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I called them by memory, placing the order with some scrutiny. So, when I finished my order and paid over the phone, the look in his eyes grew heated and playful. “Guaranteed delivery in thirty minutes?”

“Forty.” I nodded as the spark in his eyes made me grin in return.

“One moment.” He slid from bed, hit the bathroom, and meddled around the living room, returning with a robe wrapped around him that he promptly discarded. “Now, let’s hurry.”

And hurry we did.

Knotted and slaked, panting atop one another, the doorbell rang.

“Fuuuuck,” I groaned.

Lex did something on his phone and brought up his doorbell app, one I’d not seen before. “There’s a tip under the doormat. Just leave the pizza there. I’m stuck in the middle of something,” he told the befuddled delivery guy.

The man shrugged, foraged for his tip, and left.

Twenty minutes later, we ate cold pizza in bed, changed the bed sheets, and slept like nothing in the world was wrong.

Chapter Twenty-One

Lex

I nursed a low-grade headache as I leaned over some Grimm fairy-tale’s book where one of the stories was about three little pigs and the crypto bro wolf.

One built his fortune out of NFTs, the nonfungible token images that were worthless, and the wolf devalued his portfolio with a huff and puff and one market manipulating slide.

One built his fortune out of a fly-by-night scam token, and the wolf pumped and dumped his life’s savings.

And the last one built his fortune on a diverse portfolio of bitcoin and gold standard, and the wolf pumped and dumped but couldn’t bankrupt the last little pig.

“That’s not even a Grimm’s tale.” Jess leaned over my shoulder as I gripped my key in one hand and sipped a seltzer water with the other.

“Nope. Who the fuck dreams up these scenarios?” I sneered at the page as Jess shrugged.

“Most of the time, they’re archivists or deus that don’t know what they are or are too fundamentally weak to be found, and their energy just fucks with a book. Sometimes, the more people that read a novel leave their own imagination behind in little bits. Others are purposefully changed by other archivists. That, and the darker option.” She shrugged as I glanced over.

“Fill me in?” I flicked at the tab on my soda to make that irritating twang that made her flinch until she snapped it off with a huff.

“There’re more than librarians. There’re cantors—and no, not like you’re thinking. They’re those that derive magic from song. There’s the carmine, the poets, what we traditionally think of as wizards or witches. In fact, most humans can become even a small level one if they try. Words themselves hold power; it just takes a lot of understanding to encourage them to release the intent behind them. After all, if a thousand people chant something over and over again, they give something power.”

“I imagine Robert Frost’s stuff is pretty powerful,” I hummed as she nodded.

“Shakespeare, bible verses, movie quotes.” She ticked off a few fingers as I chugged the last of my seltzer water, tossed it in the recycling, and retrieved another from my lunch bag as I attempted to rehydrate my unquenched thirst.

Zeke and I had shagged like rabbits for days now, and I was bottomless—or wholly bottom. I’d nearly become a pillow princess save for the times I rode him until my knees popped.

“Any others?” I took a long swig of what was supposed to be grapefruit flavored, but was more or less spicy water that a grapefruit walked by and farted over.

“Hmm… We’re discovering new types over time. As the internet is growing, we’ve picked up on some new types that we can’t classify. They’re somewhere between a carmine, an archivist, and a pictus—”

“Painting magic?” I queried and raised a brow.

“Yeah, they can either go into someone else’s work or create their own images to draw things out. Rare and unreliable.” She waved her hand dismissively. “So, these guys can turn memes into spells and can dive into computers like we do books.”

“VR on steroids,” I said, recalling my early college years and my forgotten VR headset.

“Pretty much.” She leaned back in her chair and propped a foot up on the circulation desk as she flicked a page in yet another of my books that I’d brought her from my personal collection. She never had to hold a key like I did, though she had one to her own library.

“They don’t have organization, yet, so they’re kinda wild cards.” She flipped a page, eyes glued to the paper. “Not like us.”