by M. J. Scott
Chapter Four
Magic can do many things. Heal a wound. Start a fire. Shield a mind.
One thing it can't do is mend a broken heart. Magic or no magic I was stuck with the good old-fashioned way of dealing with heartbreak.
Lots of angry-girl rock, ice cream binges, and wearing myself out with manual labor so I could sleep had been my go-to after Damon left me.
In the hours since I'd seen the Archangel ad, I'd almost blown out my earbuds trying to drown out the whirl of "Does it mean anything? It can't mean anything. Maybe it does mean something? Don't be an idiot" that had been ricocheting around my brain since I'd seen my eyes staring back at me from my datapad.
My eyes and my long brown hair.
In the face of the angel—who, while not exactly me, could possibly be recognized as my younger, more beautiful sister or cousin or something—who needed rescuing.
What the fuck was that supposed to mean?
Thunk.
The bite of iron into wood didn't help. I probably shouldn't have been operating a nail gun angry, but heaven help me, it was punch nails into wood or start breaking things.
Thunk.
Squinting through my protective goggles, I aimed the gun again and again and again.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
Thunk.
The last nail shot into its place along the beam and I straightened, feeling each vertebra click in protest as I examined the line of nail heads. They gleamed silvery against the wood, straight and true.
Unlike Damon Riley and his electronic mind games.
Think about something else.
I stowed the nail gun, goggles, and the ear protectors I wore over the earbuds away, then wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans before reaching for a rag to wipe my face. It was warm again, and upstairs had no enviro-system yet. It made for sweaty work. Particularly when I was in a mood and didn't stop to take a break. I stretched, grimacing.
One day this house would be a techno geek's dream. My dream.
But until I got the cash flowing again, any more work would be done by Lizzie and me. For now I had a damned good security setup—something I’d never skimp on—and my old office system, resenting the tweaks I'd given it to make it play nice as a housecomp. It found subtle ways to protest, like throwing the odd As-Pop ballad into my preprogrammed list of Rock-to-hammer-to and randomly making my shower freezing cold halfway through the programmed cycle. Never let anyone tell you that machines can't sulk. Lizzie never got the icicle treatment.
I planted my hands on either side of the comp panel and pushed back, trying not to groan at the pull in my shoulders.
I needed to be Maggie Lachlan, computer whisperer, not Maggie Lachlan, face of VR game character.
Which meant I needed to stop thinking about Damon freaking Riley and start working out how to get my magic back. Starting with going back downstairs and letting Lizzie try to coach me through lighting the damned candle.
I eased out of the stretch and turned. Then jumped, an involuntary shriek escaping my lips as my pulse redlined.
Lizzie stood in the doorway.
I yanked the earbuds from my ears.
She grinned at me, raising her hands. "I come in peace."
"I didn't hear you," I said defensively. I'd never liked people sneaking up on me, and a brush with demonkind hadn't improved my jitters. "What's up?"
"Someone at the door."
The system should have killed the music and told me about that. Bitchy damn thing. My hand twitched. Where was that nail gun when I needed it? But I couldn't afford a replacement if I succumbed to the urge to see if a nail to the processor might deal with the problem, so I just had to live with electronic attitude until I could spend some time reworking the setup. Come to think of it, maybe that would be easier if I got my magic back, too.
"Can't you deal with them? I'm not exactly fit for company." I swept a hand down my body, indicating my outfit and general state of grime. I hadn't even showered.
Lizzie was a genius with contractors, and nobody else tended to come to our door unless we ordered takeout. She went out to socialize. As for me, nobody—well, mostly nobody—knew where I lived now. Which was exactly how I liked it anyway. Even if I'd been feeling social, I was wearing my oldest jeans, an even older band tee, and my hair twisted up into a bun that had to be a sweaty mess now. Not exactly dressed for company.
"You have to deal with this one yourself," Lizzie said with a shake of her head.
