Ilona Andrews - Hex Appeal

Finally, the kid went slack. “It was working, ” he repeated.

“Why would you even try something like this?” she said. “Cheating’s bad enough, but … this?” She couldn’t say she understood anything in the room, the candles or paint or that gargoylish creature. But Grant didn’t like it, and that was enough for her.

“Because I’m underage!” he whined. “I can’t even get into the casino. I needed a disguise.”

“So you summoned demon doppelgängers?” Grant asked. Thoughtfully, he said, “That’s almost clever. Still—very dangerous.”

“Screw you!”

“Julie?” Grant said. “Now you can call security.” He pulled the kid out from under Julie and pushed him to the wall, where he sat slouching. Grant stood over him, arms crossed, guardlike.

“Your luck ran out, buddy,” Julie said, glaring at him. She retrieved her phone from her pocket. It was working now; go figure.

Grant said, “His luck ran out before he even started. Dozens of casinos on the Strip, and you picked mine, the one where you were most likely to get caught.”

“You’re just that stupid stage magician! Smoke and mirrors! What do you know about anything?” He slumped like a sack of old laundry.

Grant smiled, and the expression was almost wicked. The curled lip of a lion about to pounce. “To perform such summonings as you’ve done here, you must offer part of your own soul—as collateral, you might think of it. You probably think you’re strong enough, powerful enough, to protect that vulnerable bit of your soul, defending it against harm. You think you can control such monstrous underworld creatures and keep your own soul—your own self—safe and sound. But it doesn’t matter how protected you are, you will be marked. These creatures, any other demons you happen to meet, will know what you’ve done just by looking at you. That makes you a target. Now, and for the rest of your life. Actions have consequences. You’ll discover that soon enough.”

Julie imagined a world filled with demons, with bat-wing creatures and slavering dragons, all of them with consciousness, with a sense of mission: to attack their oppressors. She shivered.

Unblinking, the kid stared at Grant. He’d turned a frightening, pasty white, and his spine had gone rigid.

Grant just smiled, seemingly enjoying himself. “Do your research. Every good magician knows that.”

Julie called security, and while they were waiting, the demon-summoning kid tried to set off an old-fashioned smoke bomb to stage an escape, but Grant confiscated it as soon as the kid pulled it from his pocket.

Soon after, a pair of uniformed officers arrived at the room to handcuff the kid and take him into custody. “We’ll need you to come with us and give statements,” one of them said to Julie and Grant.

She panicked. “But I didn’t do anything wrong. I mean, not really—we were just looking for the cheater at my blackjack table, and something wasn’t right, and Grant here showed up—”

Grant put a gentle hand on her arm, stopping her torrent of words. “We’ll help in any way we can,” he said.

She gave him a questioning look, but he didn’t explain.

The elevators seemed to be working just fine now, as they went with security to their offices downstairs.

Security took the kid to a back room to wait for the Las Vegas police. Grant and Julie were stationed in a stark, functional waiting room, with plastic chairs and an ancient coffeemaker. They waited.

They only needed to look at the footage of her breaking into the rooms with Grant, and she’d be fired. She didn’t want to be fired—she liked her job. She was good at it, as she kept insisting. She caught cheaters—even when they were summoning demons.

Her foot tapped a rapid beat on the floor, and her hands clenched into fists, pressed against her legs.

“Everything will be fine,” Grant said, glancing sidelong at her. “I have a feeling the boy’ll be put off the whole idea of spell-casting moving forward. Now that he knows people are watching him. He probably thought he was the only magician in the world. Now he knows better.”

One could hope.

Now that he’d been caught, she didn’t really care about the kid. “You’ll be fired, too, you know, once they figure out what we did. You think you can find another gig after word gets out?”

“I won’t be fired. Neither will you,” he said.

They’d waited for over half an hour when the head of security came into the waiting room. Grant and Julie stood to meet him. The burly, middle-aged man in the off-the-rack suit—ex-cop, probably—was smiling.

“All right, you both can go now. We’ve got everything we need.”

Julie stared.

“Thank you,” Grant said, not missing a beat.

“No, thank you. We never would have caught that kid without your help.” Then he shook their hands. And let them go.

Julie followed Grant back to the casino lobby. Two hours had passed, for the entire adventure, which had felt like it lasted all day—all day and most of the night, too. It seemed impossible. It all seemed impossible.

Back at the casino, the noise and bustle—crystal chandeliers glittering, a thousand slot and video machines ringing and clanking, a group of people laughing—seemed otherworldly. Hands clasped behind his back, Grant regarded the patrons filing back and forth, the flashing lights, with an air of satisfaction, like he owned the place.

Julie asked, “What did you do to get him to let us go?”

“They saw exactly what they needed to see. They’ll be able to charge the kid with vandalism and destruction of property, and I’m betting if they check the video from the casino again, they’ll find evidence of cheating.”

“But we didn’t even talk to them.”

“I told you everything would be fine.”

She regarded him, his confident stance, the smug expression, and wondered how much of it was a front. How much of it was the picture he wanted people to see.

She crossed her arms. “So, the kind of magic you do—what kind of mark does it leave on your soul?”

His smile fell, just a notch. After a hesitation, he said, “The price is worth it, I think.”

If she were a little more forward, if she knew him better, she’d have hugged him—he looked like he needed it. He probably wasn’t the kind of guy who had a lot of friends. At the moment, he seemed as otherworldly as the bat-winged creature in that arcane circle.

She said, “It really happened, didn’t it? The thing with the hallway? The … the thing … and the other…” She moved her arms in a gesture of outstretched wings. “Not smoke and mirrors?”

“It really happened,” he said.

“How do you do that? Any of it?” she said.

“That,” he said, glancing away to hide a smile, “would take a very long time to explain.”

“I get off my second shift at eleven,” she said. “We could grab a drink.”

She really hadn’t expected him to say yes, and he didn’t. But he hesitated first. So that was something. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I don’t think I can.”

It was just as well. She tried to imagine her routine, with a guy like Odysseus Grant in the picture … and, well, there’d be no such thing as routine, would there? But she wasn’t sure she’d mind a drink, and a little adventure, every now and then.

“Well then. I’ll see you around,” she said.

“You can bet on it,” he said, and walked away, back to his theater.

Her break was long over, and she was late for the next half of her shift. She’d give Ryan an excuse—or maybe she could get Grant to make an excuse for her.

She walked softly, stepping carefully, through the casino, which had not yet returned to normal. The lights seemed dimmer, building shadows where there shouldn’t have been any. A woman in a cocktail dress and impossible high heels walked past her, and Julie swore she had glowing red eyes. She did a double take, staring after her, but only saw her back, not her eyes.