Hexomancy

by Michael R. Underwood

  “Go get him, sis,” Priya finished, toasting with tears in her eyes.

  “You’re not just saying this because you think it’s the right thing to do and are being all self-sacrificing and noble?” Ree asked, sniffling.

  “At no point did I say it was that,” Priya said, making it very clear that was exactly what she was doing. “I’m fine. I’m no superhero. I want to live my life with a minimum of chances of random monster encounters, and you go running toward them. Drake doesn’t want to endanger someone, but you go after danger yourself. He thought I was someone he had to protect, but you, you’ll keep his ass out of the fire. You two just have to get over your respective bullshit and figure out how to be together.”

  “When did you get Yoda levels of wise?” Ree asked, putting her drink down.

  “I’ve watched every season of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, so I know exactly what not to do.”

  Ree wanted to hug her friend but also wanted to respect the fact that doing this was taking a big honking act of will on her part, and godsdamnit why did feelings have to be made out of squishy gut-wrenching complicated crap?

  “Now get out there and call him before my heroic self-sacrificing demeanor crumbles and I have to buy stock in Kleenex,” Priya said, taking a long slug from her drink.

  Ree thought better of it, then wrapped Priya in a hug anyway.

  “Those proton packs look amazing. You’re a badass,” she said, trying to take the conversation anywhere, literally anywhere else.

  “Get,” Priya said with the best smile she could muster, her eyes still red.

  And so she went, wrapping herself up again and heading to the street.

  She pulled out her phone in the building foyer, not interested in trying to have a sensitive phone call over the howling winds.

  First, she checked in with Sandra, who was, in fact, staying over with Darren that night as Ree’d remembered.

  That settled, she considered calling her dad, just to push things off a little more. But while she was sure he’d be as cheerleader-y as ever, she needed to shit or get off the pot, as the saying went.

  “Here goes something,” Ree said.

  Drake picked up after the second ring.

  “Ahoy ahoy?”

  Hearing his voice sloughed five pounds of worry off her shoulders. You got it bad, girl, she told herself.

  “Hey, it’s me. You free? I got off early from work and was hoping we could chat.”

  “Oh, certainly. I was just recalibrating the Aetherial Breakthrough Actuator. It’s been inconsistent to a degree that’s approaching dangerous, but given that it is currently without power, my apartment will not implode if it’s left for the evening.”

  “What’s great is that you actually have to make stuff like that clear,” Ree said, an unconscious smile on her face.

  She continued, “Can you meet me at the Shithole in forty-five minutes? I need to do some errands.” It would only take her twenty minutes to get home in this weather, but she wanted the chance to change and primp at least a little.

  “Certainly. Until then,” Drake said.

  “See ya.” Ree hung up and exhaled the rest of her breath.

  Someone upstairs was looking out for her, and sent a bus around the corner for Ree to catch a quick ride home in just ten minutes instead of twenty. The buses were slow, too, since most of their drivers had never had to work their routes with snow, but it also meant she didn’t need to make tea just to warm herself up.

  She dumped all of her coats and work stuff in her room, checked the clock, then activated a nonmagical Preening Whirlwind. This involved taking a lightning-quick shower to wash off the smell of beer, then changing into fresh clothes. She considered wearing a date outfit, but thought that most of her more “modern” date outfits might magnify what was already likely to be a very shocking course of action for the temporally-displaced old-school Drake.

  Instead of a “date” outfit, she changed into the next set of work and adventuring clothes, with well-worn jeans that fit like tights and her Inigo Montoya T-shirt. She futzed with her hair, then decided to leave it as is, slightly curled and still wet from the shower, not short enough to dry instantly, but not really long enough to fully tie back to keep from getting wet. The perils of in-between-length hair.

  She reapplied a quick base of makeup and resisted the urge to wear her vampy red lipstick. She didn’t need to vamp out with Drake, which was kind of the point. When she was out with the Rhyming Ladies, she found that she often wanted to play up the “I am actually a woman and want to find someone to date” card, or the other single men and women at the clubs and concerts would gloss right over her and fixate on her more outwardly-sexy friends, whether their tastes ran toward the Amazonian, the voluptuous, or the “exotic.” (In racist objectification land, Indian seemed to trump half–Puerto Rican for the title of Most Exotic. Feh.)

  Calm down, she told herself. Come on too strong and you might explode the poor man’s mind. It’ll be weird enough for you to come on to him, let alone if you tackle the boy as soon as he steps in the door.

  Though that would be hilarious, she realized.

  So as to avoid compulsive nervousness, she picked up her phone and caught up on the Internets.

  She had a good half-dozen DMs from Charlie with various links about geeky gossip (Star Trek: Into Darkness rumors, mostly. Did anyone believe that Benedict Cumberbatch wasn’t going to be playing Khan? Whitewashing aside, it seemed like a slam dunk).

  She was tapping out a response to Charlie’s link about a rumored Easter egg that fixed the ending to Dragon Age II when the buzzer rang.

