He paused, waiting for her to be excited, but Marci was staring at him like he’d just told her she was going to Mars. “You want me to go to a hotel with you?”
“Not like that,” he said quickly, face going hot. “I’m getting you your own room. My treat.”
Marci’s expression of frank disbelief morphed into one of cautious skepticism. “Why?”
“Because you’ve been invaluable to me tonight,” Julius said honestly. “And because the idea of sleeping in a bed while you go back to that cat graveyard you call a house is more than my conscience can stand. Just leave the car to the valet system and let’s go check in.”
Marci narrowed her eyes, clearly waiting for the trap. When it didn’t appear, Julius finally got the look he’d been waiting for: the beaming smile of pure delight. The sight warmed him right to his toes before Marci dashed away, tossing her trunk open and grabbing a fraying gym bag in a frantic explosion of energy. This plus her overpacked shoulder bag left her pathetically weighed down, so Julius, who had no bags, offered to carry something. After a short protest, she let him, handing him the gym bag with another smile that made him feel like the best thing on the planet.
This being a waterfront hotel, there was a real, old-fashioned check-in desk staffed by actual human clerks even at this hour of the morning. It was such an anachronistic sight, Julius was half tempted to ask them for a room just for the novelty factor. But despite her renewed energy, Marci looked worse than ever under the lobby’s elegant lights. Also, their filthy clothes were already drawing the hairy eyeball from the clerks, so Julius resigned himself to checking in the normal way: through the kiosk system via his phone’s AR.
By the time they walked across the marble floor to the elevators, he’d bought them two connecting rooms overlooking the water. He grabbed their key cards from the dispenser in the elevator on their way up. When the doors opened, he gently guided Marci down the hall. “I’m going to order some food,” he said as he handed her the key card to her suite. “What do you want?”
“Anything,” she said dreamily, opening the door and staring at the huge room with its sweeping view of the lake like she’d just opened the gate to fairy land.
He smiled and put her bag down beside her before walking one door down to his own room. As soon as he was inside, he pulled up the room service menu and ordered them breakfast. He also ordered himself a few things through the hotel’s automated concierge service, including a full set of new clothes. His had been on their last legs when his mother had burst into his room yesterday, but while they’d survived the fight with Bixby’s men and his dust-up with Chelsie, the trip through the sewers had completely done them in.
Fortunately, waterside hotels were famous for their ability to get anything in a hurry. The porter brought up a bag containing new jeans, underwear, and a fancy shirt made from a fabric Julius didn’t even recognize before their food could even arrive from the kitchen. The moment Julius was sure everything fit, his old clothes went straight into the trash, never to be spoken of again.
Thirty minutes later—showered, shaved, dressed in new clothes, and bearing the breakfast tray that had just arrived, as well as a special package that had come up with his other purchases—Julius knocked on the door that connected his room to Marci’s, opening it when she answered only to find an empty room. After a quick look around, he found her in the bathroom, cutting her hair in front of the huge mirror with the trimming scissors from the complimentary shaving kit.
The gym bag she’d grabbed from her car must have been full of clothes, because she’d changed into a loose UNLV t-shirt and pajama bottoms so faded, Julius couldn’t make out the original design. He could, however, clearly make out the shape of her legs underneath, and he quickly looked away before she caught him staring.
“I’ll be done in a sec,” she said, wrenching her neck around to get at the hair on the back of her head. “I’ve been dying to straighten this mess out for days.”
Julius cleared his throat and walked over to put the tray down on the table by the window. “I hope you didn’t pay whoever gave you that haircut.”
“Trust me, this wasn’t my first choice,” Marci grumbled, carefully trimming the wispy trails of hair above her eyes into something like bangs. “Do you have any idea how long it took me to grow my hair out? But Bixby’s mage was using it as a material link to track me, so I had no choice. I chopped my ponytail off and used it as bait to lure his goons into my house. Then, when they went inside after me,bam!”
Julius arched an eyebrow. “Bam?”
“Blew them up,” she said fiercely, glowering into the mirror as she put down the scissors. “Trust me, it was better than they deserved for killing my dad.” She grabbed a brush next, running the stiff bristles through her now mostly even short-cropped hair. This went on for almost ten seconds before she realized what she’d just said.
“Oh, wow,” she whispered, going still. “I guess that counts as confessing to murder, doesn’t it?”
Julius put up his hands. “I’m not judging. If someone killed my parent, I’d do the same.” If anyone actually managed to take out Bethesda, getting blown up would look like a holiday compared to what the Heartstrikers would do.
Marci dropped the brush on the marble counter with a loud clatter and leaned forward, resting her head dejectedly against the mirror. “You know,” she said softly, “believe it or not, I was a nice girl before all this. Never blew up anything bigger than a car, never killed anyone or went spelunking in the sewers or got in alley fights. They say people come to the DFZ to reinvent themselves, but I think I’ve taken the idea a bit further than intended.”
“I think you’re doing great,” Julius said, grabbing the package he’d ordered for her off the breakfast tray. “Come over here, I got you something.”
She gave herself a final shake and pushed off the sink, padding over to the table by the window. When she came around the bed, he noticed that her feet were bare. They were also adorable, her toes painted with the same glitter polish that was chipping off her fingernails, creating little flashes of sparkle as she walked.
“What is it?”
Julius blinked, startled. “Sorry,” he said, quickly looking away. “Here.”
He handed her the cardboard box, which she ripped open with focused curiosity. But instead of being excited as he’d hoped, her face fell into a confused frown. “But Julius,” she said. “This is a…”
“A phone,” he finished for her, plucking the slim, purple rectangle out of her hand and turning it on. “Here, let me show you the best part.”
He flipped through the phone’s small AR, fumbling a bit with the unfamiliar interface. He’d already set this part up through his own phone, though, so even with the fumbling, it only took a few seconds to find and pull up her account and put it on the screen. When he handed the phone back, he was rewarded with the sight of Marci rendered completely speechless.
“You can change the security settings to whatever you want,” he said. “But as you see, it’s all there. That’s your half of this morning’s earnings plus your fee for the hours you’ve worked so far, full rate.”
Marci didn’t say a word. She just stood there, staring at the five-digit number that was her new bank account balance. “But,” she whispered at last, “How? This account’s in my name. You need a DFZ Residency ID to have a phone in the city. I never got one since Bixby could use it to track me, and it wasn’t like I had any money to put in it anyway, but this…How did youdothis?”
“I used to play some pretty popular full-immersion MMOs,” Julius explained. “You meet a lot of people in games, some of whom make their living doing less than legal work. It just so happens one of my old guildmates works as a data merchant, and he was happy to sell me a fake Residency ID for you at a discount.”
