They feasted on fries while Ree considered implications, happy to have the food take her mind partially off the depth of what they were discussing. “Can you locate Aberrant Muses, track them at all? Maybe we could follow this one and cut it off before it reaches Tomas.”
Drake wiped crack spices from his mouth and took a drink of water. “I could attempt to isolate its aetheric signature based on Dr. Woolenstein’s inferences on the residual frequencies of post-living entities.”
Ree asked, “Is that a yes?”
“It’s a maybe, mademoiselle. But if your fears are correct, then time is of the essence.” Drake took another handful of fries and stood up, munching. It was hard to look dashing and intrepid while chowing down on french fries, but he made a valiant effort.
“We haven’t even had the pizza yet,” Ree protested.
“Ask for a canine box. If we are to save this young man’s life, then we must let science be our guide, lest we arrive too late. We shall not leave him to your former mentor and condemnation in the torture tournaments of the Duke of Pwn!”
People were staring. Ree laughed and flagged down Joni to ask for the pizza in a carryout box and to cancel the wine. She unfolded a twenty and a ten, doing the mental math based on a hundred visits and dozens of order combinations. Fifteen for the pizza, eight for the fries, generous tip including tipping on the bottle of wine we’re not actually going to drink just in case they already popped the cork. This heroing is expensive. Okay, I should have skipped the wine.
Ree and Drake waited for three minutes, then he said, “I will go ahead and make preparations. When you have the pizza, reach me on the cellular telephone and I will provide directions.”
With that, he turned, jacket flaring. He strode out with the determination of a hundred action-movie heroes.
Ree distracted herself with fries and a lap around the Internet on her phone until the pizza came out fifteen minutes later. She smelled the gloriousness and resisted the urge to open it up and have a slice as she walked.
Drake’s phone rang three times before he picked up. “Hello?”
“It’s Ree. Have pizza, will travel.”
“I assume so.”
He rattled off directions, but she stopped him. “Is it an actual address or something weird?”
“Weird?” he asked.
“Do I have to go down a set of stairs that shouldn’t exist, knock three times, and then close my left eye as I open the door?”
Beat. “No, none of that nonsense. It’s Apartment 7E. Master Grognard located the apartment for me and assisted in its acquisition. I did not, however, inform the landlady of my scientific endeavors. Fortunately, I have constructed sophisticated ventilation systems and have evaded notice thus far.”
Ree chuckled, balancing the pizza box in one arm as she held the phone to her ear. The streets were getting busier as people wrapped up their errands, preparing for party night. While my plans are shaping up to preventing a suicide or picking a fight with my magical mentor. Awesome.
“Got it. See you soon.” Ree hung up, then reset her armful of pizza, dodging through the crowds, trying to stay positive instead of wondering with every step whether she was too late, if Eastwood was one soul closer to going all Robert Johnson and the Crossroads. Even worse, since Eastwood would be using stolen chips.
Jackass.
Chapter Twelve
Marconi’s Nerdy Granddaughter
Ree reached the building after a short train ride and was happy to find a buzzer intercom. Pleasantly normal. She set the pizza on the flat top of the concrete railing and buzzed 7E. No answer. She waited a few seconds, then buzzed again.
The voice was scrambled by static, but she still recognized Drake on the other end. “Yes?”
“It’s Ree.”
“Entre-vous, mademoiselle.” The door opened. Ree retrieved the pizza and made her way up the stairs, through hallways with cracked paint and worn wooden rails to a poorly lit hallway with dirty tiled floor, all the way to 7E. Arms still full, she knocked with her elbow.
She heard three locks click, slide, and unhinge, and then the door opened, revealing Drake Winters, who, in addition to the outfit he’d been wearing when they met—leather jacket over a fine shirt and sturdy britches, brass-tastic goggles on the forehead—now had a rifle slung over his shoulder and an impressive laboratory behind him.