  The Shithole had its failings, mostly the walk-up, but it did have a working buzzer system with video. Someone buzzed your apartment, and a black-and-white screen at the door showed video. Drake looked like he had, in fact, just dropped whatever he was working on and come over. Smudges on his face, hair unkempt, and wearing the leather overalls that, as far as she could tell, came out only when he wasn’t certain that things weren’t going to explode on him.

  Ree buzzed Drake into the building, then proceeded to fidget for a while. She unlocked the bolt and slide locks, waiting. Ree swore she could hear every step he took, her urge to flip out, run, and/or hurl escalating moment by moment.

  With Jane, she’d had crazy circumstances and the short time frame to keep her shit together. Relatively. Plus, since Jane had been a mess because of the curse, Ree had reacted by being the stable one. With Drake, it was all about forcing the question that had been sitting at the edge of her vision since the end of the Halloween origin story to their acquaintance. The friend-to-lover jump was a risky, risky move, but she had verification from basically everyone in the universe that this was a match waiting to happen.

  None of that kept her from jumping when Drake knocked on the door.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Here Goes Nothing

  Ree held in the Eep, and stepped forward to open the door.

  Drake lit up as he entered, running a gloved hand through his hair.

  “Good evening,” he said, moving forward with familiarity to put his coat away. Ree pivoted to give him room but felt his warmth as he passed by.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” she asked out of habit, though she really didn’t want him to have a drink in hand that he might drop, or worse, use as a body language shield.

  “Yes, please. My superintendent believes that the proper response to this spate of weather is to consign the building to the climate of the Sahara. It reminds me of—”

  “Drink coming right up,” Ree said, trying to head off the story without just shutting him down.

  She removed the already-poured glass of water, as well as the also-already-poured glass of tequila she’d made for herself. Making sure she wasn’t transposing them, she returned and handed the water to Drake, who had shed
his coat. He was down to his working chaps and a soot-and-grease-stained collared shirt. The smudges and dirt were gone from his face, though.

  He took a long, long, impossibly long drink, and Ree joined him, cutting herself off at two shots’ worth. She wanted to be loosened up, not sloppy.

  “So,” she said, not sure what else to say. “There’s no way for this to not be awkward. I should know, because I’ve been running scenarios for months like I was planning a heist, and all signs point to awkward. So it’s just going to have to be awkward.”

  Drake arched an eyebrow, the move so isolated and precise and so archetypically Drake that she couldn’t help but laugh, the nervousness bubbling over.

  “Are you quite all right? Is there something amiss? With Eastwood, perhaps?”

  “No, none of that,” Ree said. Beat around the bush some more, why don’t you? taunted an inner voice

  “We’ve been friends for a while and have faced down more weird-ass shit together in fifteen months than is probably best for our mental health to recount all at once. And we get along great, but we come at life from such different worlds that I don’t have a flying fuck’s idea what that really means above and beyond the friend angle.”

  Several thoughts passed over Drake’s face, reacting and considering.

  Ree set her glass down, seeing that Drake had done the same.

  SHIT OR GET OFF THE POT! yelled a voice in her head.

  “Oh, fuck it,” Ree said, stepping forward, grabbing him around the ears with both hands, and going in for a big, Roger Rabbit–scale kiss.

  Ree pulled back, watching every nanosecond for a response. The infinitesimal moment before Drake moved stretched on to forever, letting Ree’s brain churn through every possible negative reaction and rejection possible in a blatant contravention of the ordinary flow of time because screw you, emotions.

  Drake blinked, a hilariously cartoonish motion.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t—” Ree was cut off by Drake plunging forward, restarting the kiss with vigor.

  Drake wrapped his hands around Ree’s lower back and pulled her up into his embrace.

  FUCKING FINALLY! said her brain, high-fiving itself while victory GIFs played in her mind, lighting off fireworks of sensation and arousal and fiero.

  As the moment stretched into infinity, twin buzzing sounds crashed the party.

  “Ignore,” Ree declared, returning to the kiss.

  A moment later, the buzzing was replaced by twin “Hey! Pick up, gorrammit!” in Eastwood’s voice.

  The pair disentangled. Ree asked, “What the hell?” in the direction of her phone, which sat on the lip of the couch. From behind her, she bet that Drake’s phone was the other source of Eastwood’s weird phone-hack.

  Ree woman-handled Drake as she stepped over to retrieve her phone, unwilling to let go now that she’d gotten her hands on him. She stared murderating daggers at her phone, which continued to make the “Hey! Pick up, gorrammit!” sound despite being on silent.

  “This had better be fucking good,” Ree said, putting the call on speakerphone.

  Eastwood’s voice answered—but not live, as a recording.

  “Ree. If you’re hearing this, then I haven’t checked in with the specialty app I made. What follows is the GPS information for the tracking chip I’ve had embedded subcutaneously. I’m in trouble. Please, I need your help.”

  She hung up and called Eastwood right back, ready to give him a large, cannon-shaped piece of her mind.

  Rational Ree knew that this was probably a big deal, and that they should get moving.

  But Libido Ree was not going to stand for the universe so blatantly and unfairly cock-blocking her in such spectacular fashion, and someone was getting chewed out, that was for fucking certain.

