by Hero Bowen
Jack snorted. “Greedy people like you at the top take everything, while the rest of us can’t catch a break. I’m always doing everything you don’t want to do, whenever you want it done. And you never think twice about calling me to do your dirty work when I finally get a day to spend how I want.”
“You want to explain that? ’Cause I’m stumped about how I’ve been ‘greedy’ at all by asking you to do your job,” Miles shot back, sounding genuinely pissed off.
Jack waggled the gun, as if to remind Miles who had the mic.
“Well, you keep all the important shit to yourself, for one thing,” Jack explained, ignoring Miles’s comment. Clearly, he’d been building up to this for a long time. “While I was havin’ a smoke by the club, this guy in a funny black top hat comes up to me. I figure he’s a weirdo looking for a couple dollars or a hookup, but he tells me he’s got dirt on you that I’m gonna want to hear. I’m kinda pissed on account of you ruining my night, so I give him my number, just to see if he’s got what he says he does. Figure it’s worth something, right?”
Nadia fought an irritated noise from escaping her throat. Black Hat. That little bastard. There were no true allies in Savannah’s wishing world.
“So, when you and Nadia were at the house, I get the call,” Jack continued. “This guy tells me to meet him, so I go out to the place. Two guys—the one with the hat and that Asian dude who came out of the club. They told me something veeeery interesting.” He gesticulated with the gun, putting Nadia on edge. “Said they could hook me up with the same stuff you got—y’know, whatever this drug is that y’all are taking to make yourselves super powerful and creative. The Asian guy showed me some weird shit to prove it. This is my ticket in, Miles. I’m havin’ what y’all are havin’.”
“None of this is what you think it is, and if you think I treat you bad, wait till you see how the people you’re working for now are gonna treat you,” Miles said. “You gotta listen to me, man.”
Jack snickered. “I can handle myself. Look where you are right now.” He waggled his gun again. “You’re not talking me out of this. That guy made me promises, and I’ll make him keep ’em.”
While they bickered, Nadia balanced the candle in her lap, and the wish rush fizzed through her again. The problem was, while she needed an out for this particular situation, she wasn’t about to waste a wish—one of only three she could ever get—without it also getting her closer to Nick. She just couldn’t. Whatever she wished for would have to pull double duty.
After another moment’s thought, the wording came to her.
A thrill bounded through her veins as she brought the lighter to the crooked candle wick lying nearly smashed into the wax. She leaned over the candle to block the wind of the racing boat. A roll on the sparking mechanism and the flame awakened at once. She touched it to the wick—only to be met with a dismal hissing sound and a few disheartening spits. Dampness met her thumb and finger as she pinched the wick to straighten it out. The bag must’ve sprung a leak while they were in the water.
Nadia dug her fingernails into the wax in a futile attempt to reach the dry part of the wick. She would’ve broken the damn candle in half if it wasn’t encased in glass.
“Fame and fortune—if that’s what you’re after—don’t make a person happy.” Miles glanced at Nadia as he continued to lecture Jack. “Wouldn’t make your life any better, except you’d have to live with the fact that you stabbed your friend in the back to get it.”
“That’s rich, coming from you,” Jack retorted. “What you’ve got wasn’t from hard work either, was it? That’s right, that Cronk guy told me all about it.”
Puzzled, Nadia looked up from her wax-clawing, but Miles wouldn’t meet her eyes. She didn’t have time to ponder Jack’s words too much, though, as he veered the boat toward a small, empty dock a little way up the river.
“Jack, I—” Miles began.
“Shut up. Maybe you can try talkin’ to them.” Jack nodded at two figures approaching the dock, dressed in police uniforms.
With their window narrowing by the second, Nadia frantically tried to get the stupid candle to light. But every time she tried, she got nothing but hisses and sputters. Panicked, she gave up on that candle and rummaged another one from the bag. She took Pomegranate Noir in her hands and gave the lighter another go.
She rolled the sparking mechanism again but startled as Jack turned and their eyes met.
