Hexomancy (13 page)

Calm down
, she told herself.
Come on too strong and you might explode the poor man’s mind. It’ll be weird enough for you to come on to him, let alone if you tackle the boy as soon as he steps in the door.

Though that
would
be hilarious
, she realized.

So as to avoid compulsive nervousness, she picked up her phone and caught up on the Internets.

She had a good half-dozen DMs from Charlie with various links about geeky gossip (
Star Trek: Into Darkness
rumors, mostly. Did anyone believe that Benedict Cumberbatch
wasn’t
going to be playing Khan? Whitewashing aside, it seemed like a slam dunk).

She was tapping out a response to Charlie’s link about a rumored Easter egg that fixed the ending to
Dragon Age II
when the buzzer rang.

The Shithole had its failings, mostly the walk-up, but it did have a working buzzer system with video. Someone buzzed your apartment, and a black-and-white screen at the door showed video. Drake looked like he had, in fact, just dropped whatever he was working on and come over. Smudges on his face, hair unkempt, and wearing the leather overalls that, as far as she could tell, came out only when he wasn’t certain that things weren’t going to explode on him.

Ree buzzed Drake into the building, then proceeded to fidget for a while. She unlocked the bolt and slide locks, waiting. Ree swore she could hear every step he took, her urge to flip out, run, and/or hurl escalating moment by moment.

With Jane, she’d had crazy circumstances and the short time frame to keep her shit together. Relatively. Plus, since Jane had been a mess because of the curse, Ree had reacted by being the stable one. With Drake, it was all about forcing the question that had been sitting at the edge of her vision since the end of the Halloween origin story to their acquaintance. The friend-to-lover jump was a risky, risky move, but she had verification from basically everyone in the universe that this was a match waiting to happen.

None of that kept her from jumping when Drake knocked on the door.

Chapter Fourteen

Here Goes Nothing

Ree held in the
Eep
, and stepped forward to open the door.

Drake lit up as he entered, running a gloved hand through his hair.

“Good evening,” he said, moving forward with familiarity to put his coat away. Ree pivoted to give him room but felt his warmth as he passed by.

“Can I get you something to drink?” she asked out of habit, though she really didn’t want him to have a drink in hand that he might drop, or worse, use as a body language shield.

“Yes, please. My superintendent believes that the proper response to this spate of weather is to consign the building to the climate of the Sahara. It reminds me of—”

“Drink coming right up,” Ree said, trying to head off the story without just shutting him down.

She removed the already-poured glass of water, as well as the also-already-poured glass of tequila she’d made for herself. Making sure she wasn’t transposing them, she returned and handed the water to Drake, who had shed his coat. He was down to his working chaps and a soot-and-grease-stained collared shirt. The smudges and dirt were gone from his face, though.

He took a long, long, impossibly long drink, and Ree joined him, cutting herself off at two shots’ worth. She wanted to be loosened up, not sloppy.

“So,” she said, not sure what else to say. “There’s no way for this to not be awkward. I should know, because I’ve been running scenarios for months like I was planning a heist, and all signs point to awkward. So it’s just going to have to be awkward.”

Drake arched an eyebrow, the move so isolated and precise and so archetypically Drake that she couldn’t help but laugh, the nervousness bubbling over.

“Are you quite all right? Is there something amiss? With Eastwood, perhaps?”

“No, none of that,” Ree said.
Beat around the bush some more, why don’t you?
taunted an inner voice

“We’ve been friends for a while and have faced down more weird-ass shit together in fifteen months than is probably best for our mental health to recount all at once. And we get along great, but we come at life from such different worlds that I don’t have a flying fuck’s idea what that really means above and beyond the friend angle.”

Several thoughts passed over Drake’s face, reacting and considering.

Ree set her glass down, seeing that Drake had done the same.

SHIT OR GET OFF THE POT!
yelled a voice in her head.

“Oh, fuck it,” Ree said, stepping forward, grabbing him around the ears with both hands, and going in for a big, Roger Rabbit–scale kiss.

Ree pulled back, watching every nanosecond for a response. The infinitesimal moment before Drake moved stretched on to forever, letting Ree’s brain churn through every possible negative reaction and rejection possible in a blatant contravention of the ordinary flow of time because screw you, emotions.

Drake blinked, a hilariously cartoonish motion.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t—” Ree was cut off by Drake plunging forward, restarting the kiss with vigor.

Drake wrapped his hands around Ree’s lower back and pulled her up into his embrace.

FUCKING FINALLY!
said her brain, high-fiving itself while victory GIFs played in her mind, lighting off fireworks of sensation and arousal and fiero.

As the moment stretched into infinity, twin buzzing sounds crashed the party.

