With a grunt, the magical shuffled forward across the lobby, glaring at the clean walls, the glistening wooden floor, the bright lights devoid of all the cobwebs and dust that had piled up inside the bank under Tabitha’s ownership. “I heard about the changes, but I had to see it for myself. Can’t say I like what you’ve done with the place.”
“Well, a little cleanup was long overdue.”
“It’s a dump.”
‘This guy’s got a lotta nerve.’
She snorted. “New ownership, new look, but the basic services haven’t changed. In case you were wondering.”
“I wasn’t.”
An even stronger wave of noxious stink hit her almost like a physical force when the magical stopped in front of the desk. Good thing she hadn’t eaten the whole banana.
He patted down his pockets again, sending another puff of feathers floating down to the floor, and looked Jessica up and down with a sneer. “Deposit.”
“Sure.” Breathing through her mouth, Jessica plastered on a tight smile and slid the pad of paper and the clay inkwell toward him across the desk. “Whenever you’re ready.”
“Quit smiling at me like that. You look sick.”
Jesus, some magicals had some serious projection issues.
She folded her arms and blinked at him. “Maybe it’s the smell.”
The scruffy magical froze with one hand halfway out of his jacket pocket and stared at her. Then his lips parted in a gap-toothed grin, and he let out a wheezing cackle. His eyes widened as he leaned toward her and slapped his other grimy hand down on the edge of the desk. Jessica leaned away and forced herself not to pinch her nostrils shut. Still laughing, he wagged a finger at her. “You…”
“Yeah.”
“The stories don’t do you justice.”
Great. So the rumors of the bank’s new owner had reached beyond Mel and had now made it to the magical population living in dumpsters.
Jessica cocked her head. “Seeing is believing, right?”
The magical’s laughter cut off abruptly. “Not even a little. But Tabitha never beat around the bush with me. It’s refreshing to find her replacement doesn’t give a shit about the niceties either.”
Despite the fact that she could practically taste the sour stench, she chuckled. “Something you two bonded over, I’m guessing?”
“Ha. You’re all right.” He removed a wrinkled, slightly crooked hand from his jacket pocket and extended his closed fist over the desk. “Ready when you are.”
Jessica opened her palm beneath his fist, and the guy dumped a handful of dime-sized gemstones into her hand—emeralds, rubies, something that looked like Tiger’s Eye but caught the light with a fiercer golden glow. A diamond that had to be at least two carats toppled out of her palm and skittered across the surface of the desk, and she stared at the literal fortune in her hand.
Well, anyone could rack up a decent nest egg when they weren’t spending money on new clothes or a semblance of personal hygiene.
The magical picked up the diamond and dropped it unceremoniously onto the mountain of gemstones. “That’s it.”
“Right.” She closed her hand around his deposit, feeling the gems scraping against each other. This right here was the kind of haul that would’ve driven Mickey up the wall with a new plan and a call to action for Corpus.
Why the hell was she thinking about that now? She was done with that life.
“Well?” The reeking magical snorted. “What are you waiting for?”
Jessica nodded at the pad of paper. “Your signature.”
“Huh.” He dipped his finger into the inkwell, dripping ink all over the desk before pressing his finger down on the top sheet of paper, all the while staring at her instead of paying attention to his part of the transaction. Then he tore off the top sheet with his thumbprint and waved it at her. “This what you wanted?”
She glanced at the square sheet of paper and found a smear of not only ink around the fingerprint but dirt as well. “This isn’t your first time. You know exactly how this works.”
“But do you?”
With a wry chuckle, Jessica reached out for his fingerprint slip. “Nice try. I may be new, but I’m not clueless.”
The second her thumb and index finger closed around the smeared sheet of paper, the client’s other hand whipped up faster than she could see and clamped down around her wrist.
“What—”
Stinkface jerked her forward toward him, and the edge of the desk rammed painfully into her lower belly. Jessica’s eyes watered at the stench when he leaned toward her with a crazed grin. “We’re not done quite yet.”
