by Hero Bowen
“I’ve still got this.” Nadia pulled out her tactical folding knife and eyed the blade, losing herself in the dull sheen. She was no knife-fighting expert, as Valhalla had proved earlier, but the facts were these: she wanted to live in a world with Nick in it, and this deal with Miles led to that possibility.
And the one benefit of falling out of her family’s good graces was that she had little else to lose.
Chapter Sixteen
Since Basha had kicked her out with nothing but what was on her back, the next morning, Nadia had to borrow a couple of items from Miles’s “lost and found” conquest box, which he’d assured her had all been washed and dried by his poor housekeeper—a woman Nadia had yet to see.
“I can’t believe you took a woman home who wore an ‘I Heart Georgia’ T-shirt,” Nadia grumbled as they walked east along River Street. Jack had parked up on the western side of the Hyatt Regency so the duo could approach their destination on foot. That way, they’d look less suspicious, and Jack would have time to prepare for his role in the rest of the plan, which would have him driving something a little less . . . wheely.
Miles grinned. “I can’t believe you wouldn’t wear it. What’s more incognito than a gift shop T-shirt? You’d fit right in as a tourist.”
“Standing next to you, I could wear a clown suit and I still wouldn’t stand out.” She gestured to the black jeans and muted greige sweatshirt that Miles had picked as his undercover getup. Sure, it was simple, but on him it looked runway fresh. Plus, he had those stupid sunglasses on again.
As for her, she’d gone with a pair of faded blue jeans—the super tight kind favored by her mother—and a plain white V-neck. Over the top, she had a wine-colored Art College zip-up sweater. The entire outfit had come from the cast-off box that she’d vowed never to speak of again. But at least the new ensemble made her feel a little fresher and would help her avoid immediate detection from the Wishmaster’s crew.
After last night, an easiness had developed between her and Miles that had still been there when they’d woken up—separately, of course. Nadia had worried it might be like the awkward first day back at work after an office Christmas party where too much festive spirit had been consumed and memories were a bit foggy. But that morning, he’d had a smile and a coffee waiting for her while jazz had floated through his fancy sound system. It wasn’t quite friendship, but perhaps “accomplices” was a fitting term, given the occasion.
“You still have the jar, the candles, and the lighter with you, right?” Nadia asked.
Miles patted the crossover bag across his chest. “Jar’s right in here, and I’ve got Pomegranate Noir, along with English Pear and Freesia. Oh, and Lime Basil and Mandarin. I thought a variety would be good.”
“You realize it doesn’t matter what it smells like? It doesn’t change the potency of the wish, though Pomegranate Noir sounds like it could do a fair bit of damage.” She should’ve known he’d bring ridiculous candles, but they’d do the trick if they had to make the wish straightaway to avoid it being stolen back in its unused form again.
Miles shrugged. “You never know, the perfect scent might be the key to wording the perfect wish.”
Nadia had given him the task of bringing the candles and lighter as a way of proving that she could be trusted not to steal his wish again. It was also why he was the one carrying the wishing jar. All they needed to do was steal Valhalla’s wooden locket of a wish trap before the buyer could absorb it and spend the wish, but it was smart to have Miles’s backup trap. Still, part of Nadia hoped Mrs. Lea wouldn’t show up today at all after their heart-to-heart conversation the night before.
They turned left onto the River Street walk as they reached Morrell Park: a rectangle of grass and trimmed shrubbery with a few spread-boughed trees set right on the riverfront. Here, tourists took out their phones for a photo opportunity with Florence Martus—the famed Waving Girl who had waved her handkerchief to passing ships and was now immortalized as a statue.
Nadia hoped the statue would be a good omen today. She looked ahead at Waving Girl Landing, the address on Croak’s note, and checked the time on her phone. It was 8:56, which meant they had twenty-four minutes to scope out any people waiting to board the riverboat and prevent Mrs. Lea from picking up the wish.
Closer to the landing, Miles paused and leaned up against the boardwalk railing. Nadia stopped with him and cast a sly side-eye toward the riverboat landing.
