Twenty minutes later, Grognard came along with a flask. “You look beat. Pearson’s going to need you to be strong. With Eastwood gone, they’re going to look to you now.”
“The hell they will,” Ree said. “There’re a dozen people more senior than me.”
“But they’re not the ones pounding the pavement. You’ve stepped up, and people have noticed. Every community has its champion, and you’ve built yourself a fine reputation the last year and a half.”
Ree accepted the flask and took a shot. It was more Critical Hit, but the fortified version, Grognard’s Geekomancy expressing itself through brewing. One sip, and she felt fatigue drain out of her body, the gray cloud in her mind breaking up. “If I’m the champion, then we’re in trouble.” But this time, she said it with a wink.
“Thanks, boss,” she added.
“If you’re taking over the Dorkcave, you think you’ll still have time for little old Grognard’s?”
“Only always. I might ask for a change of job description, get out of the server business.”
“You’ll miss the tips,” he said.
Ree took another sip of the Critical Hit and handed the flask back. “But I won’t miss the food stains, so it evens out. Plus, if I’m going to be all Pearson Protector, I may not have time for a night and day job anymore.”
“I bet you can handle the cave by day, take the time you need at night,” Grognard said. “I’ll take whatever help you want to give. Before this all went down, I was going to ask if you wanted to go full partner, stake into the business. The offer still stands.”
“No shit?” Ree leaned sideways into the bar. “That’s a hell of a thing. Get back to you after I’ve slept this all off?”
“Of course.” Grognard clapped her on the shoulder, and she returned the gesture.
Reenergized, she hopped off her stool and went over to Shade and Branwen, who were chatting up a storm in one of the booths.
“They fought the whole night, kept going out again and again. I was out most of the time, thank goodness. I don’t have the stomach for all of the meatspace hand-to-hand,” Shade said. “Not like your girl, here. Ree, your mother was telling me that you enrolled in martial arts when you were six?”
“Yep, that’s me. Bullies: terrible for a kid’s self-confidence, great motivation to take up Taekwondo.”
Ree slid into the booth, taking a space by her mother. She blinked and reassured herself that her mother was still, in fact, there. She hadn’t ever known her mother as an adult, and seeing her in the rags of her Darth Atropos outfit, hair stained and ragged, made her as strange as what the years had done to her face, her hair. But spend a few years being tortured and brainwashed by a demon, see how good you look. On second thought, don’t. That’s what imagination was for.
“She wasn’t really serious about it for a few years. And then you started sparring at twelve, right?”
Ree took a long sip from her stein. “Yep. Twelve-year-old girls are terrible. Sparring let me hit things. It was good therapy.”
Branwen ran a hand through Ree’s hair, the motion familiar and strange all at once. Halfway through, Ree flinched away.
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have assumed.”
“We’re a regular soap opera here, aren’t we?” Ree asked Shade.
The cyberpunk raised his hands. “Far be it from me to tell someone they’re strange. My heart and cyber-soul belong in 1986.”
“Can we chat for a minute?” Ree asked Branwen.
“Excuse me, my drink appears to be broken,” Shade said, catching the hint.
The booth empty, Ree spun through her mental Rolodex, trying to figure out what to say, what she should say.
What came tumbling out was what she’d wanted to say for years.
“You fucked up.”
Branwen took the words like a body blow. She righted herself, looked at her drink, took a long sip, and sat for a moment.
“I know. I’m sorry. You got the message I left with Eastwood?” she asked.
“Yep. Still doesn’t help. You broke Dad’s heart, and my heart. It took us a long, long time to get better. You could have told Dad about the magic stuff, about what the movies and shows were doing to you.”
“Just going cold turkey wouldn’t have helped. I needed to be free again, to be the most important person in my own life. It’s selfish, and I wish I’d figured out a way to be my own person and be a mother and a wife. But I couldn’t hack it.”
“Are you going to call him?” Ree asked.
Branwen froze, like a deer in the headlights of a demon car.
“I don’t even know what I’d say.”
“You could say you were sorry. He needs to hear it. But he also needs to keep moving on with his life. So I don’t know what to do. Should I forbid you from calling him so you don’t open up old wounds and send him right back to where he was when you left? Or keep this secret from him for the rest of his or my life? I don’t know, and I figured you’d want to weigh in.”