I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand, wishing I could wipe away the crappy day as easily. But Lizzie had her "I mean it" face on. Grudgingly, I traipsed downstairs, brushing the worst of the dust and dirt from my clothes. When I saw who was standing in my front hall, I kind of wished I hadn't left the nail gun upstairs.
Damon Riley.
The man I hadn't seen for nine months.
A big chunk of the memories that haunted me.
"What are you doing here?" I said stupidly. Nine months. You can create a whole new life in that time, but I hadn't even managed to put my old one back together.
"We need to talk." His voice was tight and low. Hardly the reunion I'd pictured all those times I'd lain awake and imagined how things could have worked out differently between us. In my stupid head, he'd looked sad. Regretful. Heartbroken. And his opening line was always some variation on "I'm sorry, Maggie. I was an idiot," followed by suitably abject groveling.
But it seemed I was the real idiot. Because Damon didn't look remotely sad.
Tired, yes.
Different, yes.
Older somehow. And harder, his dark hair cropped close and new lines arrowing the edges of his brilliant blue eyes.
Some of those lines were probably my fault. But there were a few lines on my face that he could take the blame for, too.
"Nine months is a long time to wait to talk," I said, blocking the doorway.
"I don't have time for games, Maggie. Let me in."
Ah. His I-am-lord-of-the-universe tone. Familiar. I'd found it amusing once I'd gotten to know him. Pity I wasn't in the mood to play the grateful serf today. I didn't owe him anything, and besides, this was my turf, not his. "I don't think that's a good idea, do you?"
"Damn it, Maggie," he growled. "This is serious."
My stomach sank.
Of course. He hadn't changed his mind. He hadn't seen the error of his ways and decided he just had to see me.
Damon wasn't the sort of man who had sudden changes of heart. The Archangel looking like me might mean anything. It was probably Benji or Eli—the two Righteous programmers I'd hung out with the most—who'd designed her anyway. They probably hadn't even made the connection as to where they'd gotten the inspiration for her face. The only reason Damon was here was because he needed something.
Disappointment—stupid, pathetic, useless—soured my tongue, and I was suddenly too tired to argue. "Fine." I stepped back to let him in. "Just remember this was your idea."
"Hardly," he muttered as he stalked into my house, eyes scanning everything, no doubt locking away the location of every unfinished paint job and empty doorframe in his brain. Not one to miss the details, Damon. You didn't get to where he had by missing details.
I closed the door, wondering where to take him. Upstairs was a jumble of unfinished rooms and building supplies. Downstairs was the kitchen—but he didn't seem to be here for a cozy chat over syncaf—and the living areas, including what would eventually be a study but was currently my makeshift bedroom. No way was Damon Riley getting near a bedroom of mine again. And no way was I letting him see the single futon mattress that screamed the fact that no one else had been getting near my bedroom either.
The garden, then. Maybe I could put him to work clearing up the contractor's mess and trying to disentangle Gran's favorite stubborn tea roses from the weeds doing their best to choke them. I ducked past him, trying not to let myself breathe in his all-too-familiar scent.
"I'd offer you a drink, but you'd have to ta
ke my word for it that no magic was involved," I said when we reached the kitchen, then kicked myself mentally for how sharp my tone was. Indifferent was what I was going for. Not upset.
In my imagination, when I'd opened my door to see Damon standing there all remorseful, I'd been gracious and forgiving, taking the moral high ground. Of course, in my imagination, he'd been there to beg me to forgive him. And I hadn't been dressed in my oldest clothes and covered in sweat. My imagination was a dope. But apparently nicer than me in real life.
"I'm not thirsty."
I got another faint whiff of cotton and soap and spice that spiked my pulse. He was close. Too close.
I started moving again. Away from him. I didn’t need a cascade of pointless Damon memories.