“Do you think we’ll have to actually get on the riverboat?” Miles whispered, though there was no one else around.
Nadia shrugged. “Seems like nine twenty is a pretty specific time to give. I figure the buyer is supposed to get on the nine twenty riverboat, which is where the pickup will happen.” She frowned at him. “Why? Don’t tell me you get seasick. I thought you had a jet boat.”
“Jack has a jet boat, and he’s never gotten me on the damn thing. Not yet, anyway.” Miles shivered, looking a touch green around the gills. “I’ll swim in a pool, but being away from shore . . . Let’s just say there’s a reason I don’t own a yacht.”
Nadia groaned in exasperation. “You could’ve told me that sooner. Just try not to throw up. We’ve got one shot at this.” She opened her phone and brought up the picture of the note. “I still can’t figure out what this rain/basketball thing is supposed to mean as part of the password. Usually it involves more than just a couple of random words. I’ve had to use them at wish exchanges before.”
“My finding skills aren’t really doing me any favors with that. But we’re in the right place for the wish. I feel all warm and fuzzy when I look at that riverboat.” He nodded to one in the near distance—a vision of green, white, and creamy yellow that reminded Nadia of a tugboat. She preferred the riverboats that looked like wedding cakes, with the rotating paddles.
“It’s got to be an added layer of security,” Nadia speculated aloud. “After what happened at Bonaventure, the Wishmaster won’t be taking any chances. Then again, using a private meeting place for the drop-off would’ve been the safer choice, if that was the concern.”
Miles canted his head. “Maybe they’ve been compromised, or they’re worried about having spies in their private drop-off zones.”
“Could be,” Nadia answered. Kaleena was obsessed with secrecy, the epitome of a better-safe-than-sorry kind of person. “Or maybe they’re just trying to avoid using known meeting places. I’ve never had a drop-off on the riverfront—too many people around.”
Nadia suspected there might be another reason for this location, but she kept it to herself. Since they’d fought Valhalla, the Wishmaster definitely knew that at least two people were after this particular wish. Putting the drop-off on a riverboat, just after rush hour and before the tourist influx, meant there wouldn’t be many people getting on—an easy way to narrow down the number of people her goons would have to look out for.
Fifteen minutes later, one of the multi-decked wedding cake steamers chugged up to the landing, bearing the name Georgia Queen in red letters on the side. For a fleeting second, Nadia’s heart leaped with childish excitement, but she quickly scolded herself. This wasn’t a leisure cruise. She had a job to do.
“Come on, this is us.” Nadia weaved her arm through Miles’s and put on a goofy, tourist-esque smile as she led him to the landing. She pretended to point out various landmarks across the river and leaned into him, as though they were lovers taking a stroll.
“What are you doing?” he hissed.
She peered up, batting her eyelashes. “Blending in. We’re tourist lovebirds.”
“Then pull out your phone and take some selfies. Nobody points or oohs and aahs anymore.”
She wanted to point even harder and ooh even louder, but he wasn’t wrong.
Nadia slipped her phone out of the front pocket of her borrowed jeans and pretended to snap a photo of them. She deliberately shot the pictures at unflattering angles to annoy him, but it turned out to be pretty hard to take a bad picture of Miles.
He huffed and tried to take the phone from her, but she elbowed him discreetly.
“This was your idea,” she reminded him. “Now look at me as if I’m one of your fancy guitars.”
He chuckled. “I see you more as a pair of big cymbals. You come in when no one’s expecting it and scare the shit out of people.”
After purchasing tickets from the little hut, the pair wandered down the landing and onto the waiting riverboat. Once aboard, Miles steered her up three sets of steps and across the top deck, toward the squat, yellow-painted box at the front. She didn’t know too much about boats, but it looked like it might be the captain’s “bridge.”
“Have you got your knife ready to go?” Miles murmured, patting his crossbody bag. She presumed he was feeling around for his revolver.