The lab took up the entire living room. Beakers, boilers, racks of herbs and ingredients, tubes and wires plugged into everything. And on the ceiling: fans, filters, and unnameable ridiculous devices that shouldn’t work and therefore probably were the most important. She’d been to a Steamcon, and they had pretty good decorations. Drake’s laboratory put them all to shame. With an ear-to-ear smile of wonder, she walked inside, taking it all in.
“This is awesome!” Ree said, looking for a place to put the pizza box where it wouldn’t be melted, electrified, or otherwise rendered less tasty.
Seeing her look around, Drake beckoned her to follow as he walked through the room. “We best take the food to the kitchen.”
For all that the living room was overfull, the kitchen was nearly empty. Not a chef, then.
Drake opened a cupboard, revealing a stack of paper plates and several plastic cups from Pizza U, the best of the local delivery joints.
She sliced up the pizza and ripped a still-steaming piece from the pie. She introduced the slice to a paper plate with about as much brevity and intent as a sorority girl introducing the black-sheep sister at a party, then started devouring it.
She bit through juicy chunks of tomato, chewed on succulent spinach, and crunched on the perfectly baked crust. The world went away for the third time in the day, but in the happy I-love-food-screw-the-world kind of way rather than the significantly less awesome here-comes-or-goes-a-dream-premonition kind of way.
Ree hoped not to add to her index of Ways That the World Falls Away to a Pure World of Sensation. The existing three on the index were mostly positive (the third being good sex, naturally), and she’d rather keep it that way.
Her first slice was gone before Drake could get his piece extricated from the pie and onto the plate. Half of his slice had slid off and slopped onto the table. Drake applied a spatula and attempted to re-dress the slice. “Rather problematic,” he said, his nose curled up in a face that was both cute and ridiculous.
“If you need to use a fork, I won’t think you less of a man,” she said.
Drake gave an unself-conscious smile and retrieved a fork and knife from a drawer.
Ree walked with her second slice back out into the living room, tiptoeing her way through the maze of lab equipment. With pizza in hand, she was far less tempted to reach out and touch things, so she just took a mental inventory, speculating to herself what various devices could or would do. She turned and saw Drake cut a large bite and pop it into his mouth.
“What do we have to do to track the Muses?” she asked, smiling at her successful timing.
Drake’s eyebrows scrunched up, possibly in annoyance over having been questioned with food in his mouth. Ree kept a round of cackling on the inside and waited for Drake to finish chewing.
“I understand now why you were insistent on acquiring this supper, Ms. Ree. It is quite phenomenal. It reminds me of the grand feast put out by the Pirate King of Barkeria, who ruled over an archipelago of mad islands, each stranger than the last.”
Ree beamed. “We don’t know each other so well, but let me give you some advice. Always trust me when it comes to three things.” She held up a finger for each point. “1) Obscure trivia of post-crisis DC Comics continuity; 2) my gaydar; and 3) where to find the best pizza in every neighborhood I’ve ever lived or worked.”
Drake cocked his head to the side. “Gaydar?”
Ree shook her head. “Never mind. Muses?”
Drake crossed in front of her to set his greasy plate down next to a burner. That won’t become a problem, nope. No risk of grease fires here.
“I
t’s a question of frequencies, so I will need to use my aetheric goggles to create the proper filter. I will then attach the filter in one of the goggles’ settings, and we should be able to detect any traces of Aberrant Muses.”
Drake crouched down and started rummaging through a box of parts, still talking. “Do you know anything else about where this young Tomas may live? There may be several Aberrant Muses in a city this size, though given the particularity of this Muse’s taste, and following with Spengler’s theory of niche distinction in post-living entities, we may be able to distinguish between different signatures across the emotional spectrum. Do you have access to any radio or satellite arrays?”
“You know about satellites?”
“I made communication technology a priority in my acculturation, given my technological predispositions.”
“Okay. I don’t have any radio hookups. A friend of mine on the north side has satellite Internet through work. Wait, would satellite radio work?”
“XM?” he asked.
Ree nodded, taking another bite.
“That should be sufficient, depending on the signal.”
