Chapter 13
Chapter
Thirteen
“ W hat?” My words were a breath of air, and Cassander smirked, although it wasn’t pretty or kind.
Cassander stepped back, the coin still clutched in his hand. “Why you? I’ve been asking myself that since I first saw it in your fingers.”
“Cassander.” The word came out too sharp, so I tried again, quieter, not wanting to raise the interest of the kids in the next room. “What are you talking about?”
“This coin is the most powerful artifact you or your little government agency has ever seen. And you picked it up for a few euros.” Cassander examined it, turning between the dragon side and the raven, twisting it back and forth before flipping it up into the air.
It landed in his palm, and he closed it. He smirked, opening his hand, but the coin was gone.
I stepped back again. “Where did you put it?”
If Cassander was telling the truth, then I needed to turn the coin in to the SPA. I needed to make sure it got under lock and key, in whatever secret vault they stored dangerous magical artifacts. Because a coin that could take someone across half the world in a blink could also take them straight into the Oval Office or a nuclear launch facility.
“Check your pocket,” Cassander said. The lines around his eyes were no longer crinkling with amusement but seemed carved from deep exhaustion.
I dug my hand into the pocket of my pants, drawing the coin out. “How did you?—”
“The coin has chosen you. I have done nothing.” The twist of his lips was unhappy.
Immediately, I put some things together. “This is what you were after in Paris. Why didn’t you just take it the first time you saw it? I let you hold it.”
“I knew I couldn’t. It wouldn’t come with me.” Cassander shook his head at himself. “I thought perhaps if I won it, or you gave it to me in payment for a trick…”
“You tried to run away with it right now when I gave it to you,” I said. “You weren’t planning to come back.”
“Yes. I got this far before I realized it had returned to you.” He shook his head. “Why did it choose you?”
The way he spat the word made something in me rise up, offended. “Hey, I’m a pretty good catch. Handsome. Thirty. Gainfully employed. I even open doors and remember anniversaries.”
“That seems like the bare minimum.” Cassander looked me over. “Your wardrobe leaves something to be desired.”
I looked down again at the bright pink shirt, the pants with the awkward stain. “Yeah, well, we should probably go shopping. It’s not like I want to continue wearing things that were popular during my awkward punk phase.”
Cassander’s nostrils flared but didn’t quite make it to a snort. “The power to change luck, and it lands in your hands.”
“This is going to continue returning to me.” I looked down at the coin again, the weight suddenly heavy in my palm. I remembered the confusing shell game, how defeated the man had seemed.
“It will. It has chosen you. My mother—” Cassander swallowed. “My mother said, the coin chooses the bearer.”
“And this is what transported us from Paris.” I inhaled. “This is what brought us here.”
Cassander nodded. Suddenly, I saw the future differently: if I couldn’t be separated from the coin, then I would be locked up with it. I would be closed up in whatever vault they put dangerous artifacts in, bagged and tagged and disappeared forever.
“You don’t even know what you have.” Cassander sounded frustrated, and when I looked up at him, his eyes were flashing, molten in their anger.
“What I have is a death sentence,” I said sharply. “I know exactly what I have.”
Or maybe they wouldn’t kill me. Maybe they would just lock me in a tiny box and take me out anytime they needed to use the artifact. Anytime they wanted to take a strike team behind locked doors or into a secure room, they would drag me out, and I would do it because anything was better than the cell they kept me in.
Either way, Damian Reyes, owner of “the most powerful artifact in the universe,” was having the worst day of his life because until the artifact didn’t return to me like the world’s worst boomerang, I couldn’t go back to the SPA even if Twenty-one called me today and said it was all a mix-up, and would I like to come in from the cold?
“Why were you looking for it? Hoping to break in and kill your brother while he’s sleeping?” I pushed.
Cassander shook his head. “No.”
“Then what, Cass? What do you need this coin for?”
“To change my fate,” he said sharply. “To give my brother a taste of what he gave me. To change his luck so that he could be born under an ill omen and cursed, as I was, with the gods’ displeasure.”
Cassander’s expression was dark, eyes unfocused, and he glared back at the coin. “It must … It must be able to change it. There is no way you deserve it.”
“Thanks.” My chest heated, the anger I felt tightening and growing until I knew it was going to explode out. “I need a drink.”
Cassander blinked, mouth falling open. “What?”