Nadia fumbled at her back pocket. “Yeah, how about you?”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, eh? If anyone snaps a picture of me waving a gun around, my publicist is going to murder me.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Because that’s the main priority here—you not getting the paparazzi sicced on you.”
Truth be told, him getting recognized was fairly high on her list of concerns. If a stranger called attention to Miles, one of Kaleena’s intermediaries would definitely notice, and they’d know that Nadia was here too. But it worked the other way as well. If one of the intermediaries saw her first, they’d know Miles was here. Among the Savannahian wishmongers, she was basically a celebrity herself as the Wishmaster’s sister.
Still, she didn’t mention that worry to Miles. She didn’t want him to get cold feet and back out now that they were already on the riverboat, especially since he was the one with the exit strategy and the finding ability.
“And you’re sure Jack’s in position?” Nadia bristled with nervous energy, her throat dry as sandpaper.
Miles took a deep breath. “I texted him while you were buying the tickets. He’s got the engine running, ready to catch us when we . . . ugh, don’t remind me. This wasn’t what I had planned for today.”
“Were you supposed to be shooting for the cover of GQ? Is there a supermodel you haven’t slept with, awaiting your call?” She flashed him a smile to try to cheer him up. “And please tell me that bag’s waterproof. A soggy candlewick won’t do us much good.”
Miles laughed, but it sounded hollow. “Don’t worry, they’ll stay dry. This thing is limited edition and made of military-grade something or other.”
As they approached the bridge, a burly bouncer appeared in front of the entrance. Nadia’s eyebrows went up. They were definitely in the right place. She and Miles made a show of leaning over the railing to look at the water below. Pretending to wipe some schmutz off Miles’s cheek, Nadia turned them both around, backs to the hired muscle. She raised her phone and snapped a selfie, framing the bouncer instead of her and Miles. She opened the pic as she pretended to huddle into Miles’s side, and magnified the image to check if she recognized the muscle.
She panned the image around the screen with one finger until she could see the windows of the captain’s bridge, but they were all tinted black, preventing anyone from peering in. With a sigh, she handed over her phone to Miles, who stowed it away in his bag for safekeeping.
“Do you know him?” Miles asked, tucking a strand of hair behind Nadia’s ear in melodramatic, rom-com fashion.
She shook her head. “No. Small mercies.” She gave Miles a playful slap on the chest and blinked in surprise. It was like hitting granite. “He doesn’t look like one of the Wishmaster’s cronies. The Wishmaster likes things covert, and this guy stands out.”
“I’m warm,” Miles muttered. “This has to be the place.”
Nadia frowned. “Then we just need to stand here and stop the buyer from coming upstairs. If that guy is one of the Wishmaster’s meatheads, the buyer will be going straight for him.”
“I’ll take care of that.” He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it, only to make a sour face afterward. “Ugh, you could knock out a horse with the sanitizer on your hands.”
She giggled girlishly, hating every moment of the charade. “What are you going to do?”
“Use my mojo to find the buyer and block her from coming upstairs. I might even whip out my celebrity charm if things get hairy.”
Nadia smirked. “Her name’s Dolores Lea. You could pretend you know her, if you’re really struggling.”
“Oh yeah, because that’s believable,” he said. “If anything happens up here, just bang on the side of the boat, or scream, or something. I don’t know how these missions tend to work.”
With that, he walked away, though he made sure to keep hold of her hand until the last moment, like he was an old-timey soldier going away to war. Hopefully, the bouncer had bought their puppy-love couple act—otherwise she’d just giggled for nothing.
As the riverboat pulled away from the landing, Nadia kept up the pretense of staring down at the water. Another couple came up the stairs to the top deck. Neither person was Mrs. Lea.
Nadia clenched the deck’s railing as the couple walked up to the bouncer. What if the couple worked for Kaleena, and one of them had wished for the ability to disguise themselves?
“Can we go in front of the captain’s cabin to take pictures?” a young woman with long blonde hair asked the bulky guard.
