation with the others around.
Ree stepped up the pace, crunching through the snow, watching for patches of ice in the packed-down snow, melted and refrozen into a Trojan Horse of catastrophic gravity compliance.
She’d need a plan for what to actually say, how to parse the situation without coming off like a heartless jackass.
So, Priya. I’ve kind of been sort of infatuated with your ex-boyfriend since at least this spring. Yes, I know you started dating in the summer. Nothing happened, though we have been gallivanting around the town fighting monsters for about fifteen months, so there’s that.
Ree sighed. Yeah, that’d go over great.
If she’d been better at grokking her own feelings, or hadn’t just been coming off an epic breakup, maybe the situation could have been avoided. But Drake was so old-fashioned that he’d never made the first move, having strangely run right over the level of acquaintance when a gentleman could call on a lady and straight into the place where they were crossing dimensions together, and she could have done something about it but didn’t want to do anything untoward and cross his boundaries or make his head explode, and there they were.
And now he was Priya’s ex. And given that Ree had insisted on the “no dating exes” rule back with her first college boyfriend Vinay, it’d be pretty shitty of her to beg out of the rule now.
Nope. Still fucked up, she acknowledged, and went back to square one while the tragic “just bang already” not-lovers of The Civil Wars crooned at each other, the moon eyes and maudlin sexual tension screaming from every note.
Ree arrived at Priya’s just around nine. Which meant that there could be drinking. This was good. As long as she could get through the conversation before getting to plastered. She hadn’t touched anything at work, despite a powerful hankering for wine to calm her shit down.
Priya opened her door wearing her crafting belt and goggles, magnifying glasses in place so she could see the detail work. No one was actually likely to lean in and see the background gears she painted onto the base-plate level of her Steampunk Ghostbusters proton packs, but she’d know they were there. And Priya’s art had to satisfy her before it was allowed to even think about satisfying anyone else.
The third proton pack sat on her work desk, paints, glue gun, and a stack of gears surrounding the work in progress. Abney Park played in the background.
“Hey,” Ree said as she stepped into the apartment, Priya closing the door behind her. “Glad you were free.”
Priya shrugged. “Not really free, but nothing that couldn’t wait. Drink?”
“Yes, please.”
Priya mixed up a pair of White Russians in no time flat, handing one to Ree.
“So, what’s up?” she asked.
A mental gun went off, and Ree’s heart
started racing.
“Okay, this is going to be awkward no matter how I do it, but if I don’t, it’s going to be even worse.”
Priya gave the “go on” nod.
“And I know this isn’t kosher, and it’s kind of shitty for me to do after Vinay, but that was a long time ago, and maybe that makes it slightly less shitty, but I have to ask.”
The world closed in, and Ree went into full-on monologuing.
“This whole thing is seven shades of weird, because it’s all wrapped up in the magical world crap and the Geekomancy, and Spirit realms and Faerie realms, and cross-cultural weirdness and friends dating friends, and for a while I let not knowing what to do lead to not doing anything, and then there was the pilot and Jane Konrad, and then you and Drake, and then you and not Drake, and now I’m working with him on the magic hero thing again, and it’s just totally messed up in this maddeningly exciting and juvenile way, and I just had to tell you and say I’m sorry.”
“That wasn’t a question,” Priya said, as Ree checked back into the world around her, her ears hotter than when she had to duck her head into the oven to pull out the full racks of cinnamon rolls at Café Xombi.
Woman up, she told herself. “I want to ask Drake out. Is that okay?”
“Of course it is,” Priya said, not missing a beat.
“I’m sorry for even asking, but every time he says, ‘As you . . .’” Ree stopped.
“Wait, what did you say?” She’d barreled right over Priya’s inevitable response, so busy continuing to bargain and apologize that she thought maybe she’d missed the actual answer.
Priya took a long sip of her drink. “Do it, Ree. I knew he had a thing for you from the beginning, but I didn’t know you felt the same way. I get the superhero, ‘protect the ones you love’ thing, even though it’s bullshit.” Priya’s eyes were red at the edges. “I’d be a liar if I wasn’t sad that it couldn’t be me, but Drake’s something else. He’s not the kind of guy you take home to Mom. He’s a ‘run around and have adventures, crack wise, and fight monsters’ kind of guy. Plus my parents would flip if they found out I was getting serious with a white boy.”
Hexomancy (Ree Reyes Series Book 3) Page 12