Mr. Real (Code of Shadows #1) (2 page)

“I never heard of that happening in real life. The great aunt bit.” Again he smiled. Again she was tempted.

“Apparently I met her when I was a kid, but I don’t remember it. She got cut off from the whole family.”

“Harsh.” Just then the machine beeped. The guy typed in more commands.

Great Aunt Veronica had been shunned by the Gordon family for “dabbling in the dark arts and cavorting with strange men,” as her mother had put it when Alix showed her the letter from Veronica’s estate. “She wouldn’t tone it down, and we didn’t want you children exposed to all that devilry, so we cut it off with her.”

Alix would’ve laughed at her mother’s use of the word
devilry
if she hadn’t felt so very angry that this poor elderly woman had been cut off from the family. And she lived just two hours away from Minneapolis! Apparently, Aunt Veronica lived with a man friend who’d died a day after she did. So sad. It steamed Alix to no end to think that she knew nothing about Aunt Veronica, and that she hadn’t gotten the chance to meet her and get to know her. Friends and relatives cared for each other and helped each other no matter what. Alix would’ve helped her.

Instead, this unknown aunt had helped Alix.

She’d given her a chance to escape from her mistakes. To start over.

The guy tapped a few buttons and sat back. “So nothing? On the floppy?”

“Weird symbols,” she said. “My friend thought it was some kind of old code.”

“And she had a dusty old computer room…” He tilted his head, lips quirked. “You know, those old computers are getting valuable. I could take a look at them. I would be happy to come over.”

In fact, there was a lot of 1970s and 80s-era hardware in the basement, including mini supercomputers, as her friend Karen had called them, all hooked together in a circle. Somebody had taken a sledgehammer to them at some point and smashed them all up. They wouldn’t be worth anything.

But it wasn’t really computers that they were discussing now.

She thought about it a little, how that blast of attention would feel. The gratitude, the excitement, the dare of it all. But she had a mystery to solve. “Nah, sorry,” she said. “It’s impossible. But thanks.”

He nodded, understanding her meaning, and turned back to the computer, hitting a few buttons. “Your laptop’s clean,” he said officiously. “Twenty bucks. Want me to turn it off?”

She nodded, wondering how long he’d been done.

He powered down and shut the lid. “I hate to say this, but do you think someone might’ve come into your home and messed with your machine directly?”

Gulp. She hadn’t even considered that. Surely Lindy would’ve barked. “No way,” she said, handing over the check.

The guy raised his eyebrows. “Hold on, you’re out on KE past Malcolmsberg? Is this that brick house on the bluff?”

She nodded.

“The witch house? We’re talking about the
witch
house here? Dark witch of evil manor? That was
your aunt?!
“

Outrage heated her face. “Seriously, what year is it? This whole place shuns a poor old woman on the grounds of being a witch? Just because she was eccentric and into non-traditional things, it doesn’t mean she was evil.”

“Is it evil to bring back the dead? Your aunt could do that. She could make things appear out of thin air. My dad saw it firsthand as a kid. And he’s not one to tell tales.”

“If a kid said it, it must be true,” she snapped.

“You ask anyone. Plumes of smoke. Crows—”

“I asked you for computer advice, not mystical advice.” She gathered up her purse and computer.

“All I’m saying is that if something’s unexplained out there…” the guy raised his eyebrows, as if no more needed to be said on the subject.

She left in a huff, feeling new sympathy for her aunt. Alix knew firsthand what it felt like to be the object of everyone’s asshole opinions.

True, she’d found some pretty crazy things cleaning out the house. Aunt Veronica was definitely into some occult stuff. Was there anything to it? Alix believed in karma. And in ghosts. Why not magic? The world was full of unexplained things. Was it possible something magical was going on?

The idea excited her.

On the way back home she got ahold of Karen on the phone.

“You pack a bag right now and drive to Minneapolis,” Karen instructed from her convention hotel room. Karen had a big-gun job these days with a tech firm. “Some freak has invaded your online privacy, trespassed on your porch, and left you a gift that says
look what I can do.
“

“
Is
it some freak?” Alix asked, watching Lindy’s ears flap in the rushing air from the open window. “There was no spyware on my computer. And, seriously, in 24 hours, can somebody hack a site, make elaborate graphic design changes to the images, manufacture a stunning copy of a ruby necklace, and get it onto my porch?” She was starting to warm to the magic idea. Her heart raced.