Chapter Five
What she really wanted to do was summon a ball of fire and set this walking pile of literal trash ablaze. But with one hand clenching her client’s signature and the other closed around a fistful of gems, that option seemed a little outdated.
“No,” Jessica said, blinking against the haze of the magical’s breath washing over her face. “We’re done when you get your fucking hand off me.”
The magical sniggered and tilted his head. “When are you gonna do it, huh?”
“Do what?”
“Open it.”
Without thinking, Jessica let loose a small bit of the magic still only half-contained inside her. A crackling black light flared around her hand and up her wrist, shocking the asshole who thought he could manhandle her into a heart-to-heart chat. He hissed at the jolt of energy flashing between them, and she jerked her hand away.
“Ha!” Stinkface cackled again with a wheezing echo, letting out another puff of noxious breath between his stained and missing teeth as he shook the jolt out of his grimy hand. “You got some balls. I’ll give you that.”
“And you crossed a line.” She took a step back, her stomach aching from the bash against the edge of the desk. “That was a warning.”
“You call that a warning? I’d hate to see what happens to the bastard who gets the full dose.”
“Then don’t touch me again.” Jessica glared at him and rolled her shoulders back. “I’ll go make your deposit. After that, we’re done.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
She whirled around and stormed toward the hallway into the back. “The only thing I’m opening is your damn vault box.”
His wheezing laughter followed her down the hall.
‘Whew. I wasn’t sure which one of you was gonna lose it first.’
He’s already lost it. Jessica stopped at the door on her left, which swung open of its own accord to let her into the witching vault. If he tries anything else while I’m back here, you have my full permission to zap his ass right out the door. So keep an eye on him.
‘An eye, Jessica? Seriously?’
You know what I mean.
The door clicked shut behind her as she stepped across the glittering black floor of the vault built far too wide and tall to fit logically inside Winthrop & Dirledge’s physical floorplan. Green ripples of light spread away from her feet everywhere she stepped, and she stopped in front of the curving wall lined with thousands of square boxes trimmed in gold. “He was talking about the Gateway, wasn’t he?”
‘Most likely. But isn’t everyone these days?’
And that was the problem. Everyone seemed to know more about it than the witch in charge of protecting that stupid dungeon door.
Jessica lifted the slip of paper with Stinkface’s fingerprint toward the wall of boxes. The rows upon rows of deposit boxes around the witching vault groaned and rumbled in response, shifting and rearranging around the circular room and from top to bottom as her client’s specific drawer was called into place. She definitely enjoyed this part, especially when the deposits she made weren’t volatile, illegal, way too personal, or tried to explode before she finished the transaction.
Most of the clients she could do without, though.
When the room stopped spinning and shifting, the deposit box directly in front of her flashed with gol
d and green light. Jessica swiped the fingerprint in front of the oval window at the top of the box, eliciting another green flash. Then the drawer shot open and stopped four feet out.
The whole thing was filled with gemstones.
She peered over the side of the drawer to stare at the literal treasure as she dumped the handful of gems on top with the rest. “It’s amazing no one’s tried to rob this place.”
‘Um, hello? Did that Peddler leave a massive hole in your head that drains new memories too? ’Cause I remember swallowing up a few dozen bodies the week before last, and all of them were trying to rob me.’
“Forget the Gateway. I was talking about the vault.”
‘Yeah, good luck to anyone who tries stepping in here without permission. I can keep a few thieves out of here no problem. It’s that door I can’t protect on my own.’
Jessica slapped the outside of the drawer and frowned as it slammed back into place with an echoing boom. “Why not?”
‘Because it’s not…me.’
With a heavy sigh, she looked up toward the ceiling so far above her she couldn’t even see it. “It’s inside you.”
‘Oh, sure. So the knife that troll stabbed you with two years ago automatically became just an extra appendage the second it split you open, huh?’
