Fast, heavy footsteps thudded across the scratched hardwood floor. I found myself face-to-face with a three-foot-long white stone cat with stubby legs and dragon wings. It spread its wings and lashed its tail. Stone claws dug new gouges in the floor. Its ears were flat against its head.
I kept still. If this was anything like Duke’s other creations, those teeth and claws were hard as diamond. “It’s just me. Annette Thorne.” He would have seen me on the video feeds when I unlocked the Tech Support door, which meant letting his pet threaten to eat me was a deliberate choice. “Who’s your friend?”
A deep, raspy voice from the back of the apartment answered, “Her name’s Chunk.”
Chunk circled me twice, then trotted away to sit in a torn, flattened computer box. Her tail continued to twitch as she watched me.
“Nice work,” I said. “The whiskers are amazing. How do you keep them from snapping off?”
A grunt was the only response. So much for small talk.
“I need a favor, Duke.”
That got a snort. “I figured.”
“I’ll pay.”
“Damn right you will.” A lamp switched off in the back, and Marmaduke Stone stepped out from behind a workbench piled high with a wall of partly disassembled electronics.
Duke looked less like a computer whiz and more like a boxer—both the fighter and the dog breed. He was six foot four and heavy with muscle. Not the sculpted lines of a bodybuilder, but the thick build of a man who spent hours on end working with heavy stone when he wasn’t running his bar.
He stopped five feet away and crossed his arms.
His jowled face was just as I remembered, covered in salt-and-pepper stubble. He’d started shaving his head since I last saw him. That was a surprise but not an unpleasant one. The warm, bronze skin of his scalp looked good: confident and sexy with a light sheen of sweat.
He wore tight jeans and an even tighter T-shirt. His feet were bare, reminding me of the way his toes used to curl and clench when we—
I was here on business, dammit. I pulled out my phone and showed him the screenshots I’d taken. “I’m looking for a kid named Ronnie. He stabbed a harvester last night, then showed up at the shop this morning packing an enchanted knife.”
Duke took the phone from my hand, careful to avoid touching my fingers. He held the phone on his palm, and the screen started to flicker, jumping through the recent photos. The shop’s security app opened next and began playing back this morning’s footage.
My body clenched, but I swallowed my protests about the violation of my privacy. He was trying to make me uncomfortable. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.
Duke was an old-school elemental wizard. He specialized in stone, but he was pretty good with metals, too. He had a side gig selling custom jewelry online.
He used to make gargoyles for the Catholic church in the late 1800s, creating guardians who could be called on to slash and crush and kill. But it was the dawn of the computer age that brought out his true gifts.
Duke could read silicon like a book and follow circuit paths like an Eagle Scout with a map and compass. He could even fix cracks and chips in your phone screen. He’d resurrected every one of the arcade games in the Gauntlet, and his little studio apartment was the best tech-repair shop in the country. Maybe the world.
I was pretty sure he had some elemental blood himself. It would explain why he was still around and looking so good at a hundred and fifty.
“Who’s Blake Davis?” he asked.
My muscles tightened further. “My son. Stay out of my text history.”
That was the price of coming to Duke for tech support. He snooped through anything that landed on his workbench. He claimed he couldn’t help it. I wasn’t sure I believed him, but between the information he picked up from his clients’ devices and the chatter he overheard in the bar, he was my best contact for otherworldly gossip or scouring the internet for hard-to-find info. He used to be, at least, back when we were getting along.
“If you’re looking for nudes, I took them off my phone before I came over,” I said.
His newly shorn scalp meant I could watch the blush creep up his neck and past his ears. “I was checking your bank balance to make sure you could pay me. You’re doing well for yourself.”
“I had some high-paying cases in my day, and I’ve made some good investments.” I grimaced and admitted, “Also, my first husband was one of the wealthiest vampires in France.”
“That’s good. Means you can afford the surcharge. Call it a succubus tax.”
He was rapidly moving from cold and distant to full-blown asshole. “Since when are you prejudiced against demons?”
“Call it an Annette Thorne tax, then.”