“Ignore,” Ree declared, returning to the kiss.

A moment later, the buzzing was replaced by twin “Hey! Pick up, gorrammit!” in Eastwood’s voice.

The pair disentangled. Ree asked, “What the hell?” in the direction of her phone, which sat on the lip of the couch. From behind her, she bet that Drake’s phone was the other source of Eastwood’s weird phone-hack.

Ree woman-handled Drake as she stepped over to retrieve her phone, unwilling to let go now that she’d gotten her hands on him. She stared murderating daggers at her phone, which continued to make the “Hey! Pick up, gorrammit!” sound despite being on silent.

“This had better be fucking good,” Ree said, putting the call on speakerphone.

Eastwood’s voice answered—but not live, as a recording.

“Ree. If you’re hearing this, then I haven’t checked in with the specialty app I made. What follows is the GPS information for the tracking chip I’ve had embedded subcutaneously. I’m in trouble. Please, I need your help.”

She hung up and called Eastwood right back, ready to give him a large, cannon-shaped piece of her mind.

Rational Ree knew that this was probably a big deal, and that they should get moving.

But Libido Ree was not going to stand for the universe so blatantly and unfairly cock-blocking her in such spectacular fashion, and someone was getting chewed out, that was
for
fucking certain
.

The call rang through to voicemail, and Ree hung up, wishing for a moment for the return of old telephones where you could slam down the receiver to express anger. If she slammed her phone like that, the gorilla glass would shatter into a million foot-shredding pieces. Instead, both phones beeped again, Ree’s displaying a destination point on her maps app.

“We shouldn’t ignore that, should we?” Ree asked, one hand still wrapped around Drake. As long as they were still touching, that moment wouldn’t vanish, wouldn’t escape back into impossibility. It would stay real.

Drake ran a hand through Ree’s hair. She leaned into the touch, wishing for the universe to have better timing.

“I’m afraid not. As conflicted a figure as he may be, he is a friend, and a fixture of the community. And I for one have no interest in letting Lucretia get the last laugh.”

“Damnit. But when we’re done with that, I move for an immediate resumption of smooching.”

“Seconded,” Drake said, his face flush. “I was rather hoping that I knew the reason why you asked me to come calling, but even an imagination spurned on by visits to countless impossible realms of Faerie could not predict how ravishing that kiss would be.”

Ree rolled a save vs. melting in her shoes.

“Put a pin in that beautiful mushy stuff. I won’t do any good to you as a puddle and needing to be carried around in a bucket. We can do better than the Wonder Twins. Also, not related.”

Drake smiled the smile of missed pop culture references, and moved for his coat. Ree let him go, heading back into her bedroom to retrieve her own coat.

You are going to owe me so damned bad
, she thought in Eastwood’s direction as they bundled back up and headed into the night.

The GPS signal
led them to an overpriced parking lot in the center of town, the kind of place where event pricing topped $30, and somehow, every single day in the week seemed to be an “event.”

In reality, the only time that Thursday was that kind of event was when it was trying to take your money.

“So, where’s Clint?” Ree asked, looking around the building. The structure had room for several hundred cars, and if Eastwood was stuffed into someone’s trunk, this would take a while.

Drake asked, “May I inspect your mapping program?”

Ree handed over the phone, feeling a jolt of not-actual electricity when their gloved hands met again.

They made their way into the ground level of the parking garage, walking by an empty guard station with snow piled around it like it was the peak of a mountain.

It was all she could do to not just pop the locks to an SUV and head to Makeout Town, though making out in cars had never actually managed to be that comfortable.

Focus, Ree. Nookie later.

“And how accurate are these signals, usually?”

“GPS? Usually within a hundred feet or so, if you’re using the good ones.”

“But it does not indicate elevation, does it?”

“Why would it . . .” Ree asked, then stopped in place. “Shit. He’s at Wells’s, isn’t he?”

“That does seem likely. I thought that her laboratory was located farther south.”

“She had to move after the attack on Grognard’s. Too many gnomes in the neighborhood. She moved uptown, right around here. Sadly, that means it’s sewer time.”

Drake’s nose wrinkled in autonomic disgust.

Ree made her way toward an alley. “Not exactly the kind of getting dirty I was hoping for tonight.”

Now, where is that going to be?
Ree did mental math and started sweeping snow aside, revealing a manhole cover.

Drake helped her clear off the rest of the snow, and then Ree pulled out her switchblade to jimmy loose the cover.

“Actually. You got a crowbar in that coat of yours?” she asked.

“Alas, no. I left my breaking-and-entering kit in my semiformal jacket.”

Ree took a break to apply another smooch, which caused Drake to wobble, nearly losing his crouched footing.