“What are you doing?” he snapped, wrenching the lighter and the candle out of her desperate grip. “You going to MacGyver a bomb or somethin’?”
Jack sneered as he snatched Miles’s bag and tossed it overboard, where it hit the water with a splash. He turned back to the wheel and maneuvered the boat the last bit of distance to the dock. Miles cast a distraught look at Nadia.
They’d lost their last chance.
Words from Basha years ago sprang into Nadia’s head. “Is no good to think of wishing as cure-all. Is good for some things, not everything. It will stab you in back more times than it helps. You remember this, you never have problem.”
Neither the words nor the thought of her grandmother helped Nadia’s feeling of helpless desperation.
“Come on, Jack,” Miles pleaded. “This is bad business.” He gestured at the riverbank where the “cops” waited. “These guys are serious. They might kill us!”
Jack shook his head. “That Crank guy promised that neither of you would get hurt,” he said, but his voice faltered. “It was just gonna be a negotiation.”
“They’re lying,” Nadia replied, not even bothering to hide her fear.
Jack’s gaze flitted from his former employer to the “cops” on the jetty. “I don’t want you to die, man.” He paused, the irony that he had a gun trained on Miles completely lost on him. “I’ll handle it. I’ve got a way with words.”
“Just keep driving the boat! You’re not going to talk them out of whatever they want,” Miles protested.
Jack didn’t reply.
Just shy of the dock, he reversed the engine, bringing the jet boat next to a mooring post. The bump of waves to Nadia’s right offered a tempting escape, but the pistol still hanging from Jack’s hand was more persuasive. The two fake officers waited ahead.
Folding his arms across his chest, Jack puffed himself up like a bullfrog. “All right, I’ve delivered. Now give me my ‘wish’ or whatever you guys call it. And remember, you promised nobody was going to get—”
A knife pinwheeled through the air almost too fast to see.
Jack collapsed onto the deck with a thud and rolled over, screaming. Jabbed into his left eye was a thin-bladed throwing knife that had buried itself just deep enough to somehow not kill him. The gun landed somewhere underneath him.
Nadia recoiled in horror and looked away, not daring to meet Miles’s eyes. The blade had come from the still-raised hand of the female “officer”—a willowy young woman with braided dark hair and cold eyes as devoid of emotion as a shark’s. Nadia recognized her as Calypso, another of the Wishmaster’s inner circle, rumored to have wished to never miss her target.
Not much of a rumor anymore. That kind of perfect aim, taking his eye and only his eye, was proof of a wish-given skill if ever Nadia had seen it.
“The only reason you’re alive is because I spared you,” Calypso said coolly. “A millimeter to the left and that blade would be lodged in your brain. Demand something else, why don’t you.”
Jack moaned in response.
“No?” Calypso spat. “Good. Now, shut the fuck up and get out of here. And I’ll be watching, so don’t do anything stupid. Cross me again, and the next one goes through your heart.”
Nadia could only stare at Calypso, fear melting all words off her tongue. Yes, Jack had betrayed them, but he hadn’t deserved to suffer like this.
Miles knelt over his driver, his expression panicked. “Jack! Hang in there, man.” He glared at the Wishmaster’s goons. “What the hell did you do that for?”
; “Because we felt like it. Now, let’s go,” replied Calypso’s male counterpart, a lackey Nadia didn’t recognize. He was small and mousy, with a pair of thick spectacles, but if he couldn’t offer the Wishmaster muscle, then he had to be wielding some other valuable skill.
A blur of black uniform slipped across the dock as the mousy man shot forward at inhuman speed and pinched the back of Miles’s neck. Nadia didn’t know what he’d done, but it couldn’t be good. Miles seemed frozen in shock while Calypso walked toward him with her arms outstretched.
Nadia scrambled away, ready to throw herself back into that sweet, murky Savannah River if it meant saving herself.
“Get back!” she warned the bespectacled man. “Don’t touch me.”