“What are you saying?”

“Think about it—we know Aunt Veronica was into black magic in some way, all those crazy books, and her jewelry tastes, those symbols we scrubbed off the basement floor. What if she was really onto something?”

“You think it’s magic?”

“If it defies explanation…” Alix said.

“Then that just means you look harder. Jumping to a magical explanation—”

“I’m not jumping to it. I’m going to run a scientific test. I’m going to repeat exactly what I did with the necklace with something different, and use my web cam to record the whole thing. And then we’ll see.”

“Stop. Think it through. You could be dealing with somebody dangerous.”

“I
am
thinking it through. Sure, maybe it’s a bauble-leaving freak, I’m not ruling that out. But maybe, just maybe, I could discover something mind-blowingly awesome. The guy at the computer store asked if I’d downloaded anything suspicious. Well, I did. Remember when I got that old floppy converted? All that crazy code? What if it did something to my computer?”

“Oh my god,” Karen said.

“What?”

“A magical computer? Is that where you’re going with this?”

“What were my aunt’s two main hobbies? Witchy stuff and computers. It’s exciting! Think through this with me, Karen. I mean, what if it’s real? It would be beyond winning the lottery. We could literally have anything we wanted. But first we’ll do this test. What should I order for it? We should think of something really challenging for the next task.”

“I know it seems cool, but you have to be smart. This is not all fun and games here, Alix.”

Alix frowned. “Thanks a lot, Hardass Paul. Are you going to kick me off our phone call now?”

“I can’t believe you just called me Hardass Paul,” Karen snapped. “I’m not a Hardass Paul for wanting you to be safe.”

“
This is not all fun and games?
That is so Hardass Paul.”

“Not at all!”

They bickered back and forth until Alix apologized. “But I’m going to solve this. I don’t care.”

In the four years since Hardass Paul had kicked Alix out of class—four years and hundreds of miles away—he’d grown in significance, becoming the poster boy for all the people who thought Alix was screwed-up and irresponsible. In the years since, whenever Alix got Karen into some crazy situation—drunkenly trapped in a phone booth in rabbit costumes with the police on their way, for example—one of them would turn to the other and ask,
I wonder what Hardass Paul would have to say about this?
It was always good for a laugh.

Hardass Paul. So much hotness wasted on a humorless jerk.

Alix passed through tiny downtown Malcolmsberg, all four super-quaint blocks of it, nestled along the banks of the Mississippi River. She should’ve never called Karen a Hardass Paul.

Once she was through town she turned left, up the wooded bluff, and headed toward the house.

Her
house.

For being a supposedly witchy, black-magic-dabbling person, Aunt Veronica had lived in quite the cheerful house, all red brick and white wood trim. And massive, too—the old Victorian was a small hotel in an earlier incarnation, the estate people had said.

It still seemed weird to Alix that she owned a house, even after four months. But thank goodness for it. For what Aunt Veronica had done for her.

The week before Alix learned of the inheritance, she’d been evicted from her apartment and fired from her tenth cocktail waitress job. It was this whole mess stemming from her arrest on charges of trespassing, burglary, destruction of property, arson, public drunkenness, and disorderly conduct. She got probation and community service—by a hair—but her legal fees were insane, and she’d become an object of scorn of all her friends but Karen.

If she could turn back time, she’d do the same damn thing all over again.

Well, okay, she’d still break into Manuel’s apartment to erase the sex-with-Karen videos he was threatening to put on the Internet, but maybe she wouldn’t have been so drunk that she knocked over his seven-day candle and started a small fire. Or trashed the place putting it out. Or stolen that bag of Butterfinger candy bars after erasing the files. That, too, had been ill-advised.

Naturally, most everyone took Manuel’s side, because he was the victim of Crazy Alix breaking into his place and trashing it. It wasn’t like she could say why she was there. Nobody but Karen and Manuel knew that.

And she’d do it again in a second. She’d fight like a rabid coyote to protect her best friend any day of the week. Maybe she was a screw-up, but she was a loyal screw-up who fought fiercely for the people who were good to her.

