That was a big part of why she’d decided to leave tonight. Lys kept begging her to take more time to heal, but Adrian had been in the enemy’s hands for an entire week. Bex was so upset at the idea of him being tortured in some sterile white prison cell filled with creepy golden eyes, she didn’t even notice Muriel holding something out to her until the witch gave up and slipped the object into the front pocket of Bex’s oversized black T-shirt.
“What was that?” Bex demanded, patting her chest in alarm. “A curse?”
Muriel shook her head. “Just an acorn.”
Bex arched a dark eyebrow. “You want me to give Adrian an acorn?”
“He’ll know what to do with it,” the witch promised. “My nephew isn’tthatbad at soul witchcraft, and seeds are the essence of the future.”
Those were some pretty cryptic instructions, but Bex didn’t get a chance to ask for clarification. The Old Wife of theFuture had already wandered away, vanishing like a shadow into the rowdy crowd surrounding the apple strudel booth.
Bex stared blankly at the wall of humans for a few more seconds, and then she turned on the heel of her stiff new combat boots—a replacement for the pair she’d burned to ash during her first fight with Havok—and started walking toward where the Witch of the Future had told her Lys was waiting.
As the only permanent restaurant in Hemlock Bend, the Brew Ha Ha wore a lot of hats. During the day, it was a coffee shop. After sunset, it was a pub. On crowded weekends like this one, it served as a shady retreat from the blazing autumn sun. Every table in its massive common room was packed with tired-looking festival-goers while the witch at the bar served drinks that smelled suspiciously like the potions Adrian used to brew.
Whatever they were, they were definitely filling people with energy. The moment exhausted customers drank their orders, they went right back outside to spend more money at the craft tents, creating a convenient wall of chaos that kept the scalies from looking too hard up the rickety steps to the shop’s second floor, where Lys was waiting with an unexpected—and extremelyearly—tall, green guest.
“Can’t be,” Bex said as she climbed the ladderlike stairs to see Felix, the Goblin Prince of Seattle, struggling to balance his lanky, seven-foot-tall body on one of the coffee shop’s antique wooden chairs. “How did you get here so fast? I only called you last night.”
“It’s called hustle, sweetheart,” the goblin replied, his voice sharp and curt with none of the usual flirtation. “I flew into Albany on the red-eye to pick up the cargo from my freight guy. Had a hell of a drive getting out here, though. You could’ve warned me the witches would be clogging every road into this boondock with their bake sale traffic.”
“I didn’t realize you’d be coming in person,” Bex said, plopping the remaining half of her pastry on the table before taking a seat next to Lys’s current go-to body: a lanky young man with a photographer’s vest and perfectly trimmed hipster beard who was practically bouncing up and down in his chair.
“Enough about your traffic problems,” Lys snapped, leaning over the antique sawhorse that had been retrofitted into a tiny café table. “Did you bring what we talked about?”
Felix curled his long arm down to pick something off the floor. It looked like an old-fashioned soldier’s knapsack that had been taken on one too many campaigns. Every inch of it was stained with something, but the heavy brown canvas beneath was finely woven, and the straps that held its top flap closed were stitched with magic symbols Bex didn’t recognize.
“What in the Hells is that?” Lys demanded, their amber eyes flashing dangerously in their disguise’s friendly face. “We asked for weapons.”
“And I delivered,” Felix insisted with a sharp-toothed grin. “That, my impatient chameleon, is the Armory of Solomon.”
Lys’s scowl deepened, and the goblin heaved an enormous sigh.
“Are you Luddites familiar with the concept of a Bag of Holding?” he asked, leaning as far back in his chair as his ridiculously long limbs would allow. “The Armory of Solomon follows the same principle, but for weapons.”
“Is it sorcery?” Bex asked suspiciously.
“Nope,” Felix replied, reaching out to pat the unassuming bag’s lumpy top. “This gorgeous baby was made in the fifteen hundreds by a renegade alchemist turned smuggler. He got purged by Gilgamesh shortly after completing his masterpiece, which is how my grandfather was able to acquire it on the cheap, but it still works like a charm. Despite its small size and unassuming appearance, this little knapsack can hold afunctionally infinite number of weapons. Since it was made during the Renaissance, that used to mean only swords, bows, and black powder cannons, but I’ve spent a pretty penny updating it to accept modern firearms as well, including automatic weapons, grenades, explosives, towable artillery, and so on.”
He unbuckled the knapsack and reached his arm in up to the elbow before pulling out a brand-new, shiny AK-47.
“I’ve got your whole order in here,” he explained as he dropped the gun back into the apparently bottomless knapsack. “Only way I could do it. You asked for enough weapons to outfit an army, but while I’ve always got the goods on hand, even I can’t drive twenty big rigs stuffed with illegal munitions across America without drawing suspicion. With this little beauty, though, all that destruction fits in one conveniently portable package.”
“Tooconvenient,” Bex observed tersely, keeping her hands firmly away from the knapsack. “You’re telling me there’s an entire army’s worth of weapons packed inside one small backpack?”
Felix grinned. “Now you see why it’s a treasure of my clan.”
“And nowyousee why I’m suspicious,” Bex snapped. “You’re the one who’s always telling me not to be a mark, but blindly accepting a treasure like this is absolutely mark behavior. We’re out of money and cornered hard right now. I know you know that, so why are you showing up with too-good-to-be-true treasures? Is this some kind of trick?”
Given their past interactions, Bex felt that was an extremely valid question, but Felix’s beady eyes narrowed like she’d just challenged him to a duel.
“Not everything goblins do is about money,” he said, uncrossing his legs and straightening his shoulders until he wasback to his full looming height. “There’s pride to be answered as well, and mine will be paid in full.”
“Pride?” Bex repeated, more confused than ever. “What does that have to do with—”
“You think I got on a plane at midnight and flew across the entire damn country just to cheat you?” Felix snapped. “I’d make more cash ripping off tourists back home! I’m not here for profit. I’m here because Gilgamesh played me for a chump.”
“Played you how?” Lys asked. “I thought you never worked with Heaven directly.”
