“Exactly!”
“How often does this result in cases of blood poisoning?” He just grinned. I should have been laughing, but I wasn’t. It was just one more thing.
“What’s up?” he asked. “You’re nervous.”
The muscles across my shoulders were tight. I must have walked in here looking like a wolf on the prowl. “Distracted. Hey, while I’m thinking of it—thanks. The reason this place works is you. So thanks.” Now I was sounding maudlin.
Shaun shrugged, a way to brush past the sentimentality. “I love it here. Dream job, you know?”
The bartender pushed over a glass of my favorite beer. Personalized service. I could hug the guy. “Cheers all around,” I said, and lifted the glass in a toast.
Ben, suit jacket over the back of a chair and the first couple of buttons of his shirt undone, was waiting for me at the back table, “our” table, where we held court and seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time. Sometimes plotting, sometimes just hanging out. This was our den, our refuge, our tribe.
Why did it all suddenly seem fragile?
He stood when I approached, and I set the glass down so he could fold me in an all-encompassing hug, his arms tight around me. I leaned my face against his neck and breathed deep, taking in his scent, soap and skin and the sweat of the day, the wild and fur of his werewolf side, as familiar as my own self.
“How’d it go tonight?”
“So you weren’t here for the drinking game?”
“No, I had a call from a client. There’s a drinking game?”
“Apparently.” I tried to sum up tonight’s far-ranging show, and couldn’t. “The usual, I think. It’s so hard to tell from that side of the mike. And how are you?”
His expression was drained. “It’s been one of those days.”
Ben was a criminal defense lawyer. When he said “one of those days,” he meant it, and I likely couldn’t imagine how bad it could really get. Because of client confidentiality he didn’t go into details, but he spent a lot of his professional life with people who were hitting bottom or on the way there.
I pulled back, tipped his chin toward me, and kissed him. I felt the tension leave him, and his arms settled more firmly around me. That only made my own tension more evident.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“That obvious?”
His smile was kind, and he brushed a strand of loose hair back behind my ear. “Seems like a little more than your usual after-show jitters.”
“Cormac’s on his way over. I think he found something.”
Ben sighed, pursed his lips. All that tension returned. “Right. Good thing we have beer.”
The man himself arrived maybe ten minutes later. I could smell him when the door opened, his distinct scent of leather jacket and close apartment living. Also, an undercurrent: herbs and lit candles—a magician’s tools. This, I associated with Amelia. His ghost, a Victorian wizard woman who’d died—or “died” rather—over a hundred years ago. And, I had to admit, his partner.
He came straight to the back table, trusting we would be here. We had a chair waiting for him across from us.
“Hey,” Ben said in greeting. “What’s up?”
“You’re not going to like it,” Cormac said. Which was a hell of a greeting. I’d have asked, How bad could it be? But this was Cormac, and my imagination failed me.
He pulled his laptop from a courier bag slung over his shoulder and opened the screen, turning it to face us. Ben and I leaned in close to look. I needed a few minutes to make out what I was looking at—an e-mail thread, maybe a dozen messages deep.
Earlier this year, we’d posted online a mysterious coded book of shadows that potentially contained information about what Roman planned—and how to stop him. We hoped crowd sourcing might help us decode the writing when all else failed. Finally, Cormac managed to translate the book. That was where we got confirmation about the volcano thing. In the meantime, dozens of people had sent him messages. This thread of conversation didn’t seem to have much to do with the book, but the correspondent must have contacted Cormac with enough information to warrant a response.
I read on. The unknown correspondent knew about Amy Scanlon—the author of the coded book of shadows—and asked a lot of questions about what Cormac knew about her: who she was, whom she was working with, what she was doing. The pointed interrogation was enough to raise the hairs on my neck and the hackles across my shoulders. This guy knew something, but what? Cormac’s replies were vague, leading without giving too much away. He kept his own identity safely hidden. Then the discussion got into really arcane details about some kind of dueling magic and spells.
“What exactly have you been getting up to?” I said, accusing. He’d spent time in prison, and as an ex-con he wasn’t supposed to carry—or handle, or even think about—guns anymore. He’d been pursuing
magic as a replacement, which seemed to miss the point to my thinking.