She stumbled upon a burst of excitement, immediately balanced by annoyance and a little dab of shame. “Now all we have to do is go back to Café Xombi and explain why I’m running around playing scavenger hunt but couldn’t come in to work.”
Drake shook his head. “We would only need to be within ten yards or so to allow me to utilize the satellite connection.”
Ree didn’t know much about satellites, but that seemed unlikely. “Really?”
“The joys of a worldview that conflates magic and technology. At the moment, contemporary understanding of science has as much bearing on my work as I wish it to.”
“So you get to cheat?”
Drake smiled. “I rather prefer to think of it as a creative reinterpretation of rules that I never agreed to in the first place.”
“Then why do you need to bother learning about modern tech if you can just cheat?”
“As with many pursuits, one must know the rules in order to confidently break them.”
“Fair enough. What can I do to help?” Ree asked.
Drake set a box of beakers on the table before him and stopped a moment to consider. “How would you evaluate your knowledge of physical chemistry?”
“I got an A-minus in AP Chem in high school, but that was about a decade ago. I’m pretty sure I can still operate a Bunsen burner without hurting myself.”
“Brilliant. If you don’t mind, I will have you perform some simple procedures while I work on adjusting the aetheric goggles. I can talk you through the steps. Please interrupt me if I am spouting nonsense or if you have problems. Especially if something explodes.”
Drake talked her through several reactions that sparked vague shadows of memory from her time in AP Chem, back when she’d been carrying a torch for Andy Ritcher, who was not only a point guard on the basketball team but the captain of the Academic Decathalon team. He’d been beloved by girls throughout the school. But when he showed up one cold Friday morning and stripped his sweater to reveal a Kingdom Come Superman T-shirt, Ree was doomed.
Musing on Andy Ritcher’s shoulders, she almost added too much phosphorus and spilled some on the table, prompting a string of cursing and some rapid towel application.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing!” Ree sputtered and continued to wipe down the counter with all the desperate speed of a backed-up Monday-morning rush. Her cleaning done, she returned to the procedures, resisting the urge to put on a pair of safety goggles and give her best Mad Scientist maniacal laugh. Instead, she played it out in her head and channeled the glee.
Several minutes of mixing and measuring and heating and one small explosion later, Ree had prepared the necessary supplements, and Drake had done whatever calibration he had to do on his big honking goggles.
Drake Winters: Victorian Pulp Adventurer, Steampunk Mad Scientist, and Neighborhood Quixotic Curiosity.
Ree wondered if she could fit that on a business card, blocking out the text in her mind while trying to fit an artsy brass gear on an oiled but burnished background.
“Done!” she said, pulling the thermometer out of the last solution upon seeing it settle at 175 degrees.
Drake whirled into action, plucking up beakers and tubes of solution and assorted chemicals. He mixed and applied and coated the ingredients with the deftness of a ballet dancer and the deliberation of a painter. Ree stood back in amused awe as he worked and then clicked the filters into place and declared, “Huzzah!”
“Huzzah?” Ree asked. “Isn’t that a little old-school even for you?”
Drake gave a rakish smile. “I’ve always been fond of ‘huzzah’ as a triumphant declarative.”
Ree nodded. Fair enough. “So, are we good to go?”
“Indeed. Our first step will take us to the satellite signal, and from there we should be able to pick up the trail of our Aberrant Muse, presuming it is an Aberrant Muse. I’d feel rather foolish if we’ve spent all this time only to discover that the fiend in question was a Boggard or a Brer Ghast.”
Boggard she knew, but the other . . . “Brer Ghast?” She returned to the kitchen and stared longingly at the pizza.
“A localized breed of post-living psychophage.”
“Gesundheit,” Ree said.
Drake looked around discreetly, as if there were actually someone who had sneezed. Such hilarious manners. Today’s adventure brought to you by Kate and Leopold.
“Sorry?” Drake asked as he cleaned up the workspace. On their way out, he picked up his rifle again and strapped a bag to his belt.