Also, Alix knew a thing or two from her life of mishaps and underachievement: once you messed up enough times, scandals and arrests didn’t hurt you as badly as they hurt somebody with a clean slate, somebody people thought well of. Like Karen. Alix could absorb things. Karen couldn’t. Though even Alix was challenged by the twin losses of home and job.

It was at that point that the inheritance letter had arrived.

Why had Aunt Veronica left it all to her? Alix was the only one in the family too young to remember meeting the woman. Was it because they were both black sheep?

She and Karen had driven out to see the house the following weekend and Alix had instantly decided to turn it into a bed and breakfast. Two hours away from Minneapolis and an hour or so up from La Crosse—it was the perfect location. A new start. And she would name it Veronica’s, in honor of her aunt.

Alix’s parents were horrified about the inheritance due to the black magic bit. Alix’s older sisters seemed hurt and dismayed that they’d been overlooked for the house and the little pile of cash, which Alix had promptly shared with her sisters, leaving her just enough to fix up the place.

Everybody thought she’d make a mess of it—nobody said it directly, but it was obvious from their advice:
When you own a bed & breakfast, you can’t go out dancing all night, Alix…You have to be up early, Alix…You have to follow safety regulations, Alix…It’s not as easy as it looks on TV, Alix…People will be counting on you with their vacation plans, Alix.

Alix just flipped her pink hair at them and laughed. They thought she wasn’t listening, but in truth, she was terrified. Terrified by the responsibility. She hoped the place would be good enough to live up to her mysterious aunt’s generosity. And that people would like it.

Karen was all for it. Karen drove out over many weekends to help clean and scrape and paint. And at night they drank wine on the porch and played Scrabble and sometimes dined semi-ironically at the old-timey Malcolmsberg supperclub.

But now it was August, and there was still tons to do to be ready for her first guests by Christmas, as she’d brashly announced. Mostly, she needed to get the rooms nice and the kitchen licensed for food prep. And then there was the carriage house, which was presently full of junk. Every time she felt dispirited, she’d say to herself,
It’s not Christmas yet.

Now there was a mystery to solve.

As soon as she got home, Alix got started on her plan. First, she needed to find a new jpeg image to save to her laptop and click a bunch of times. That’s what she’d done with the necklace image, and a day later it was there, as if the repeated clicking had alerted the powers that be—or the stalker that be—to the significance of it.

She considered going for an image of a bag of her favorite spicy jalapeño potato chips—none of the Malcolmsberg stores carried them—but she decided against that. If whoever or whatever was capable of producing something as complicated as a copy of Xing’s necklace—
in one day
—why the hell go for potato chips? It should be something desirable and slightly challenging. She briefly considered a huge pile of cash, but that was practical and boring, and not much of a challenge. After some deliberation, Alix settled on white vinyl majorette boots with swingy tassels from Marley’s of New York, size 9. At the last minute, she added a white vinyl clutch and a belt. Click. Click. Hah! Good luck getting stuff overnighted from Marley’s.

She created the file and clicked it like crazy. Then she sat back, staring at the fabulous ensemble and scratching at her sparkly blue nail polish.

After that, just to cover all her bases, she made a professional-looking “No Trespassing” sign and hammered it to the wooden railing of her front porch, her bracelets jingling. According to Sheriff Deacon, leaving gifts on doorsteps wasn’t illegal—unless the property was “posted.”

Finally she set up the web cam. What would she see on it? If the outfit arrived, would it be an exact duplicate of the image? The necklace looked a lot like the picture. She’d assumed it was crystal, because that’s what that jewelry guy, Xing, said, but maybe she should have it appraised.

As night fell, she started feeling nervous. What if it was just some stalker freak? Had her desire for this thing to turn out magical made her stupid?

She took the sledgehammer, the shotgun, her phone, and her computer to bed and texted back and forth with Karen, who was at some convention app-startup bash.

She and Karen were opposites in many ways. Karen was calm and smart and sarcastic with dark hair and glasses, whereas Alix was bold, big-boned, and boisterous, with bright hair. Different as they were, Alix considered their friendship to be deep and ancient and forever, and one of the luckiest things in her life.