Page 36 of Hex and the City
“So I’m detecting a theme here,” I told him, still wearing a loose smile of my own. “Penetrate. Obfuscate. And how did you hang around without the lady noticing you?”
My senses had already mostly processed how attracted I was to Max. But they were not prepared for the sight of him absolutely beaming with pride. I was so tempted to hurt his feelings and make him stop. It almost felt like his smile was actually, physically lighting up the entire room.
“Watch this,” he said, with a wink that made my heart flutter. “Dissipate.”
And I watched, and my heart fluttered again, then skipped when he disappeared completely from view. Hold on. Not entirely. His body had only become transparent, his dimensions still faintly visible from what little light fed into the store from the outside.
But the gleam of the streetlamps and the moon itself, how the light refracted off the shape of his body — had Max turned himself into something like crystal? I clenched one fist, holding back my mounting fear, trying to calm myself.
The arcane underground seemed to be very fond of factions, pockets of belonging for those of us who didn’t fit in with regular society. Because we were still human, after all, with a hunger for finding others who shared what we had in common. The Masques, the spiders, Tiamat and her dragon kin.
What about thieves who used magic derived from crystals? Did those have factions, too? Who was Maximilian Drake, really, and what did he have to do with the person who created the anomalies?
Seconds passed. A minute, I thought, and he reappeared again, skin glistening as his crystalline body became flesh once more. Despite my suspicions, I couldn’t help myself.
“That was amazing,” I said. “And kind of beautiful, too, I have to admit.”
He bowed from the hip, as bright and animated as I’d ever seen him. “Thank you, thank you. I’m not sure I’ve ever done a reverse infiltration before, but I suppose this counts.”
I noted that he didn’t make a fuss of me calling anything within his periphery beautiful. Maybe he was more mature than I was, acknowledging that I meant the total transformation of his body into crystal, and not his body itself.
Even though that was also true. Even though this crystal magic theory was bugging the living hell out of me.
We could keep working together for now, as long as I kept my head on my shoulders. This could all just be coincidence, right? Surely there was more than one crystal mage out in the world. Could be hundreds, maybe, and I was seeing patterns and jumping to conclusions.
Just as long as I kept my head on my shoulders. I cleared my throat. “We should probably, you know, check for a client list.”
“Good idea.”
Max stepped over to the computer behind the counter in a few easy strides. He was just walking. Why did it make me take note of how long his legs were, how tightly his jeans fit over his ass? What was wrong with me? This guy could be in cahoots with the anomalist, playing some long, sick game with me for reasons I couldn’t fathom just yet.
I followed him, half-sat myself on the edge of the counter by the computer. “And I suppose you have some special spell that’ll help you figure out the password. Let’s see. Decipher — no, that’s not it. Calculate? That’s on theme, but it doesn’t really — ”
He chuckled, but it sounded more like a grunt. “I went invisible and watched over her shoulder when she went to shut the computer down. She had to wake it from sleep since she wasn’t actually using it. Looks like they’re hyper vigilant around here, need a password just to wake the computer. Lucky for us.”
Max bent over the keyboard as the monitor flickered on, his fingers tapping too fast for me to catch what he was typing. So even if you stripped him of his magic, he was still keenly observant of these little details, and clearly very intelligent. Seriously, who was this guy?
“So what was the password?” I asked.
He straightened himself up with a grin. “‘Shopping. That’s it. No numbers or special characters or anything. We can just look at the most recently accessed files and start from there. Has to be some spreadsheet or sales system with all the names we need.”
The way his eyes lit up was almost infectious. It made me believe that this harebrained idea would get us somewhere.
“What about time stamps?” I asked, trying to make sure all our bases were covered. “Won’t they check when something was last opened? And I’m not just talking the computer. Won’t they — I don’t know, won’t they dust the keyboard for prints? Hey, stop manhandling that mouse, already.”
He shook his head, opening this folder, clicking on that file. “If we do our jobs correctly, they won’t have any reason to check. We were never here. We never existed. Look, here it is.”
The glaring white of a spreadsheet hurt my eyeballs. I shut them, rubbed my eyelids before attempting another look. Max was already scrolling through the rows of data while my eyes regained focus. By the time I could read properly again, he was still scrolling. And scrolling. And scrolling.
“No way,” he muttered. “No fucking way. Limited edition, my ass. The first batch of Diablo 69 had a thousand bottles issued. That’s an enormous number.”
“Oh. Because of course it did. Hell, even if it’d been a hundred, we’d still be screwed. How were we supposed to narrow anyone down?”
Max massaged his scalp with the tips of his fingers, his hair sticking up in spots. “I don’t know. I figured we could look for obvious signs. Names of people from prominent magical families, anyone with a weird address. I don’t know. Fucking something.”
“There you go again with these magical families.” I scratched irritably at the back of my neck. “How does that help us in the least?”
“Because those are some names we get to scratch off the list, if they’re even in there. The Hemlocks, the Lyons, the Brillantes, all the others. Hell, it could even be a clue, or a scandal, if any of them are involved. And why does the concept bother you so much? You come from a magical family yourself, your witch clan.”
