Reese suffered a spasm of mild horror. “I have to cook?”
Natalie grinned. “If you can make tea, you can probably handle this one. The ingredients are pretty common. The black cohosh—aka black snakeroot—is native to the eastern part of the U.S. and probably would’ve been a high-value trade item back in the day, but you should be okay. If the health-food stores don’t have it, try a homeopath.”
Reese pulled up the e-mail on her phone, saw that she’d received the promised file, and nodded. “Okay. Guess I’m going shopping.”
But as she said her good-byes and shut down her laptop, she was very aware of a low-grade churn in her stomach and the feeling that she hadn’t asked Lucius exactly the right questions. She was missing something. And that was never a good sign.
The cashier at the natural food store sent Reese a funny look as she rang up her purchases: snakeroot, sage, maize, dried beans, measuring cups and spoons, and an industrial-strength coffee grinder. At first Reese thought the girl might have recognized the ingredients for the snake ritual . . . but when she got the same sort of look at the convenience store where she loaded up on Ho Hos and Diet Coke, she started to suspect they were looking at the tired rag that had formerly been her jacket. She had brought a couple of clean shirts and underwear on what she had anticipated would be a short trip to locate Dez, and her tough combat pants looked okay despite what they had been through in the past twenty-four hours. Her coat, though, was torn and tired, and looked like what it was: city gear that had been dragged through the mud.
“You’re rationalizing,” she said to herself, earning another leery look from the convenience store clerk. “Admit it. You want the leather.”
She had parked near an upscale store that seemed to cater to either biker bitches that had money, or high rollers who wanted to look like biker bitches. Maybe both. Regardless, the mannequin in the window was wearing a hell of a jacket. Cropped in the front and dipping longer in the back, it was sleek and deceptively simple, with a square collar, off-center zip, and subtle studs on the sleeves—the good kind that wouldn’t scratch the shit out of furniture or flesh.
Reese didn’t covet often or easily, but she was feeling it now. A piece of it was probably leftover adrenaline, another piece of nostalgia. But she was also cold, and would rather have her own coat than borrow Dez’s again. That had been far too . . . intimate. So, telling herself she would make it fast, she dumped her purchases in the car, stripped out of her bedraggled city coat and headed into the store.
“Can I help you find anything, ma’am?” The sales clerk had dark hair, decent body art, and a serious case of muffin top.
Reese pointed. “I want that.”
She got an up-and-down, and a cautious, “It’s handmade and one of a kind.”
“And?”
The clerk named a price that wasn’t nearly as bad as Reese had been expecting based on what it would’ve gone for in LA or Denver. Besides, Strike had said “unlimited expenses,” she thought with a grin, though it was doubtful she would turn in this particular receipt.
“Do you want to get it, or do you want me to?” she asked Muffin Top.
Five minutes later—and very conscious of the time, despite Lucius’s assurances that Dez would sleep it off even without the antidote—she slipped into what felt like a second skin. The lining was cool and slick, the cut somehow ruthlessly fitted without restricting her motion, and the longer tail at the back would cover her .38. Even better, it had hidden vents and a thin, high-tech insulation that—at least according to Muffin Top—would keep her comfortable in temperatures anywhere between frosted margarita and lightly toasted. Whatever that meant.
Reese handed over her backup plastic. “I won’t need a bag.”
As she drove back to the hotel with the windows cranked down so she wouldn’t sneeze her head off from the sage and other stuff, she couldn’t shake the slightly queasy feeling that she always got when she spent more than a couple of hundred dollars on something that wasn’t for work, wasn’t essential. It had been a long time since she’d been a street kid, but those neural pathways were set for life.
I thought you had outgrown the leather phase? asked an inner voice that wasn’t her own.
“The other one isn’t warm enough, and it looks like crap,” she retorted, then stopped when she realized she was arguing with herself. “Shit.”
She was an independent operator. She would wear what she damn well pleased, and come and go on her own schedule, and she wouldn’t let anyone make her feel guilty about it. But although that logic sounded good, she was still going around in her head when she got back to the hotel, making it a relief to shove those problems to the back of her mind and ignore them while she focused on the job at hand. And if a whisper at the back of her brain said that things with the Nightkeepers—and Dez—had stopped being a job and become something more, she ignored that, too.
When she opened the door to his room, overheated hotel air wafted out, prickling her pores. A trail of clothing started just past the bathroom: coat, then tank, then cargo pants, socks, and boots. Faint snores came from the bed, where a huge mound of spare blankets and comforters moved rhythmically, more a mountain of bedclothes than any recognizable human being. Despite Lucius’s reassurances, worry nagged as she hauled her purchases up from the car, using a side door so the desk clerk wouldn’t give her any “no cooking in the rooms” static.
Then she stripped off her new leather, plugged in the in-room coffeemaker, and got cooking. By late afternoon, she had a feeling that poor Mr. Coffee had brewed his last pot—the upper chamber was gunked up and there was some gnarly sludge burned to the bottom of the pot—but she had about a cup of mossy-smelling syrup that, when she tried it, actually didn’t taste all that bad. More, it made her head spin and sparked warm liquid shimmers low in her belly.
“Whoa. Potent stuff.” Weaving a little, she left her room and headed down the hall. She hesitated for a second at Dez’s door. Then she crossed her fingers, sent a small, wordless prayer to whatever higher power might be listening, and let herself into his room.
CHAPTER EIGHT
On one level, Dez knew he was dreaming, that his mind was rebooting as his body healed and his magic rebounded. On another level, though, he was twenty-one again, and more jittery than he’d expected to be as he pushed through the door to the pawnshop a couple of blocks down from his and Reese’s apartment.
He relaxed—some, anyway—when he saw he had timed it right: Thin-faced, cadaverous Zeke was leaning on the glass display counter and there was no sign of Afternoon Bob, who couldn’t keep a secret for shit.
“Hey.” Zeke grinned, showing a glinting gold incisor that narrowed to a point, tagging him as a former Cobra, one of the lucky few who had gotten out and been badass enough—and useful enough—to not wind up dead in the process. “Got something good for me?”
He had been on the receiving end of a couple of Dez’s recent jobs, which was pretty much glorified messengering of merchandise from point A to B, cash from B to A. Reese called it laundering—she had been getting tighter and tighter about that stuff alongside worrying about Hood’s getting out of jail. But the way Dez saw it, he had a plan for Hood, and the transfers weren’t hurting anybody—they were bringing high-value stuff into the neighborhood, and the jobs were low-risk for top-notch pay.
He shook his head, playing it casual. “I’m not selling today. I was thinking about buying something.”
“Ah.” Zeke got his “I smell a profit” look. “Something like this?” He tapped the case under his scrawny elbows, where the higher-end jewelry lived. His finger landed right over the snake ring Reese had been drooling over the other week.
Dez had taken a good look at it, thinking he would find something similar—or, better yet, have it made— when the time came. But that had been before the storm. That was how he had started thinking of his life, as before or after the storm, because things had sure as shit changed for him that night. He hadn’t just kicked Keban’s ass, he had gotten a taste of the magic. Afterward, the dreams and restlessness had quit and he had