“A drink. I just found out that my life is over. I need alcohol. And lots of it.” I looked down at the coin, hesitating before I offered it to Cassander.
If he had it, he could leave. If he had it, I’d be forced to arrest him, and then they’d lock him in their little cell. But he wanted it, and I most definitely didn’t.
I held the coin out, and Cassander grabbed it eagerly. His fingers closed around it, and for a second, I felt relief, but then one of the kids yelled, and I turned and tripped over a toy banana, falling to the floor and smashing my nose into the carpet.
Whining in pain, I lifted my hands up to my face, trying to check if there was permanent damage. As I tried to sit up, I caught sight of the coin, right in front of where I’d fallen, the dragon glaring at me unhappily.
“Right.” I picked up the coin and put it back in my pocket.
Cassander was frowning, but his lip twitched into a small smile. “So when I said ‘the most powerful artifact in existence,’ you thought it could be traded like a playing card?”
“I mean, I was thinking a Pokémon card, but yeah.”
Cassander hummed. “It appears to have failed.”
“Yeah,” I pressed my fingers to my nose, checking again. It didn’t feel broken, but it was painful to the touch. “That’s been made very clear for me.”
Cassander crouched down, eyes narrowed, examining my face. I startled when he reached out, pressing his thumbs on either side of my nose. I started to bat his hands away, but he glared, and I relaxed.
His fingers were cool, fingertips skimming my skin. “It doesn’t appear to be broken.”
“Are you going to kiss it better?” I raised an eyebrow suggestively, and he dropped my face. I could still feel the echo of his touch, the ghost of his fingertips on my skin.
“You said artifacts have no effect on you,” Cassander accused.
“They don’t. When I was first in training, they had me touch all sorts of artifacts, and I couldn’t even make the night-light artifact flicker.” I scooted until my back touched the wall, relaxing against it. My knee was still vaguely sore from yesterday, my nose hurt, and my muscles were beginning to scream at their unhappiness between running for my life and sleeping on the couch.
“You couldn’t even make a little night-light glimmer, and yet the most powerful artifact in the world appears to be well at work with you. It seems the coin has determined what kind of luck it would like to give you.” Cassander’s lips pursed, and he stood.
When he offered over his hand, I took it, my knee almost giving out until I shifted my weight.
“So what exactly does it do, the most powerful artifact in the world?” I kept my voice low, and Cassander and I were close enough that I could see the shift of his muscles under my old T-shirt. Even wearing a gym shirt and pants, he looked regal.
“I told you. It changes your fortune. My fortune was to be the heir displaced by his brother.” Cassander’s eyes crinkled, one eyebrow going up haughtily. “Your fortune is now to wear clothes you abandoned twelve years ago.”
I closed my eyes, thinking about my perfect life destroyed in under twenty-four hours. Years of work gone. Trust from the SPA evaporated. And several people with very large weapons trying to kill me.
“You said there was a drink on offer,” Cassander noted.
“Yes.”
I needed more than a drink. I needed enough alcohol to make me forget that my life was over; everything I had ever wanted had gone up in smoke.
In the living room, the kids began screaming, and Cassander glanced at me briefly. His expression wasn’t quite sympathetic, something harder than that. But he nodded to himself. “Stay here until you’re ready.”
Then he was gone, headed down the hallway, his voice rising to instruct Riley, “What did I say about pressure points? You must learn to fight more efficiently if you’re going to hold off any assassins.”
Without him, the hallway seemed long, and I drew the coin out. I stared at it, twisting it back and forth, examining the dragon and the raven. There was no indication of where it had come from, what country had originated it. Not that it mattered much.
The coin looked old. Most artifacts were old, although we had discovered a few that had obviously been created in the past ten years—an action figure from a recent Pixar movie, a lipstick tube from a line of makeup a couple of years ago. No one knew what created artifacts, what called them into being. The Strange Phenomenon Agency had been studying it since World War II, when so many artifacts had been unearthed the US government hadn’t been able to ignore them anymore.
Shaking my head, I asked the coin, “Why me?”
The coin didn’t answer, and I twisted it back and forth until I was almost dizzy with it. Then, I used my thumb to flip it up into the air, catching it as it landed. I slapped it on my wrist.
“Dragon.” When I pulled my hand away, it was a raven.