Before she could blink, the officer was behind her. His hand snapped around the back of her neck, his pinched fingers cold and slimy against her skin, as if he were dripping poison into her. She tried to shuffle farther back so she could tip herself into the water, but her limbs wouldn’t move. In fact, her whole body felt weirdly relaxed, like she’d been drugged.
“You don’t give orders,” he whispered as he picked her up and threw her over his shoulder with surprising strength.
Nadia tried to speak, but her jaw had gone slack, her mouth refusing to cooperate. And yet, she could still feel the unspent wish buzzing around inside her like a lost bumblebee trying to find the hive. How long would she be able to keep it before Kaleena pulled a secret out of her—and the wish with it?
Chapter Nineteen
Still woozy, Nadia and Miles were dumped into the back of a windowless van and left to roll around like discarded scaffolding in a builder’s pickup. Nadia wanted to curse or yell as they bounced around during the drive, but her mouth stayed frozen, as though she’d just come in from subzero temperatures and her body hadn’t caught up with the warmth yet.
She didn’t need Miles’s finding power to know where they were headed: the Wishmaster’s headquarters. Her inner “oh shit” instincts were strong.
Going there would bring a decisive end to her hopes for a brighter future. Kaleena would force two more wishes into her and take them back. Nadia would feel the high of each, and the all-consuming low of knowing she’d never get to use them for herself. No Nick, no desperate reunion after a year apart, no faraway place for them to grow gray and old. She really had kissed him, held him, told him she loved him for the last time. There would be no second chance. The one thing that had kept her in the wish-hunting game since he’d died was her dream of settling the debt and starting fresh, but her plans had diverged so massively—all because she’d seen an easier route and tried to run with it, hoping there’d be no fallout.
Nadia wanted to sleep forever. It was all too much to think about.
Ten minutes later, she managed to coax a wiggle out of her toes and fingers—a positive sign that whatever the pinching guy had done wasn’t permanent. A few minutes after that, instead of feeling like a mosquito encased in hardened amber, she felt more like a bug who’d gotten caught in a puddle of honey. A little sticky, but all the parts were moving.
When the van finally came to a halt, their captors bundled them out with sacks over their heads. As Nadia tried to get her legs working again, she half walked and was half dragged inside some sort of building, then down a hallway, judging by the change in sound.
While she was still trying to get a grip on what was happening, her escort jerked her sharply to a halt, and a door clanged shut behind her. Rough hands snaked over her body, patting her down. Someone took the tactical folding knife from her back pocket. Both her and Miles’s phones were already at the bottom of the Savannah, thanks to Jack throwing the bag overboard.
“Hey!” Miles sniped nearby. “Hands off.”
A moment later, the hood came off, revealing a stone-faced Calypso. Nadia looked around as best she could without making it obvious. The inside of the building looked like an old bank, with pillars and archways running along the sides of a central hall and bright daylight shining in through square-hatched windows. Marble, polished to a high shine, explained the slipperiness underfoot. The only furniture was a few benches that seemed like they’d been thrifted from a railway station, and a single reception desk at the far end of the hall—all devoid of people.
“Well, this is a sight I’d hoped to never see again,” Nadia muttered, her voice odd and unnatural as her mouth and tongue struggled to remember how to function.
Calypso smirked and turned to the mousy man. “Come on, Folgers. We’re running behind schedule.” She took hold of Nadia’s arm and frog-marched her down another hallway. Folgers—Nadia scoffed at the code name—grabbed Miles and dragged him along behind them.
Every time they turned a corner or went through a door, Nadia’s mind became fuzzy, as though it was trying to forget what it had seen. Whatever wish had been used to keep the Wishmaster’s headquarters hidden made it impossible to place where she was. Once or twice she thought Calypso had retraced her steps, but the wish made it hard to tell. Being here was like remembering a long-forgotten dream—she only recognized the place after seeing it again, and even then she wasn’t completely sure.
“I see you trying to look around. Go ahead,” she heard Folgers tell Miles with a chuckle. “Won’t help you any. You won’t remember shit about this place. Just know you’re seeing someplace most people never do. Enjoy it while you can.”
