28. Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly
Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly
When the ring lights came out, Luna knew they were in real trouble.
She was standing with her back to Spellbound Books, watching Vex’s minions swarm around the gazebo. Laptops balanced on folding tables. A portable green screen was zip-tied to the back railing, sagging in the middle as if it had already given up on life.
The place looked like a low-budget TV studio had mated with a TED Talk.
And the chairs. My gods, the chairs. Sixty-four empty folding chairs arranged in neat rows facing the gazebo, each one a monument to Vex’s profound sense of self-importance.
The only occupied seat was front and center: Chuck the Investor, legs crossed, hands folded over one knee, looking like an impatient king waiting for an execution to begin.
“This is embarrassing,” Delilah murmured beside her. “I want to apologize to the gazebo.”
“The gazebo has seen worse,” Scarlett muttered, scrolling through something on her phone without looking up. “Remember when the Earls tried to reenact WrestleMania?”
“That was high art compared to this.”
Luna barely heard them. Her attention was locked on Vex, practicing dramatic gestures like an overeager mime. Burke stood off to one side, looking sour. One assistant circled the camera for the third time, needlessly adjusting an angle.
“You with us, Luna?” Mama’s voice was low, pitched just for her.
“I’m here.” She forced herself to blink, to look at her mother. “Just thinking through the plan.”
That was mostly true. She considered the plan: which spells Vex might show first, how she and her sisters would respond. They’d drilled this. They were ready.
So why did her chest feel like someone had filled it with concrete?
Focus.
Belinda Chatterjee hovered nearby, tugging at her cardigan sleeves. “I still think we should’ve told Shaw about this. He’d know how to handle these magician types. He handled Burke before—”
“Shaw isn’t here,” Luna said, more sharply than she intended. “Sorry. I just mean, we’re ready.” But then she noticed her hands were shaking. She shoved them in her pockets.
Is he all right?
The thought arrived uninvited, sharp as a fishhook. She shouldn’t care where he was. He’d stolen from her, he’d lied . . . He’d played her for a mark. Those Oklahoma sharks could have him, as far as she was concerned. Shaw, with those sad eyes and soft lips and—
Stop. I no longer care where he is. I no longer care if he is safe, or if he ever thinks of me at all. I don’t care.
“They’re about to start,” Scarlett said.
In the gazebo, Vex had stepped into the center of the camera frame. The ring lights made him look like a televangelist, all white teeth and confidence. He rolled his shoulders and shook out his hands, like a boxer preparing for a fight.
Assistants flanked him with cameras. Nearby laptop screens had multiple chat windows open, already exploding with activity. Luna couldn’t read the text at this distance, but she could see the scroll speed. Hundreds of messages. Maybe thousands.
“Online audience is huge,” Scarlett murmured. “Tech press, investors, crypto people. Some government handles I don’t recognize. And—oh, fantastic—someone from the Senate Subcommittee on Emerging Technologies.”
Burke stood beside Vex with his hands clasped behind his back, radiating a kind of rigid disapproval.
And Chuck the Investor? Chuck turned toward the bookstore and waved.
Not a friendly wave. A knowing wave. A little finger-wiggle of acknowledgment aimed directly at Luna and the gathered witches.
His expression said, I see you, I know what you’re planning, and this is going to be delicious.
Luna’s stomach dropped.
“He knows,” Delilah breathed.
“Of course he knows.” Scarlett’s voice was flat. “Question is whether he cares.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Luna forced steel into her spine, into her voice. “We do this anyway.”
Because if they didn’t—if CastR launched successfully and Vex’s app went live, turning magic into a purchasable commodity for anyone with a smartphone and a credit card—the balance between magical and non-magical worlds would collapse. And not gradually. It would be chaos.
Easy. No pressure at all.
Aphra moved up beside them, her long hair pulled into a tight bun. “Ready when you are, ladies.”
Violet, vibrating with nervous energy, nodded enthusiastically. “I’ve been practicing. I can do it. I know I can.”
“You’ll do great.” Luna hoped it was true.
In the gazebo, Vex cleared his throat. The cameras swiveled to him. Even from across the green, Luna saw the instant he switched into performance mode. Shoulders back. Smile wide. Every inch of him shouted: watch me, love me, give me your attention.
“Here we go,” Mama said softly.
Luna took a breath. Held it. Let it out slowly.
You’ve got this. You trained for this. You can do this without—
—without Shaw.
Her chest ached.
Stop it. First things first.
