Page 64 of Hex and the City
Leon pointed at the phone and shook his head. “That’s not what it says here, but it may as well be. So the Masques just slip the media a bag of money and that’s that? Poof! All covered up?”
“More or less,” I said, swirling my glass, relishing the clink of the ice. “Pretty common practice with all the bigger magical enforcement agencies. Gotta make sure the normals keep believing it’s a normal world. Spin their stories.”
“Oh, please.” Roscoe took a swig of his beer, grimaced as he gulped it down. “These jerks couldn’t spin their way out of a paper bag. I could do way better. You guys think I could get a job running PR for them?”
Johnny Slivers rested his chin on his knuckles, running his finger lazily along the rim of his glass. “Then who would stay in the shop and be an insufferable know-it-all while I tend bar and serve all the customers?”
Roscoe reached over, cupping his jaw in one hand. “Aww. I would miss you being a grumpy-grump. And I’d miss the opportunity to beat up a rough customer every now and again. Explode some magic and launch someone across the room. Good old bar fight.”
Johnny replied with a sneer, his playful, silent signal, a not-so-secret gesture of affection between the two. Roscoe chuckled, leaned in, kissed him on the corner of his mouth.
“Please, you guys,” I grumbled, clutching my stomach for effect. “We just had the shit kicked out of us by a martial artist time mage. You’d think we’d suffered enough damage and anguish for one day.”
“Haha, yeah,” Leon said, chuckling nervously as he shifted in his chair, his cheeks reddening. “So gross.”
Leon took a sip of his cocktail — a white Russian, something sweet for someone sweet — and looked furtively away. He couldn’t be more obvious about avoiding my gaze.
“Oh, look who it is now,” he said, pointing at the doors, clearly grateful for the diversion.
Vera Loong, the Jade Spider herself, swept imperiously into Unholy Grounds. A rare sighting outside her home bar at Silk, and an even rarer sighting of her in something almost approaching natural light. It was always so dark at Silk. Maybe that was why she chose to wear a melodramatically gigantic pair of sunglasses. At night. Indoors.
“I came as soon as I heard,” she announced, striking a pose at our table, hand against her forehead.
“Pull up a chair, then,” Johnny Slivers said.
Vera stared at him absently, as if he’d spoken to her in an alien language. Johnny sighed, pushing himself up from the table, trudging over to offer her a seat, sliding it in as she sat daintily down. The Jade Spider, a diva to the bitter end.
“Something green and delicious will do,” she said, motioning at our glasses.
“Wonderful,” Johnny drawled. “A melon ball it is, then. No more absinthe for you. Not since the last time.”
Vera leaned toward Leon, lowering her sunglasses to make eye contact. “I have no idea what he’s talking about. Hello, gentlemen. Strange times, and a strange day too, hmm?”
I tossed back the last of my mojito, pursing my lips. “It would have been very cool if you’d just talked to us, Vera. All those texts and calls you never returned, and for what? Why?”
She sighed as she removed her sunglasses, setting them down on the table. I didn’t expect her eyes to be red-rimmed. Vera drifted through her days like some ghost from a forgotten Hollywood, never taking anything too seriously, trading on glamor and excess. Somehow it never crossed my mind that the Jade Spider could be capable of crying.
“I do apologize, to the two of you most of all. It came as a shock to me, too. At first I was only tempted to test my theory, to see if one of our sibling-spiders was involved. And then came the curiosity of seeing if I could weed out which of them it was. And then came the fear, the realization that one of our number was abusing the web of rumor and gossip that we weave, that someone was exploiting our network of secrets in the name of doing actual harm.”
“You could have told us,” Leon said softly. “You know we would have done everything in our power to help.”
The earnest look on Leon’s face, the sincerity in his eyes — it could break a damn heart.
Vera shook her head, her eyes distant. “I suppose you could call it hubris, then. My foolish belief that I could identify the correct spider in time, that I could stop them. Yes. I should have told you the truth. Allow me to start now. I was the client all along. I put in the order for the job in the first place.”
“Bombshell,” Leon breathed.
My fingers tightened around my empty glass. Roscoe exhaled so slowly that the air escaped his lips in a long whistle. Johnny’s tattooed arm punctuated the pause in conversation, descending on the table to deliver Vera’s garish, almost offensively fluorescent cocktail.
“Why?” I asked, a single word, a curt question.
“I’d had my suspicions in the past. When you work with web and silk, with the strands of information as we do, you see the patterns forming.” Vera took a careful sip of her drink, nodding with approval. “One such pattern suggested interruptions, even interceptions when jobs involved rarer, more expensive targets, especially items to do with the manipulation of time. It had to be a spider. No doubt. They’d always been so careful, never overextending. Until now.”
I kneaded my forehead with the edge of my thumb. “So you placed the job, knowing that the quickening sand was exactly what they wanted, knowing it would lure them out.”
“You will, naturally, be compensated for your part of the work.” Vera rapped the table with the knuckles of both hands, indicating at both me and Leon. Good. We deserved something out of all this, damn it.
“Much appreciated,” I said. “I only wish we could have caught the anomalist. Your good friend is still at large.”