“Hey, the memories are off limits.” Jessica glanced at Stinkface’s fingerprinted slip of paper, which had turned a bright emerald-green now that the transaction was complete. “I don’t know how many times I have to tell you that.”
‘About as many times as I have to spell it out for you, witch. There’s a difference between me and the…upstairs…when you…’
Rolling her eyes, she stalked across the witching vault and slipped into the narrow hallway again. “Let me guess. You can’t talk about the differences.”
‘Oh, look. You’re catching on.’
After two weeks of living with a disembodied bank’s voice filling her head? Yeah, maybe she was starting to get the hint that even the bank couldn’t tell her what was behind that door.
‘And anyone who just gives up that information thinking you’ll do them a solid afterward shouldn’t be trusted, either.’
So you’re the only thing I should trust, is that it?
‘At this point, yeah. I’d say I’ve earned it.’
Maybe. Having one’s body taken over by a sentient building to blast a few dozen magicals into oblivion would create a certain level of trust for anyone. As long as that building didn’t take over without permission.
‘Yeah, yeah. We’ve been over that already.’
Stop talking.
Jessica reached the end of the hall and headed toward the desk in the lobby. “Okay, it’s done. So unless you have any other transactions to make, I guess that’s—”
She stopped. The lobby was completely empty.
“Hello?”
‘Don’t start all over at the beginning again, Jessica. As fun as it was to watch you mouth off at an empty building, we both know you don’t have to talk to get my attention.’
“Not everything’s about you.”
The bank sniggered. ‘That’s the dumbest thing you’ve said all day, and we still have eleven and a half hours open for business.’
There was no sign of the magical who’d come in stinking like a landfill with a small fortune to deposit. Jessica glanced down at his emerald receipt in her hand and shrugged. “So what am I supposed to do with this?”
‘Save it for later? Burn it? Use it as a tissue? Take your pick.’
“Very helpful.”
‘Hey, if he didn’t want it, fine. He got what he came here for.’
True.
Once she took up her usual place behind the desk, Jessica opened the bottom left drawer and dropped the receipt on the pile of random loose papers, pens, candy-bar wrappers, and who knew what else already gathered inside. “Is that a sock?”
‘Sure.’
She closed the drawer and shook her head. “So you redid the entire…yourself but couldn’t clean out the junk drawer?”
‘Everything for Tabitha was a junk drawer. And this desk is the hub of magical interaction. I figured I’d leave it up to you to decide what’s important enough to keep.’
Jessica didn’t even know what a quarter of the artifacts stuffed into the floor-to-ceiling shelves around the lobby were, let alone what was important enough to keep. But she was pretty sure unpaired socks in the desk drawer, dirty or clean, weren’t part of the valuable inventory.
‘Sentimental value, maybe? Tabitha had weird connections to a lot of things.’
“Tabitha was a packrat.” She reached for the center drawer of the desk and paused, looking up to scan the shelves stuffed with incomprehensible magical trinkets despite the slightly more organized look of them. “I’m guessing it’d be too much to hope she kept some kind of inventory list, right?”
‘I mean, you can hope all you want. Just as long as you pay attention to what you’re doing. Like the fact that you should not be opening that drawer right now.’
“What?” Jessica withdrew her hand from the center drawer when it trembled.
No way that damn lizard could fit in a drawer that size.
‘No, it’s not the lizard. Just what you put in there.’
The coin.
She’d been so focused on running the bank the only way she knew how, dealing with clients, and then psyching herself out over her lunch with Mel yesterday that she’d completely forgotten about the gold coin Leandras had withdrawn from his deposit box a week ago. The same coin that almost ripped Winthrop & Dirledge apart before it brought two feuding and highly incompetent gangs of magicals down on her head. The coin he told her he’d come back to retrieve in a few days.
Where the hell did the fae go off to anyway?
‘If you ask me, the longer that two-timing swindler stays away, the better.’