“I loved your father very much. He was the kindest person I’d ever met, and he gave me years of peace. But I can’t be that woman.”
Branwen pointed to Ree’s lightsaber, peeking out of her apron. “That is who I am. I’ve bound up my whole life in it, can’t not be it. The prequels were crap about a lot of things, but for me, a stable family and my calling don’t go together.”
“What about Eastwood?”
“Eastwood wasn’t the type to settle down. Never was, never would have been. He was good and bad for me, I was good and bad for him. It worked more than it didn’t.”
“So what are you going to do, then? Stay in Pearson? Go itinerant? Return to Dagobah?”
“My master is dead, years ago now. The only place I know people is here. But this is your city now, not mine.”
Ree reached out a hand, rested it on her mother’s palm. “It’s a big city, Mom. I’d rather not lose you again, if I can avoid it.”
Branwen smiled, and Ree saw her mother again, the woman she’d known as a girl, underneath the wrinkles and burns and years of pain.
“Good. Because someone needs to take over the Dorkcave, and that thing is just too Gen X for my taste. Though I would love to keep a key to raid it as an armory, if you don’t mind.”
Branwen grabbed Ree’s hand and turned the touch into a handshake. “On the condition that you come by at least once a week to talk.”
“Deal.”
That’s one thing down. Ree slid out of the booth.
“Awesome. I’m going to go sleep for a week or so, and then I’ll come by.”
“Can’t wait,” Branwen said, her familiar glow still going strong.
She found Drake at the bar, recounting the most recent adventure with Talon and Grognard.
“It was a fight for the ages, something out of a saga, every bit as dramatic as any of the films whose props they bore.”
Ree grabbed a stool and let him talk, embellishing and digressing from a story only hours old, applying the experience of a man who’d traveled across worlds, who had learned to fit in anywhere, if oddly. But no matter where he went, he stayed himself.
“Pardon me, folks,” Ree told her friends. “Can I steal you away for a minute?” she asked Drake.
“No,” he said. “You needn’t steal that which is freely given.”
And he says stuff like that. She held out a hand and led him over to another booth.
“Are you okay?” Ree asked.
“Dr. Wells gave me a restorative, and that in addition to the joyous shake has put me in fine enough condition for one who has been through the wringer.”
“Really okay, or not-dead okay?”
Drake leaned in and kissed her. Gently, attentively, like his whole focus was on kissing just right, a sharpshooter’s atten
tion to the precise deployment of two lips. “A portion of both, I suppose.”
“You wanna get out of here, then?”
“Are you making intimations of an amorous nature?”
Ree waggled her eyebrows in her best impression of Groucho Marx. It was pretty terrible impression, as she’d never gotten remotely close to his control.
But the mere attempt got Drake to chuckle, so it was always worth it.
The pair made their farewells. Hugs from Shade and Talon and Uncle Joe, kisses from her mom, a bear hug capped off with healthy claps on the back from Grognard, and they were off.
Back at Ree’s, they kissed and laughed and tossed off sweaty clothes, making their way as quietly as possible to the bedroom. Ree left a sock on the door, and turned to Drake, already tucked under the covers, his shirt gone.
Drake sat up in the bed. “I’ve been thinking that it was high time that we celebrate another milestone. Seeing Eastwood’s sacrifice, I realized that there is nothing I would hold back from you, nothing I don’t want to do together.
“I am yours,” he said. “Heart and soul.”
Ree slipped into bed and kissed him on the forehead, then the lips. “I love you.”
Drake smiled a rakish grin to end all rakish grins. “I know.”
Ree waited a moment, then laughed with all the energy she had left. She kissed Drake again, then gave him a high five. They settled into a comfortable embrace, laughing contagiously.
10 points for Harrison Ford’s improv win.
“Also, when you mean you are mine, do you mean . . . ?” Ree asked, trying not to probe right after hitting one milestone and blunder her way toward another.
Drake took a breath, and nodded. “I presume you have supplies?”
“Boy, do I,” Ree said, reaching over to her bedside table drawer.
Behind those doors, Ree and Drake laughed and kissed and talked and celebrated making it through another adventure.
