Playing with Fire: A Magical Romantic Comedy (with a body count)(4)
I gaped at him. He wanted to pay how much for me to find someone? Seventy-five thousand was more than twice what I made in a year, and that included all the buckets of gorgon bile I’d shoveled up so some cop didn’t get turned to stone trying to do it. Seventy-five thousand meant I could make good on my never-spoken threats of quitting.
“Oh, and Miss Gardener?”
“What?” I asked, tensing as I waited for the catch. There was always a catch. I should have known there’d be a catch.
“This talk never happened.”
Of course. I should have known. Someone willing to pay a fortune for someone to be found wouldn’t want anyone else to know he was looking. I sighed. “That’s going to make it difficult to ask my friends for help.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be smart or something? Figure it out.” He turned and headed for the door.
I fumed. “If I were so smart, do you think I’d be working as a barista in a pixie dust shop?” Why did rich men always insist on ignoring me? Magnus McGee left without acknowledging my question. “Screw you, too, buddy. And your sister sucked at the reverse cowgirl, in case you were wondering!”
Ah, well. It was probably for the better he couldn’t hear me. Who could he need to find so badly he’d pay so much for me to do the work for him? Had he missed the memo? I found people all right, in the worst positions possible.
I blinked, and a thought struck me. What if he hadn’t missed the memo?
Muttering curses, I shoved the black phone into my pocket to deal with after my hell shift ended.
While I could understand the pixie sisters ditching their shift, I expected better from Branden. The satyr loved coffee and pixie dust more than life itself, and he worked at Faery Fortunes part-time for the discount. He had a far better paying job as a desk monkey somewhere, but until now, he’d never missed a shift. With Mary still a no-show, I was stuck with closing.
If anyone expected me to open in the morning after an eighteen-hour shift, they’d get an unpleasant surprise. I locked the front door, flipped the sign, and cleaned up the mess. As soon as I finished, I wrote Mary a scathing note informing her she could find some other certified barista, invoked one of the rare New York employee’s rights laws favoring the workers, and told her she owed me for all eighteen hours I’d worked solo. In case she had trouble with the math, I gave her the amount along with a reminder she had promised to be back within an hour.
I would regret my decision when it came time to pay my rent. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t. My certification opened doors, and everyone wanted someone who could handle dangerous substances without a hazmat suit. If I didn’t mind a life as a high-class janitor, I’d be set. There weren’t a lot of people who could fall into a vat of gorgon bile and live to tell the tale. I was one of three in New York City, and the other two were gorgons, powerful ones who didn’t need to petrify me before crushing me to teeny tiny Bailey bits.
A little after one in the morning, I trudged home. Thanks to the late hour, it took four buses, and I staggered to my door in Queens at a little after three. All in all, I couldn’t complain. It could’ve been worse—a lot worse. I had run into only one drunk, and he’d been more interested in a leggy blond, who had enjoyed shocking the shit out of him with her Taser a little too much.
In the relative safety of my apartment, I flopped on my battered, flea-market couch and dug out Magnus McGee’s phone. “Who could you possibly want that you’d pay me so much to hunt him down for you?”
To add a bit of extra icing on my day, the asshole had locked the phone. I glared at the prompt. “Seriously?”
Blocking the info behind a passcode meant he either wanted a little revenge or meant for me to earn my keep. Fine. Two could play at his game, and a four-digit passcode wouldn’t take too long to hack, especially if I pulled out all the stops. First, I’d try random bullshit luck. I’d save the hocus pocus for later, when I was frustrated enough I wouldn’t care if I broke the phone.
I took a few minutes to test the device to make sure it was the real deal. A few swipes of the screen brought up the expected menus, and I even turned on the flash out of curiosity. Maybe after I got paid for the work, I’d buy my very own cell phone. I was probably one of ten people in the entire city without one.
It took me until five after six to brute force my way in. The device clicked, the screen flashed, and it displayed a list of icons showing one missed call. It also clicked and gave an electronic buzz. Before I could do more than suck in a startled breath at the unexpected sound, the device detonated. A cloud of vapor, dust, and glass shards burst in my face. The sharp bite of shrapnel tore into my skin, and my eyes burned with the fires of hell.
With tears streaming down my cheeks and blinding me, I staggered to my bathroom to flush my eyes. I cursed every painful moment I spent splashing my face with water. When I could finally see again, reddish droplets stained my white sink and had splattered on my mirror. I squinted to make out my reflection. The whites of my eyes had turned an angry red, but by some miracle I refused to question, none of the shards had cut me anywhere important. Being blinded would’ve really put a damper on my day.
I picked out the fragments with tweezers. It was a good thing I hadn’t started life all that pretty, as my new collections of scars would ensure no man looked my way twice. At least I didn’t think I needed any stitches.