The man shook his head. “You can’t obscure the view, or the captain won’t be able to see. I suggest you get down to the lower decks. Looks like rain is coming our way.”
Nadia felt a flicker of doubt. Maybe this was a normal security guard after all, hired to stop people from blocking the captain’s view, and she was wasting her time up here. She supposed there was only one way to find out.
She waited for the young couple to head back down to the lower decks, then drifted toward the bouncer in what she hoped looked like a casual fashion. He barely showed a hint of acknowledgment and kept staring forward.
“Excuse me.” She cleared her throat. “I’m here to speak to the captain.”
The guard’s expression remained blank. “The captain is pretty busy right now.” He tilted his head skyward. “It’s getting gray and cloudy out there. I hope the weather holds out for the cruise. Think it’s going to rain?”
A eureka moment sparked in Nadia’s head. He’d used the word “rain” with that couple before. And there was no such thing as coincidence in the wishing world. It had to be the password from Croak’s note, and “rain” was part of this feeder line, to gauge if she was acting on behalf of the buyer or not. Anyone who wasn’t in the know would think the bouncer was small-talking about the weather, but she’d cracked it. All she had to do now was slip the second word into her answer.
“I friggin’ hope not. I’m just here for my grandma. My buddies and I were planning to play basketball at the park a little later on,” she replied, hoping there wasn’t some set phrase she was supposed to say instead of just fitting her word into a sentence. Like an “eagle flies at midnight” kind of thing, followed by an exchange of sleek metal suitcases and terrible Russian accents.
The guard’s face relaxed. “Would you like to meet the captain?”
“I’d be honored.” Nadia smiled, her heart pounding a mile a minute. She wasn’t quite sure what she’d pulled off, or what she’d face on the bridge, but she couldn’t help feeling a swell of satisfaction. Even if this was only stage one.
“I’ll just see if the captain is ready for . . . visitors.” The bouncer gave an awkward head-bob of a bow and disappeared inside the bridge, leaving Nadia to her jittering nerves.
She’d been waiting for a couple of minutes when Miles bounded back up the stairs to the top deck. He skidded to a halt at the head of the steps and rushed out the words “I’m sorry!” in a way that was anything but discreet.
“What for?” Nadia snapped.
“The old woman is on her way up here,” he replied, rapid-fire. “I tried to tell her it was out of bounds, but she said she had someone to meet.�
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Panicking, Nadia split her attention between the bridge door and the stairwell. If Mrs. Lea saw her, it wouldn’t take long before she realized she’d been duped.
“Why didn’t you stop her?” Nadia ran a stressed hand over her hair.
Miles flashed her a withering look and pointed to himself. “You wanted me to put my hands on an old white woman?”
At that moment, the bouncer emerged from the bridge. His eyes narrowed, then widened as he seemed to really see Miles for the first time. His mouth opened, but Nadia didn’t wait to hear what he’d say. She charged through the still-open door, shouting a strangled “good luck” to Miles as she slammed it behind her and yanked the bolt across.
Panting, Nadia pressed her back flat to the locked door that rattled into her with the percussion of the bouncer’s concerned fists. The handle spasmed violently but held, which was good in one sense—but it also denied her exit, and she had no strategy on how to make one. The bouncer would be prowling like a wolf out there until Nadia reemerged, unless Miles figured out a way to handle him. She was definitely flying by the seat of her pants now.
At the controls, a figure turned to meet her. But the captain could’ve kept their back to her, and Nadia still would’ve known who it was. The height gave it away.
Valhalla. And she was wearing the wooden wish trap locket around her neck.
Still revved up on adrenaline, Nadia pushed off from the door, lunging for Val and knocking her into the controls.
“I wondered if it’d be you,” Nadia snarled, reaching for the locket.
Val grabbed Nadia’s shoulders and kept the locket out of her reach. “Croak said you were up to something. Never thought you’d be stupid enough to come here.” Her voice, thankfully, wasn’t Basha’s this time, but instead had a higher, smoother tone.
“Not stupid if . . . it . . . works.”
