Page 59 of Hex and the City
“Later,” I said, vaulting off him, off the bed, making a beeline for the bathroom. “If there even is a later. I figured it out. We have to go. Move.”
He sat up, now more confused than anything. “Go where?”
“Get dressed, I’ll tell you on the way.”
I ran the water in the sink, cleaned myself up as best as I could. The tree and the bird with the shifting seasons in Lunata Park, the bizarre renewal of Naranja Plaza’s splendor. The quartz, the quickening sand.
Again, weren’t sand and quartz fundamentally made of the same thing? Sand was just tiny quartz, at the end of the day. This was never about decay and rot and rebirth. The anomalist was manipulating the most inevitable force in the universe.
We were up against a time mage. A chronomancer.
I twisted the knob on the faucet, cutting off the water, presenting myself with an unfortunate conundrum. Stopping the flow of water was easy enough.
How the hell were we supposed to stop the flow of time itself?
26
MAX
Ikept my head low, my foot on the gas, and my eyes laser-focused on the streets as Leon babbled away in my ear. He was right. Everything fit together. It wasn’t the most common thing to encounter in the arcane underground, time magic. Part of it was how difficult the craft was to practice in the first place.
Flub the casting of a fireball? You get burns that need dressing and treating, stat. Mess up the wrong kind of time magic? Age yourself fifty years. Lock yourself in an endless time bubble. Turn yourself into dust.
“Come on, come on,” Leon muttered, glaring at my phone on the dash. He’d punched in the number the Masque had left us on our individual lumps of alabaster.
A number on a jagged rock. Worst calling card in the world. Miraculous that it didn’t burrow a hole through my jeans pocket. The ring tone blared throughout my car speakers. I wished the Masque would pick up already, just to end the torture. He didn’t even give us a name I could cuss out.
Finally, a staticky and vaguely frantic “Hello?” came in through the speakers. Oh-ho. No more of that smarmy overconfidence from before, eh, Mr. Masque?
“A time mage,” Leon yelled, fingers digging into the dashboard. “The anomalist is a time mage.”
One second of silence, followed by a derisive snort. “We already knew that,” the Masque declared smugly. “Now if there’s nothing else useful for you to report, Mr. Alcantara — ”
“A spider. Did you know that your perp was a spider?”
The Masque didn’t answer. My mouth fell open. Was Leon being serious? And yet it all made sense.
“Hear me out.” Leon leaned closer to the phone, expression deathly still. I could see the signs on his face, the satisfaction of solving a puzzle. “Someone came out to the Smith house to grab the bag of quickening sand on the same night me and Max were supposed to. I chalked it up to coincidence, but we were the only two finders on the job.”
The look in Leon’s eyes was the first thing to really distract me from the road so far. They were sparkling with excitement, from the pure joy of fitting one puzzle piece into another. He was made for this. He thrived on this. And for whatever reason, he was getting me all amped up, too.
The Masque finally spoke. “You’re suggesting that someone found out by tapping into the spider network.”
“No. I’m suggesting that your ‘someone’ was already part of the spider network.”
My grip on the steering wheel tightened. That explained why Vera was being so cagey, ignoring our text messages and everything. She must have suspected, sending us to check out the anomalies, then pulling back and closing ranks once she confirmed another spider was involved. The Masques, the spiders — fuck, even the Brillantes — we all protected our own.
“When did you know?” I mouthed at Leon.
He shrugged. “Just now. Or a little earlier. Dunno, it just clicked together.” He sat up, thumped the dashboard. “And hey, do the spiders just choose fancy names for themselves or do their titles have anything to do with their magic?”
“It varies,” the Masque answered. “Why?”
“Crystal magic,” Leon announced triumphantly. “Everything the anomalist has thrown at us has used sharp, clear crystal, one way or another. If there’s a Quartz Spider out there, it’s got to be them.”
I racked my brain, checking the dimmest, dustiest parts for any mention of a Quartz Spider being active in Dos Lunas. Nope. Didn’t ring a bell. Must have been before my time.
“Masque,” I said to my phone. “Guy? Masque guy — look, we’re going to need a name from you in the future. But can you look in your records, check out whatever database you have? Look for a spider with the relevant abilities?”