"Fine," I said for the second time as we reached the back door. I stepped out into the late afternoon sunshine and started down the steps to the one mostly clear patch of grass. What would eventually be vegetable beds and garden again was almost all covered in weeds or building junk. "You want to tell me what this is about?" I asked, watching where I was going and trying to remember if it was the fifth or sixth step that was loose.
"You need to stop," he said, still in that weird tight voice.
Stop? Stop walking? Somehow, I didn't think that was what he meant. Confused, I turned to face him. He loomed over me. I wasn’t short, but he had about five inches on me plus a two-step height advantage. Still, I held my ground. "Stop what?"
He leaned forward, a frown slashing a crease between his eyebrows. "The messages."
He'd not only lost me, he'd dumped me in the middle of a forest with no map. What the hell was he talking about? "What messages?"
To my surprise, he looked almost relieved by my question.
"What messages?" I repeated.
He shook his head, scrubbing a hand over his jaw in a familiar gesture of frustration. "I told them it wasn't you, but they insisted."
"Told who?" Not only was there no map, but I was starting to feel like I'd dropped into a conversation that had started long before he'd arrived on my doorstep.
Damon didn't answer. Instead, he turned on his heel, as though he intended to walk right back out of my life again.
Before I knew what I was doing, I lunged up the stairs between us and grabbed his arm. "Oh hell no. You can't just waltz in here, say a few cryptic sentences, and waltz out again without explaining what's going on."
He stopped, and we both looked down to where my hand was wrinkling his very expensive blue shirt. My palm tingled. It took a lot not to curl my fingers deeper into the comforting strength of his bicep. Instead, I pulled my hand back as though it didn't feel like it might just burst into flames. Thankfully Damon didn't immediately retreat.
I backed up as far as the width of the porch steps would allow, resisting the urge to rub my palm on my jeans and remove that tingling awareness.
What were we talking about again? Messages. Right. Something about me and messages.
Not good messages presumably if they were enough to bring Damon to my doorstep after he'd made no attempt at contact since the day of Nat's funeral.
My payment for services rendered had arrived in my bank account the next day. I hadn't even had a chance to send an invoice. The deposit was accompanied by a very impersonal message from the Riley Arts legal department stating that my contract was considered complete, that my payment had been made, that Riley Arts would be happy to provide a testimonial should I require one for future clients, that all my access to the Riley Arts campus and systems had been revoked, that they would be sending someone to collect my security pass and scan my system for proprietary information per the contract, and ending with a stern reminder of just how watertight the nondisclosure agreement I had signed as part of that contract was.
That had been it. Nothing from Damon himself.
I didn’t know if he'd thought he'd been making things easier for both of us, but at the time, it had felt more like a boot to my stomach after I'd already been knocked to the ground and run over.
After a farewell so precisely calculated to let me know that I no longer had any place in his world, I had to assume that only something really bad could have brought him back to my door.
Just what I needed, another freaking problem. Irritation and apprehension surged through me, burning away the confused jitters of my hormones. "What messages? And what makes you think they're from me?"
Damon put his hands on his hips. The movement made his loosely rolled cuff move higher on his arm, and I caught the glint of the gold and silver circuitry embedded in the skin of his left wrist. His interface chip. Key to the most realistic virtual reality experiences anyone had yet invented. "Because my cybersecurity department traced them back to your system. Which wasn't easy."
"Apparently not, given they came to the wrong conclusion." I tore my eyes from his wrist and fought the urge to rub the scar on my own. I'd had a chip once. Not for long. Because it turned out getting it installed had broken a magic binding I hadn't known about and set a demon on the warpath. Not to mention giving me seizures as a nice little bonus.
I hadn't been tempted to get a new one. After learning earlier that lack of magic could equal vulnerability, I could only think that was a good thing. But that didn't mean that I didn't sometimes remember just how amazing the experience of being in a virtual world enabled by one had been.
Or how much easier it had made my job, letting me visualize and search the acres of code and data I waded through in ways that just weren't possible without it.