That day, Ree had lost a mentor and a sometimes friend, regained her mother, and taken several steps forward with her partner, her partner in every single way.
Falling asleep with Drake’s arms around her, pleasantly entangled and disheveled, Ree found more peace than she’d had in years, with two big question marks in her life replaced by exclamation points of joy.
The next afternoon, after more amorous distractions, and a long, long shower to wash off the week’s pains, she picked up her phone and called Grognard.
He picked up on the first ring. Almost like he was waiting for the call, or something, she thought.
“Yep?” Grognard asked.
Ree smiled. “I’m in. Let’s rock this joint.”
Acknowledgments
Three novels and a novella later, here we are at the end of the first major arc of the Ree Reyes series. There’s more to Ree’s story yet to come, somewhere down the road. Hexomancy is an ending, but not The Ending.
It’s strange to think that as of writing this, it’s been only four and a half years since I started working on Distraction: The Novel, over Thanksgiving while Meg was studying. Distraction: The Novel soon came to be known as Geekomancy, and would launch my career as a novelist. Ree has grown as a character as I’ve grown as a writer, and I think that Hexomancy is our best story yet.
And that’s all because of the help I’ve had along the way, from readers, fellow writers, my editor and agent, and many more.
Here are a few specific shout-outs to people who made a substantial difference for this latest novel:
A Muppet-flail of appreciation to Mary Robinette Kowal and my fellow classmates in the “Writing on the Fast Track” class I took in fall of 2013. That class unlocked nothing less than a revolution in process for me. Most of the time, it takes me between three and six months to write a first draft of a novel. I wrote the rough for Hexomancy in a month and a day, thanks to having a stronger, richer outline and applying the focus techniques from the class. Mary has also done me the great honor of serving as the voice of the Ree Reyes series for two novels and a novella in audio form, bringing her mad chops (technical term) to the series.
And while I’m giving out productivity props, big thanks to Rachel Aaron for her productivity-hacking essay/book 2K to 10K: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love, which helped round out ideas from Mary’s class. Metrics, man, metrics.
A massive w00t of gratitude to Beth Cato for detailed notes and insights.
Muchas gracias to Enrique Bertran for his assistance in helping me with Puerto Rican Spanish, all the better to represent Ree’s cultural and linguistic heritage.
Geeky cheers for a job well done to Sara Megibow, the Agent of Awesomeness, for helping me shape my career as it grows over the years.
A hearty Wookiee yowl of appreciation to my editor, Adam Wilson, for going with the flow when I called an audible to change gears, and for always challenging me to dig deeper, to enrich the world and its wacky magicks.
Meg, my partner in life and love. The best possible first reader, expert analyzer of character, she of the mighty laser eyes. If Meg weren’t such a hard worker, this whole series might not exist.
And to you, dear reader. Ree’s tale is not yet done, but she’s gotten this far because of your time and love. Because you read and enjoyed the books and told your friends. You have my deepest gratitude. If you keep reading them, I’ll keep writing them. Deal?
Baltimore, Maryland
April 2015
About the Author
MICHAEL R. UNDERWOOD is the author of Geekomancy, Celebromancy, Attack the Geek, Shield and Crocus, and The Younger Gods. By day, he’s the North American Sales & Marketing Manager for Angry Robot Books. Mike grew up devouring stories in all forms, from comics to video games, tabletop RPGs, movies, and books. He has a BA in Creative Mythology and East Asian Studies and an MA in Folklore Studies. Mike has been a bookseller, a barista, a game store cashwrap monkey, and an independent publishers’ representative. Mike lives in Baltimore with his fiancée, an ever-growing library, and a super-team of dinosaur figurines and stuffed animals. He is also a co-host on the Hugo-nominated Skiffy and Fanty Show. In his rapidly vanishing free time, Mike studies historical martial arts and makes homemade pizza. He blogs at MichaelRUnderwood.com/blog and tweets @MikeRUnderwood.
FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: authors.simonandschuster.com/Michael-R-Underwood
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Also by Michael R. Underwood
Geekomancy
Celebromancy
Attack the Geek
Younger Gods
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2015 by Michael R. Underwood
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ISBN 978-1-4767-5781-0
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Hexomancy (Ree Reyes Series Book 3) Page 26