“I didn’t ask you.”
But the bank was right. Leandras had ties to both cults—or whatever they were—who’d come to take the coin from him and the bank from Jessica. And they’d ended up fighting each other for the prize too, which apparently Leandras had been involved in protecting. Or maybe he’d stolen it. The only winners in that fight, though, were Jessica and the fae man in a satin suit with a silver spoon up his ass.
‘And me. Though I wouldn’t say the fae won much of anything.’
“Sure. Just his life.”
‘Meh. Overrated.’
Said the bank with no possibility of actually being killed.
‘Hey, just because I don’t bleed like a walking meat sack doesn’t mean I can’t be—’
The metal crow hanging on the door let out its warning croak, and the bell jingled two seconds later as the door opened.
“You can’t be what?” Jessica muttered through clenched teeth.
‘Well, distracted, for one.’
Finish that thought.
‘It can wait. A client approaches, witch. Do your job.’
Jessica took a deep breath and figured she looked insane when she shot a tight, aggravated smile at the two women stepping into Winthrop & Dirledge. She and the bank were definitely finishing this conversation later. When she could threaten it without pissing off more magical clients.
Three more customers made their way into the bank over the next two and a half hours, each of them rather mundane and harmless compared to the dirty guy covered in rags who’d left without his receipt. An elf woman with three differently sized boxes she swore up and down her great-aunt Lucile would kill to get her hands on. A changeling who’d literally morphed her own hand into a bag to carry the smaller bag of squirming, jiggling seeds—and she’d had the nerve to ask how much extra it would cost for Jessica to go into the vault and water the things once a week. The answer was nothing. Because the only plant Jessica watered was the potted bamboo in front of the bay window upstairs. And the last was a wizard in a mechanic’s jumpsuit who pulled three huge stacks of bound hundred-dollar bi
lls to deposit. Apparently, the witching vault did take human money too, as long as the client already had a box in their name.
Jessica made herself a double helping of Ramen noodles for lunch, topped with a hardboiled egg and as much Cholula hot sauce as she could stomach. Now, she sat in the rolling chair she’d pulled from the tiny, cramped office at the opposite end of the kitchen, using the lobby’s desk as a table as she slurped the slightly crunchy noodles into her mouth. Just the way she liked them.
‘You know how disgusting that is?’ the bank whined.
She snorted and swallowed her mouthful. “That I have to eat to stay alive while you get to just sit there and make lame comments? Yeah, I know.”
‘Look at you. All that slurping. You need paper towels. There’s soup all over the place.’
“No there’s not.” Jessica glanced down at the splattered drops of broth covering the surface of the desk, and she quickly pried a stray noodle off the front of her shirt before slurping that up too.
The metal crow above the door cawed once, but the sound briskly cut off as it stretched its inanimate wings to their fullest extent. Then it practically screamed out a hoarse cry before the front door of the bank flew open with a bang.
Jessica almost spilled the rest of her soup in her lap, but she managed to set the bowl down on the desk first and stood.
A huge man barreled into the lobby, lugging a massive suitcase with three giant rips like claw marks down the leather front. The second the door shut behind him, his illusion faded, and now it was an orc with half his face covered in burn marks and twisted up in a perpetual snarl. He turned to look over his shoulder at the frosted-glass window and growled. “Whatever you’re doing, stop.”
“Yeah, good morning to you too.” Jessica quickly swiped the drops of soup off the surface of the desk, then wiped her palm on her jeans.
“It’s not. And it won’t be for you either if you don’t—” The orc finally saw her standing behind the desk and growled again. “So it’s true.”
“Depends on what you’re referring to.”
“I knew I shouldn’t have listened to that damn tinkerer.” The orc stormed toward the desk and hefted the massive suitcase onto it with a bang. “The scryer finally kicked the bucket.”
The Cursed Fae (Accessory to Magic Book 2) Page 5