I stomped down the stairs, hoping he'd follow me to level ground. Staring up at him gave my neck and shoulders even more reason to protest. "So, perhaps you come down here and explain what the hell is going on?"
He descended the stairs and joined me. My patch of scruffy grass felt way too small for the both of us. Even over the garden smells of rose and grass and dirt and wood, his scent made my heart clench with remembrance. But I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of seeing that I wanted to back away from him.
"You sure you need an explanation?" he asked.
I tilted my head, staring up at him. There wasn't a flicker of anything approachable in his eyes. They were the blue of storm clouds and frost, not the brilliant summer sky shade I remembered so well. "Trust me, if I was sending you hate mail, you'd know it was from me."
A dimple flicked to life in his left cheek as his mouth quirked. "That's what I told them, but they didn't believe me." The dimple disappeared again as he straightened his shoulders.
Nice to know he had some scrap of faith in me. Didn't make up for him dumping me, of course. "Aren't you the boss? Don't they have to believe you?"
"Not according to my head of security. That was our agreement when I hired him. That he'd push back when things needed pushing. I told him he was wrong about this. But he's pushing back."
"I think this conversation might be easier for both of us if you tell me exactly what's going on. Start at the beginning."
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lizzie drift past the back door, hovering just inside. She raised a brow inquiringly. I gave a tiny head shake. No rescue required. Not yet, at least. Lizzie nodded and disappeared again. Not that being out of sight meant she was necessarily out of earshot.
"The beginning is, you know, where the problem started," I prompted when Damon didn't immediately start speaking.
His frown reappeared. "It's complicated."
"I gathered that much the second you turned up on my doorstep."
The frown deepened. The problem was that on him, after nine months of not seeing his face, even a frown looked good.
Curse my stupid hormones. And curse his stupidly handsome face.
"We could try small talk," I suggested. "Start with something easy. Like 'So, Damon, what have you been up to lately?'"
The frown smoothed from his face like chalk under an eraser, wiped clean by a flatly unreadable facade.
Score one to me. I knew perfectly well wha
t he'd been up to.
Riding out a media shit-storm the likes of which had rarely been seen since the aftermath of the Big One when he'd revealed that a demon had been using technology developed by Righteous to harvest enough energy to break out of its realm and into our world. Clawing back his reputation and his company's viability inch by inch.
He had scars, too.
So what? My inner voice sounded petty asking the question. Maybe rightly so. Why should I care about his scars when he didn't care about me? "I shouldn't" seemed to be the obvious answer.
The more complicated one was that part of me did. The part of me that now watched his face and tried not to hold its breath, trying to read what lay behind the careful mask he wore.
"I could ask you the same question."
My breath caught as my stomach clenched. Apparently he hadn't bothered checking up on me. The fact that the newslinks didn't write stories about me the way they did about him wasn't an excuse. With the resources he had at his fingertips, he could find out almost anything about anyone, anytime, anywhere. If he hadn't, it meant he hadn't wanted to. Hadn't cared enough to.
Didn't care enough about me.
Even though I'd known that already, such blatant proof felt much like being stabbed in the heart, the pain just as sharp as the day we'd said goodbye. I bent and tugged a few weeds from the edge of the nearest bed, determined to make sure he couldn't see my face until I regained control of my emotions. Even then, I didn't want to face him. But I didn't think he was just going to stand there silently while I weeded. I straightened and lifted my chin. "Or we could just get to the point. What messages?"
Damon met my gaze for a long moment, then parked his denim-clad butt on a stack of bricks. I stayed standing.
"I've received some strange emails."
"What kind of strange?"
"Threats."
"And obviously threats must come from me? Gee, thanks."
The look he gave me had a distinct flavor of "Don't be an idiot" about it.
"Maggie, I get threats all the time. But these tripped more than the usual red flags. My cybersecurity team traced the emails back to your system. Mitch wanted to bring in the cops. I told them no. I wanted to speak to you first."