“Joke. So, do you just walk around town with that thing?” Ree had gotten away with some weird costumes for Halloween or cons, but that gun was far too, well, gunlike for him to be able to walk around town.
She’d hate to drop $30 on what amounted to three slices eaten, but she couldn’t exactly carry a pizza box around while hunting a supernatural entity that pushed the depressed into suicide. Or could she? No, that’s dumb. Instead, Ree pulled out a slice and fished a freezer bag from her purse while Drake talked. Hu-mothereffing-zzah. Now to make sure the bag didn’t get smashed to bursting in a fight.
Drake locked the door to the apartment as he explained. “The rifle, being primarily supernal in nature, tends to be ignored by those who are affected by the Doubt. I’m told they view it as a rather unconvincing prop by an Arab craftsman by the name of Neruf?”
Ree chuckled as they walked down the stairs.
• • •
The sun was slouching behind the tops of the skyscrapers and was well on its way to the coastal horizon by the time Ree and Drake reached the alley beside Café Xombi.
Ree had suggested that they round the block to approach from the alleyside, to make absolutely sure no one saw her. She would have to figure out how to keep her job, but this wasn’t that time.
Had it been daytime in her vision? Thinking back, she couldn’t clearly remember. The room had been lit, but whether that was via sunlight or boy-cave lamps, she couldn’t tell.
Drake prowled through the alley, trying to find the best sliver of signal, holding up a brass-and-copper box with antennae that danced as he moved, twitching their frequency until Drake stopped in place, fiddling with the box and his goggles at the same time. A minute later, he bounced in place with a small “Huzzah” and strode out of the alley, saying, “Follow me.”
“You don’t need to stay in range of the XM?” Ree asked, still confused.
“Negative. I needed only use the satellite signal to scan the entire city. Now that I have pinpointed the appropriate signal, this device can accurately track relative direction and distance.”
Ree nodded. “If you say so. You don’t happen to have an extra pair of those goggles?” she asked as they wandered through the U-District. A block away from the café, Drake crossed against traffic and was nearly run over by a Suburban.
G
reat. I’ve traded the socially ignorant silicon cowboy for an absentminded professor. Note to self, schedule self-reflection time with the theme: “Why do I always end up playing second fiddle to bizarre and variously broken men?” Reference abandonment issues and Elektra complex. Tomorrow on Dr. Phil.
The oil baron’s wet dream of a car missed Drake by slamming on the brakes. It slowed enough so that Ree could push Drake out of the way, shouting at him to move. The driver stopped, leaning out of his car to spout profanities at Drake, then at Ree, every third word referring to one or another of their orifices and what he was angrily going to do to them.
Ree desperately wanted to stop and chew this asshole out for several minutes, but they had better things to do. So she just led Drake across the street, hurrying to get out of view of the jackass in the Suburban. Drake ground his feet, boots skidding on the sidewalk.
“Not quite so fast,” he said. “The goggles are incapable at calibrating at this speed.”
Ree took a long breath and let Drake proceed, fiddling with the top button on her jacket as the man in the Suburban gave up and drove away.
They continued for another half-dozen blocks, Drake following the trail while Ree stalked like a panther on a leash. The sun continued to drift westward, the sky shifting toward orange-red. If she were someone to believe in omens, she’d take this as a bad one. She never used to believe in that shit, but who the hell knew how things worked anymore? Not me, not Leftenant Anachronism here, for all his quixotic chivalry. Captain Hubris knows, but now that I know he’s Empire Strikes Back Lando instead of Return of the Jedi Lando, screw him and his Dorkcave that smells like feet and old booster packs.
As the orange bled into rose-red, they reached a residential neighborhood, and Drake’s pace quickened. “The trail has strengthened. We must needs hurry now, I believe. Have you weaponry of your own?”
She’d left the tanto behind at the Dorkcave and hadn’t brought anything from home. And her media battery was long-empty. This was why Batman had a TiVo. She wasn’t Batman, but she did have a smartphone with streaming video.
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