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He had apples in his room? “I don’t know, Zee.”

“Forget the apples. On the plus side, there’s no Wi-Fi”—he counted on his fingers—“no annoying work calls, no humming air-con . . . it’s out of order . . . and definitely no gremlins.”

“Sixty dollars is a small price to pay for safety,” Victor added.

Her gaze lingered on the folder tucked under Victor’s arm, then drifted across the street. Her options were to stay with us, or step outside the wards where Gideon held all the power. “Then I suppose you have a new guest.”

CHAPTER 8

We checked Noreen Greene into the hotel, and gave Madame Matase subtle instructions to keep an eye on her. After checking that I was still breathing and hadn’t died in the past few moments, Victor took his new obsession—the Gideon Cain file—into the conference room with instructions to be left alone, where he began to pour over it, leaving me and Zee to sit in the depressingly empty bar.

“I miss Tom,” I said, after a few minutes of silence. Even the jukebox was quiet, and that was rarely quiet for long.

“Yeah.” Zee nodded and sighed hard. “He was borderline in-fuckin’-sane, and a drug dealer, but who isn’t in this town?”

“You know, back in Agatha’s workshop, there were these smoky beings in jars,” I said, recalling the moments before I’d been stabbed. “Agatha had one attack me, but I saw its eyes and its heart wasn’t in it. They reminded me of when Tom Collins appeared in Agatha’s aquarium lab—kind of solid but not solid. They had the same strange glow. Do you think they were djinn too?”

“It would fit, right? I mean, Cain has others do all his bad shit for him. So someone took Tom Collins from his home, wiped his memory, and shoved him in an AI bartender unit for pick-up later. There’s no way Mr. Evil Sorcerer is going to dirty up his thick fingers with that shit.”

“You think Agatha did it?” I asked.

“I don’t know . . . maybe. She was into trading body parts. But she’s dead now so . . .” He slumped against the bar and sighed with his whole body. “Who am I gonna get my fix from now?”

The bar lights flickered. Just a little blip—a blink, and they were back.

“Did we pay the electric bill?” I wondered aloud.

“If you gotta ask me then imma say no.”

“I’m sure Madame Matase⁠—”

The lights cut out altogether, but the jukebox glowed its neon hues, and with a clunk-click, began playing “The Only Way is Up” by Yazz—another track I had no idea was in its library. Did they even use records in that era?

“You’re hearing this, right?” Zee asked, his face barely visible in the gloom, and only lit by the jukebox’s candy colors. “I’m not fuckin’ high from whatever Tom put in my drink?”

He hadn’t had a drink. We’d been at the hospital all day.

The lights blazed back on. Which is more to say they sort of blinked into hazy existence from old bulbs, and buzzed like they might explode or cut off again.

Which was weird. Even for us.

“Gremlins?” I wondered.

“They fix shit now, they don’t break it.”

Zee pushed to his feet and ambled toward the jukebox. The track cut off, the jukebox clacked mechanically, and another track began to play—“Don’t Leave Me This Way.” I got to my feet too, just as the lights flickered. “Hold on . . .” Poking my head out the bar door, everything seemed normal in the foyer, and Madame Matase confirmed the lights were all fine. Whatever was happening, it was isolated to the bar.

I joined Zee at the jukebox just as it began to play “Don’t You Forget About Me.”

“It’s possessed,” he said. “These tracks aren’t even in its library. Look, it’s not even picking up a record. It’s riffing.”

“Eighties classics?” Victor asked, pushing through the bar door. He must have heard the weirdness from the foyer.

“Of course you’d know the era.” Zee rolled his eyes.

“I Want to Break Free” by Queen was up next.

The jukebox was only playing snippets of songs, not even the whole tracks . . . almost as though it was trying to communicate.