  The call rang through to voicemail, and Ree hung up, wishing for a moment for the return of old telephones where you could slam down the receiver to express anger. If she slammed her phone like that, the gorilla glass would shatter into a million foot-shredding pieces. Instead, both phones beeped again, Ree’s displaying a destination point on her maps app.

  “We shouldn’t ignore that, should we?” Ree asked, one hand still wrapped around Drake. As long as they were still touching, that moment wouldn’t vanish, wouldn’t escape back into impossibility. It would stay real.

  Drake ran a hand through Ree’s hair. She leaned into the touch, wishing for the universe to have better timing.

  “I’m afraid not. As conflicted a figure as he may be, he is a friend, and a fixture of the community. And I for one have no interest in letting Lucretia get the last laugh.”

  “Damnit. But when we’re done with that, I move for an immediate resumption of smooching.”

  “Seconded,” Drake said, his face flush. “I was rather hoping that I knew the reason why you asked me to come calling, but even an imagination spurned on by visits to countless impossible realms of Faerie could not predict how ravishing that kiss would be.”

  Ree rolled a save vs. melting in her shoes.

  “Put a pin in that beautiful mushy stuff. I won’t do any good to you as a puddle and needing to be carried around in a bucket. We can do better than the Wonder Twins. Also, not related.”

  Drake smiled the smile of missed pop culture references, and moved for his coat. Ree let him go, heading back into her bedroom to retrieve her own coat.

  You are going to owe me so damned bad, she thought in Eastwood’s direction as they bundled back up and headed into the night.

  The GPS signal led them to an overpriced parking lot in the center of town, the kind of place where event pricing topped $30, and somehow, every single day in the week seemed to be an “event.”

  In reality, the only time that Thursday was that kind of event was when it was trying to take your money.

  “So, where’s Clint?” Ree asked, looking around the building. The structure had room for several hundred cars, and if Eastwood was stuffed into someone’s trunk, this would take a while.

  Drake asked, “May I inspect your mapping program?”

  Ree handed over the phone, feeling a jolt of not-actual electricity when their gloved hands met again.

  They made their way into the ground level of the parking garage, walking by an empty guard station with snow piled around it like it was the peak of a mountain.

  It was all she could do to not just pop the locks to an SUV and head to Makeout Town, though making out in cars had never actually managed to be that comfortable.

  Focus, Ree. Nookie later.

  “And how accurate are these signals, usually?”

  “GPS? Usually within a hundred feet or so, if you’re using the good ones.”

  “But it does not indicate elevation, does it?”

  “Why would it . . .” Ree asked, then stopped in place. “Shit. He’s at Wells’s, isn’t he?”

  “That does seem likely. I thought that her laboratory was located farther south.”

  “She had to move after the attack on Grognard’s. Too many gnomes in the neighborhood. She moved uptown, right around here. Sadly, that means it’s sewer time.”

  Drake’s nose wrinkled in autonomic disgust.

  Ree made her way toward an alley. “Not exactly the kind of getting dirty I was hoping for tonight.”

  Now, where is that going to be? Ree did mental math and started sweeping snow aside, revealing a manhole cover.

  Drake helped her clear off the rest of the snow, and then Ree pulled out her switchblade to jimmy loose the cover.

  “Actually. You got a crowbar in that coat of yours?” she asked.

  “Alas, no. I left my breaking-and-entering kit in my semiformal jacket.”

  Ree took a break to apply another smooch, which caused Drake to wobble, nearly losing his crouched footing.

  “And what was that for?” Drake asked.r />
  “Your sense of humor.”

  “Then I shall endeavor to not be as humorous during our melees, as I rather think a battlefield kiss is inadvisable, despite its prevalence in films.”

  “I just need to channel an action movie and we’ll be fine.”

  “Very well. How long will you need?” Drake asked, working to pry open the manhole.

  “I mean, in general,” Ree said, pulling on the other side. They got the manhole cover free of its slot, and hauled it off, depositing it by the edge of the street. Drake draped his feet into the hole.

  “It’s cool. I got point,” Ree said, wagging the lightsaber.

  Drake removed his feet. “After you.”

  Ree gave Drake her best flirty wink and held the hilt down into the sewer, thumbing on the blade.

  The blue light illuminated the sewer, a thick stream of sewer water flowing thanks to melt from the epic snowfall.

  “Looks wet down there. Watch your feet.” Ree dropped into the sewer, landing into a crouch, holding the lightsaber tight as she looked both ways, checking for gnomes, alligators, or whatever the Pearson sewer might have in store for them that week.

  “All clear,” Ree announced, stepping to the side and holding her lightsaber parallel to the flow of the sewer, keeping the blade away from Drake as he dropped into the tunnel. His landing made a splash that flowed over her thankfully-waterproof boots.

  Uggs, in addition to being the stinkiest kind of boot, were also not waterproof. Instead, Ree went for the ugly but functional pig leather, purchased secondhand for lessened ethical wooginess.

  “Okay, here we go. Watch my back?” Ree asked.

  “And I will also keep an eye on our flank.” Ree could hear his smirk without having to hear it.

  “Cheeky.”

  “I find that the intimacy of a passionate kiss leaves me rather less inhibited about making such comments. Though I will, of course, cease to do so should you wish.”