Huffing a sigh, I pocketed the coin and headed back out to find Cassander engaging the kids in the same card trick he had earlier. When I took a seat on the couch, I watched him, but he was good. Better than good. He managed to seed conversations with the cards so that Riley and Junior didn’t even realize he had subliminally planted the cards he wanted them to say before he flipped them over, revealing that he had managed to “read their minds.”
“You’re like Grandma,” Riley said with wonder. “She’s magic too.”
“Grandma isn’t magic,” I said sharply.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology resembles magic,” Riley said huffily. “And Grandma is pretty advanced.”
I laughed, and somebody fumbled at the front door. My mother came in, juggling her purse and another bag. When she saw us all, her lips twisted into a smile, and she waved her hand away when I stood to offer help.
Cassander was dealing out the deck of cards into two piles. “Now I will teach you strategy.”
“Isn’t this just War?” Riley asked suspiciously.
“If you can’t cheat at a game so simple, then there’s no help for you at all.” Cassander flipped over his top card. “Begin.”
By the time my mother had cooked enough pasta to feed a table of ten, Cassander had shown Riley how to distract, rearrange her deck conveniently, and cheat her way into winning the simple card game.
“Damian, set the table,” my mother instructed.
I stood, moving carefully, setting the table. While serving the water, I managed to drop two glasses on myself. Then, I dropped the entire pot of pasta on my foot.
Luckily, the food was okay, even if the bones of my foot felt crushed.
Dinner was loud with two kids, each of them talking over each other to tell their grandmother about their day. When they finished, I helped my mother with dishes before asking for her keys.
“Where you going to go?” my mother asked suspiciously.
“I thought I would go visit Betty,” I said.
“Do you think she’s going to be happy to see you?” my mother asked.
It was an incisive question, slicing me to the bone. “I want to see her.”
“Sometimes being a grown-up means not doing things we want,” my mother said. “You aren’t worried someone will see you?”
My mother’s words held new weight with Candace’s revelation. My mother was asking if the secret agency I worked for was looking for me. They were, and I hadn’t had a chance to check the secret email yet, but from what Twenty-one had said, they had bigger fish to fry than some field agent that had gone missing during an operation where everyone else had died.
Even I winced as I thought it.
My mother fished in her purse, pulling out her keys and offering them over. “Be careful, Damian.” Her words were the same as they had been on a Ventura beach, and I heard the same motherly affection in them.
I grabbed the keys, turning away. I couldn’t deal with that. The idea that my mother felt anything like motherly affection toward me and Candy made something in my heart twist.
“Come on, Cassander. Stop teaching my niece to break the law.”
Cassander stood fluidly, handing over his half of the deck of cards to Junior. Then we headed out, the cool evening air a shock.
As we drove through the city, I felt like I was home for the first time. The grocery store was the same, even if they had replaced the sign with an LED one. The local elementary school looked abandoned, tall weeds growing along the fence.
Desert Flower was a city built for people who had other places to be. Almost everyone who lived there worked at the hotels in Palm Springs or Indian Wells. Anyone who didn’t work in hospitality worked for the manufacturing facility down the road that spilled dark smoke into the air even at seven o’clock at night.
The entertainment in a town with more mobile home parks than actual houses was limited to the bowling alley, drugs, and a few bars that existed in different quadrants of the city. I drove almost all the way to the freeway, pulling into a sprawling parking lot.
We both got out, Cassander not even making any comments at the sign half shattered from bullets. Honeyrock flickered irregularly in neon, the high-pitched noises like a mosquito in my ear.
“When you said a drink, were you suggesting something like this?” Cassander looked around. “Or is there another bar behind this one that isn’t likely to give us hepatitis from the glasses?”
“You’re welcome to stay outside. I’m sure any number of drunk locals are going to find your cutting wit hilarious.”
Snorting, Cassander followed me as I opened the door, the bell attached to the handle jangling. It was the middle of the workweek, and the room was already a quarter full. Behind the bar, Betty was pouring a glass of beer from a worn tap handle.
Her black hair was pulled up into a jaunty ponytail, her pale skin powdered and lips painted bright red. She wore a black tank top, her apron underneath the same color. When she looked up at me, the black eyeliner widened her eyes even more than her own surprise.
“Damian Reyes.” She finished pouring the beer, handing it to someone further down the bar before coming closer to us, arms crossed. “Where’s my money?”