Page 8 of All Out of Flux
Something high-pitched squeaked and twittered in the back of my head. I couldn’t make out the words, but I recognized it as my brain’s interpretation of how Leon might sound when he was nagging me.
That’s a terrible disguise, the voice said.Didn’t I tell you to keep a change of clothes in the trunk?
I scoffed, dismissing the Leon-voice. Was he nuts? The only change of clothes back there was just as stylish as everything else I owned.
But maybe he had a point. Maybe I needed to dress down sometimes, especially if I was trying to do something a little stealthier. What kind of a finder would I be if I wasn’t open to adapting, to finding more ways to become more efficient with my work?
This wasn’t the day for that, though. I wrinkled my nose at the ball cap, flinging it into the backseat. Fuck it. If Tío Gustavo happened to be in there, he’d sniff me out in an instant, anyway. Didn’t matter if I walked in wearing full drag, tits and all.
I stepped out of the car, chest thrust out, rolling my shoulders to make sure that my leather jacket fell over my bodyin just the right way. I nudged the aviators up my face with the tip of my finger. In the back of my head, the vague, twittering Leon-voice whistled and catcalled.
“Yeah,” I muttered to myself. “I know, right?”
And so I strode toward the shop. The place? Hermanas Arcanas, loosely but not quite translated as “magical sisters.”
It was, in fact, owned by a pair of magical sisters, who in turn were owned by Tío Gustavo Brillante himself. He had his fingers in many of the pawnshops and curiosities shops sprinkled throughout the city, whether they were mundane or magical. Tío Gustavo wasn’t picky like that. In his opinion, everybody was worth scamming.
Hermanas Arcanas, however, was most definitely a magical establishment. No one who wasn’t supposed to know could tell from the outside, of course, the same way it worked for Unholy Grounds. Only those in the know could really know, whether from the buzz of ambient magic that hung in the air, or from the quiet power held by the sisters themselves.
I couldn’t spot either of them as I approached the front door, but Teresita and Luisita Mendez were accomplished mages in their own right. You’d have to be to work around enchanted objects. It took a certain amount of arcane awareness to correctly identify the business end of a magic wand, for example, or to know whether that cursed ring would fuse to its wearer’s finger.
Little chimes above the door rang as I entered. Tiny brass bells. No magic within them, but the ringing lingered throughout the interior of the shop.
A labyrinth of vintage furniture and décor covered so much of the shop that I could hardly make out the walls and the floor. It almost seemed deliberate, how a path had been defined for traveling through this maze of antiques. Would I find a minotaur at the end? Not if it found me first.
It smelled of incense, old books, ancient wood, the better to give the right impression to the impressionable. Much of it was smoke and mirrors. That was the entire point. Look, smell, and sound mystical enough, and it might just lead to a sale.
“Feel free to look around,” said a voice from behind an armoire to my left.
Was that Luisita or Teresita? I could never tell, anyway. They were twins, after all, the kind that enjoyed playing it up by dressing alike, talking alike, and finishing each other’s sentences.
A head poked out from behind a bookshelf on the other side of a store, the eyes only giving me a passing glance. “Yes, yes. Let us know if you need anything.”
The sister vanished again in a rustle of cloth and the faint tinkle of jewelry. I only caught a glimpse of black hair done up in an elaborate coif, then finished off with a single yellow rose.
I coughed and said something polite in answer, keeping my head down. Neither had found me very interesting. Good. They didn’t need eyes on their customers, given that they had multiple methods of security in place. The cameras, for one thing, because only the most foolish of mages would forego the benefits of modern technology entirely.
But they had wards, too. I was sure of it. Magical glyphs and traps, not unlike the ones that Roscoe liked to use to defend Unholy Grounds. This wasn’t the sort of place where you could stick something in your pocket and walk out. Setting off the alarm at the door wasn’t the big issue here.
It was whether or not the thing in your pocket was rigged to explode. A crude and violent way to deter theft in the arcane underground, but that was why finders had to be very careful about our work. That did add an extra layer of complexity to my problem, though. I had a second reason for coming to the shop that day.
The Jade Spider’s new assignment.
It was a simple statuette of indeterminate origin, made out of a mineral that had been smoothed out over the ages. A pale, almost tan sort of stone, carved centuries ago into the approximate shape of a human. Now the features had been worn away, whether from natural weathering or indelicate handling over time.
Which did strike me as odd, because Vera had explained that the statuette itself was hardly magical. Maybe its influence was stronger, once, but now it only held a remnant of its enchantment, described to me and Leon as a very primitive luck charm. That made it even more of a challenge to hunt down.
We had ways of finding enchanted objects in the arcane underground. But whereas a book of shadows that once belonged to a powerful witch might stand out as sharply as a blazing bonfire, a shabby old lucky charm might only burn as bright as a birthday candle.
Not that I could even detect artifacts on my own. Simply didn’t have the talent. Someone like Roscoe might manage, given plenty of time and concentration.
But the idea of going window shopping with Roscoe, of all people, made me glad enough to do things the old-fashioned way. Loved the boy to pieces, but hours upon hours of him talking my ear off about arcane minutiae and ancient history? The very thought of it made me shudder.
Still, it was surprising what you could find from casually browsing through old shops. I’d never actually completed a mission from stumbling upon a client’s artifact in a pawn shop — how convenient would that be, eh?
I ran my fingers along the top of an old writing desk, inspected an old, grubby inkwell. No statuettes in sight. I raised my head to scan the place, on the lookout for anything evenvaguely shaped like a slightly deformed human. Instead I saw a pair of eyes staring right back into mine.
“Oh, fuck,” I sputtered. “Oh, God. Sorry, sorry. I didn’t see you there.”
