“Abracadabra,” she muttered, hitting the enter button.
Ashburn, it transpired, posted bios of most full-time employees. (She took a detouring moment to search forherself and found she was not sufficiently significant for her department to mention even in passing.) The college managed to garble her quarry’s name—“Hartgarve”—but helpfully identified him as director of the IT help desk, with previous employment at Mycro Corp. in California and a degree from Cornwall University in England.
This explained the indeterminate accent. But the Internet could uncover nothing else about him. She poked around Mycro Corp.’s website and found no mention of him there; ditto for Cornwall University. “Alexander Hartgrave” (and “Alex Hartgrave” and, for good measure, “Alexander Hartgarve”) in several search engines returned no hits aside from the bio. She tried networking sites. A court case search. A patent search. An international newspaper archive search. She even entered his name into online telephone directories, for all the good it did her.
How could someone so technologically connected be virtually invisible? It must be deliberate. Maybe he reallywasin hiding.
What was up with Hartgrave suddenly seemed like an even more intriguing question than how magic and tech got intertwined. Not just because the two questions might be related, but because a mystery involving a shadowy wizard promised adventure.
Nothing was more seductive than that.
5
Explosions
The mulish twist to Hartgrave’s mouth the next evening told Emily he was prepared to hear—and shoot down—a question about technological magic. So in the mildest tone possible, she asked, “Why did you come to Ashburn?”
He blinked. Then he went even more mulish. “No. Next question.”
She gave an inward cheer. Mystery! Definitely a mystery! Next line of attack: “Who taught you how to do magic?”
“Next question that isn’t about me,” he snarled.
Undeterred, she asked, “Why are you living in the Inferno?”
“Why areyouliving in the Inferno?”
So he had noticed. “Uh ...”
“Exactly.”
Something about hisso thereexpression made her want to laugh. “Fine. I’ll tell you if you tell me.”
Both sides of his mouth curved up. A smile, an actual smile. “You first.”
Oh. Now that she thought about it, her reason was at least as embarrassing as never outgrowing a childhood crush on books about wizards. She sighed. “I can’t afford to heat my house properly, that’s why. Oh, come on—it’s not funny.”
He composed himself, but the remains of his laugh were everywhere on his face. “And here I assumed you were doing it expressly to annoy me.”
“No, that’s just a side benefit. So? What’s your reason?”
“Unique architecture.” He let that marinate for a few seconds. “The commute’s not bad, either.”
She scowled at him. Every time she thought he might be all right, really, he reminded her that he wasn’t. “You’re supposed to tell me the truth.”
“I always tell you the truth,” he insisted. “And speaking of living arrangements, you might want to stop renting that piece of dreck on Grand Avenue if you’re sleeping here.”
“How did you know—”
“Because, Emily Helena Daggett—age twenty-six, credit score of six hundred, daughter of John and Helen and a lifelong resident of Iowa, college included—I like to know whom I’m dealing with,” he said, crossing his arms.
Her mouth fell open in outrage. But then, he’d simply had more success doing to her what she’d tried to do to him, hadn’t he? She surprised herself—and Hartgrave, by the look of it—by bursting into laughter.
He shook his head. “You’re a very unusual person.”
This just made her laugh harder. “Says the spellcasting IT guy living in a hidden room.”
“Back to my original point,” he said, leaning against the archway to her corridor, making her notice that what she’d taken for a black shirt was actually a dark green. (Flashy, for him.) “Get out of your lease, and you’ll save money.”