“And what was that for?” Drake asked.

“Your sense of humor.”

“Then I shall endeavor to not be as humorous during our melees, as I rather think a battlefield kiss is inadvisable, despite its prevalence in films.”

“I just need to channel an action movie and we’ll be fine.”

“Very well. How long will you need?” Drake asked, working to pry open the manhole.

“I mean, in general,” Ree said, pulling on the other side. They got the manhole cover free of its slot, and hauled it off, depositing it by the edge of the street. Drake draped his feet into the hole.

“It’s cool. I got point,” Ree said, wagging the lightsaber.

Drake removed his feet. “After you.”

Ree gave Drake her best flirty wink and held the hilt down into the sewer, thumbing on the blade.

The blue light illuminated the sewer, a thick stream of sewer water flowing thanks to melt from the epic snowfall.

“Looks wet down there. Watch your feet.” Ree dropped into the sewer, landing into a crouch, holding the lightsaber tight as she looked both ways, checking for gnomes, alligators, or whatever the Pearson sewer might have in store for them that week.

“All clear,” Ree announced, stepping to the side and holding her lightsaber parallel to the flow of the sewer, keeping the blade away from Drake as he dropped into the tunnel. His landing made a splash that flowed over her thankfully-waterproof boots.

Uggs, in addition to being the stinkiest kind of boot, were also
not
waterproof. Instead, Ree went for the ugly but functional pig leather, purchased secondhand for lessened ethical wooginess.

“Okay, here we go. Watch my back?” Ree asked.

“And I will also keep an eye on our flank.” Ree could hear his smirk without having to hear it.

“Cheeky.”

“I find that the intimacy of a passionate kiss leaves me rather less inhibited about making such comments. Though I will, of course, cease to do so should you wish.”

“No, no. Game on.”

Drake lit the directional light he’d re-created off a snake light design, Steampunk-ifying it with gears and copper. “Pardon my presumption, but does this mean that we are courting now?”

They reached a T-junction, bearing left after Ree checked both directions. If she was remembering right, Dr. Wells’s new location was just down on the right.

“That’s the idea. Though maybe it’s not the smartest thing to sort out our relationship status in a sewer. How will we update Facebook from down here? ‘Ree Reyes and Drake Winters are in a relationship and it’s complicated by the fact that they’re constantly in mortal danger’ is strangely not an option.”

“Unfortunate. That would encompass the situation rather effectively. I remember your friend Charlie saying something about the importance of Facebook officiality at one point or another.”

“Charlie’s very much a pics-or-it-didn’t-happen kind of guy. Validity through confirmation and public knowledge and all that.”

“Is that your preference as well?” Drake stopped for a moment, focusing as if listening for a distant sound.

Ree pointed back down the hall past where they’d turned, asking the question with her facial expression.

Drake shrugged as if to say
Uncertain, but I heard something
.

They’d spent a lot of time in sewers together.

Is that what their relationship was going to be? It better not. It’d just take a concerted effort to not make it all about the work. She had plenty of ideas of other aspects she’d like to see involved, and not just the ones that involved beds and no clothes.

After waiting for a minute, they continued onward, moving slowly.

Ree’s mapping app showed the beacon right on top of their position. She pointed her lightsaber at the various doors and holes, trying to remember Wells’s new clinic location from the one time she’d visited. Blunt force trauma didn’t tend to help this part of her memory, strangely enough.

She waved the blade at one of the doors, and they moved, almost shoulder-to-shoulder. Almost, though, so it wasn’t quite as distracting.

Ree gave Dr. Wells’s code knock, which was the Morse for S.O.S.

Something moved in the distance, back where Drake had stopped.

Yep, something’s out there. Let’s just hope it decides to bugger off by the time we’re done.

A few moments later, the sound of metal on metal, and then the door swung open, revealing Dr. Wells, Pearson’s resident Aesclepiomancer.

Dr. Wells was a short woman, constantly wearing a lab coat as a badge of office. The space was lit, framing her from the back and in blue-scale from the front.

She kept her hair long, dreads tied back.

“There you are. Come in,” she said, voice flat.

Ree shut off her lighstsaber, saving its nostalgia battery for their trip out, if needed. Drake stepped inside, still covering them, and then Dr. Wells closed and relocked the door. She pressed a palm to the door and spoke some Latin, and Ree felt something intangible slide into place.

Magic senses tingling.
She couldn’t always feel magic, but when she knew to expect the working, it was much easier.

Dr. Wells’s new location lacked the painting of the derby girl on the roof, but this one had its own mural, a graffiti-as-art-history of medicine. “The real history of medicine” as Wells said.