Vex spread his arms wide and began to speak.
* * *
Shaw woke to the sound of two men arguing about overtime.
“—saying is, I got a cookout,” the first voice said. Male, young, aggrieved in that particular way of twenty-year-olds who’ve just discovered the world wasn’t fair. “My girl’s family. Her mom’s making ribs. You know what it’s like to miss ribs?”
“I know what it’s like to miss a mortgage payment.” The second voice was older, tired. “They’re paying triple overtime, kid. You can eat ribs any day.”
“It’s the Fourth—”
“It’s a regular workday. Now stop your sobbing and help me with this cable run.”
Their footsteps receded down one of the aisles—hot or cold, Shaw couldn’t remember which was which—and the argument faded into the general mechanical scream of the place.
Shaw kept his eyes closed and took inventory.
Still breathing. Good start.
Still in the server room. Less good.
Arms suspended over his head, wrists caught in restraints that burned like spite. Not good at all.
Everything hurt. His wrists had gone numb, promising future agony. His head throbbed. It was the kind of pain that suggested he’d been unconscious a while. Long enough for the world to keep turning, long enough for it to be morning, long enough for it to be—
The Fourth.
The cookout. The ribs. July Fourth.
Shaw’s eyes snapped open.
The server room looked the same: rows of metal cabinets stretched into darkness, lights blinking in no pattern, air so cold his breath fogged.
The noise still crushed him, made his bones feel like they vibrated.
But now there was activity. Not just the two workers he’d heard.
More voices came from deeper in the facility.
The clang of metal. The electronic beep of something being scanned.
Or logged. Or whatever these modern people did with machines.
Overtime on the Fourth. Which means the demo’s today. Which means—
Luna.
She was standing in Oak Haven right now, probably. Vex was performing like a trained monkey while investors watched, and who knows what magical punishments were about to rain down on her? All because Shaw had fucked up and Delilah had hung up, and now Luna had no idea what was coming.
Shaw’s jaw tightened.
The sentinels stood around him in a loose circle.
Four of them, maybe five—hard to count when they kept flickering at the edges like bad film.
Hollow-eyed bastards. Burke’s dogs. They hadn’t moved since Shaw woke up, just watched him.
Blank attention. Things that had never been alive couldn’t fake that.
The wards pulsed. Shaw felt magic channel through the facility and Burke’s arcane CastR machinery. It connected this place to Oak Haven like a noose. Every pulse meant Luna was in danger.
* * *
Vex’s voice carried across the green with the kind of studied enthusiasm that made Luna’s teeth ache.
“—revolutionary hour in human history. Magic, which has been the province of the few, the elite, the lucky—” he spread his arms wide “—becomes accessible to everyone.”
“He’s really selling it,” Scarlett murmured.
Vex’s grimy little assistants tracked him with their cameras. The laptop screen showed the chat exploding—emojis, questions, excitement. Burke stood motionless, hands clasped, watching.
Vex lifted one hand. “Let me show you.”
The air above his palm shimmered.
Her sisters shifted into position beside her. The others readied themselves. This was it. A butterfly appeared: delicate, blue, impossibly detailed. It fluttered up, wings catching the morning light.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Vex’s smile was genuine. “Now just watch.”
The butterfly multiplied. Two. Four. Eight. A cascade of blue wings spiraling upward into the summer sky.
Luna didn’t wait. Mentally she reached for the spell’s structure, found the thread that held it together, and pulled.
The butterflies stuttered mid-flight. Four butterflies turned into coconuts and plummeted to the ground. One became briefly philosophical and started reciting Yeats. Another inverted and spent several confused seconds being a butterfly-shaped hole in reality. Then they all popped like soap bubbles.
The witches nodded approvingly and turned their gazes to the gazebo, eager to see Vex’s embarrassment. But he just laughed. “Well, that was unexpected! The beauty of live demonstrations, folks—magic is nothing if not spontaneous.”
The chat loved it. Even from a distance, Luna could see the scroll speed increase.
“Smooth,” Delilah muttered. “He’s good.”
Too good. Vex was playing the glitch as intentional, as part of the adventure.
Chuck leaned back in his chair, beaming. He waved at the witches again. “Is this good shit or what?!”
* * *
Think, Shaw.
He’d been in worse spots. Probably. The time Big Eddie Moran had caught him cheating at cards came to mind. The time the cops had dragged him into that back room in Cicero. The time he’d spent ninety-eight years in an interdimensional void.
Actually, that last one might be worse.