The headquarters felt like part prison, part high-security vault. Given the way Adrian had been driven into hiding, Nadia understood why Kaleena never met clients at all, preferring to send wish-laden intermediaries out to do it in public. In addition, the highest-potency wishes were stored in the most heavily guarded parts of this building. Those that surfaced for sale usually went to auction, and top-shelf ones sold for seven figures, though that had been under Adrian. Kaleena seemed to be hoarding those wishes for her own purposes now.
Their guards kept them moving quickly, and the wish protecting the building didn’t seem to bother those in the Wishmaster’s circle. They emerged into an archaic-style hallway that reminded Nadia of enclosed cloisters, with curving white windows and dirty gray tiling. Beyond the crosshatched panes, she could see the street, where people walked by in ignorant bliss. To them, this building was probably like Narnia—one day, it was there, and the next, they’d forgotten all about it. She imagined there were commuters who walked past this place every day and still didn’t notice it, thanks to the illusion.
Miles started to say something, but he got cut off by a smack from his captor. Nadia’s cheeks flushed with a guilty heat—that he was here at all was her fault. Calypso and Folgers dragged them along a concrete corridor and paused at a huge steel door with a hefty lock wheel.
They’d reached the vault, and never before in her life had Nadia so desperately wanted a door to stay closed.
Calypso pressed her hand to a scanner beside the door, then stared into a retinal scanner, which chirped approvingly. Kaleena clearly wasn’t taking any chances with security, though Nadia thought it was a little overkill given the protecting wish, the security cameras in every room, and the hired muscle.
The door’s indicator lights turned green, and Calypso spun the lock. As she pulled the vault door open, she smiled cruelly and gestured inside. “Welcome to your room.”
“These things are airtight. We’ll suffocate—”
Nadia’s protests were cut off as Calypso shoved her inside, followed shortly by Miles.
Calypso pointed to a vent overhead in the vault that, judging by the weld marks around it, had been retrofitted to prevent exactly what Nadia feared. “The Wishmaster wants to talk to you,” she explained. “And what the Wishmaster wants, the Wishmaster gets, so trust me when I say you won’t suffocate. At least until then.”
“When?” Nadia asked, taking in the vault’s bare steel walls. “Today? Tomorrow?”
Calypso shrugged.
“I can’t wait long,” Miles protested. “I need to piss, like, yesterday.�
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Folgers slid a rusty metal bucket into the vault with his foot.
“Enjoy your stay. If you need anything at all, just shout.” Calypso gave them a wicked grin and shut the vault door with a muffled thud. As the locking bolts slid closed with an ominous click, all Nadia could think of was a closed coffin being lowered into a grave.
Nadia wandered over to the far-right corner and sank down against the wall, feeling heavy to her bones.
Miles’s foot flew back like he was going to give the bucket an annoyed kick, but he seemed to think better of it and began to pace instead. “Hey, Wishmaster, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted up at one of the security cameras in the vault. “I. Didn’t. Steal. Anything! My wish got stolen!”
“Watch it,” Nadia warned, trying to ignore her own despair.
He rubbed the back of his neck where he’d been pinched and turned to face her. “I don’t care. It’s the truth. I’m here because supposedly I stole a wish from . . . myself? Man, come on!”
Nadia rested her head against the cold concrete. “If you keep quiet, you might get away with a lighter punishment. The real beef is with me, you know.”
That seemed to placate him. He gave up on his pacing and took a seat near her, which she thought was a bit odd when there was so much space.
“Do you think Jack’s all right?” Miles asked, after a few minutes of silence. “I can’t get that image of him out of my head, with all that blood running out of his eye.” He shuddered. “I know he did us dirty, but he didn’t deserve that.”
Nadia nestled her chin between her bent knees. “That’s on him. He got himself in that situation. You tried to give him a heads-up, but he didn’t listen.”
“Whoa. Foreigner must’ve written ‘Cold as Ice’ about you,” Miles said, staring at her in disbelief.
