29. Chuck the Investor
Chuck the Investor
Shaw rounded the corner at full sprint and nearly ran face-first into his own tie.
Shaw stepped directly in front of the tie-marked rack and turned to face his old enemy.
One honest job, he thought. Even if it kills you.
Burke emerged from the aisle like a winter storm personified. Composed, furious, hands glowing with that cold light that promised extremely permanent solutions to any and all temporary problems. “Nowhere left to run.”
“Not running,” Shaw replied. He positioned himself at the side of the cage, hoping against hope that he could block the “7B” marker with his head.
“Did you know, Frankie didn’t even want to go to Egypt?
But you paid him. Told him it would be easy money.
Just steal a few artifacts from King Tut’s tomb. What could go wrong?”
“Your brother was weak—”
“My brother was twenty-one.” Shaw’s voice hardened.
“And you sent him into a cursed tomb because you were too chickenshit to go yourself. All that power, all that magic, and you’re still just a coward hiding behind other people’s deaths.
You were looking for the secret to immortality,” Shaw said.
“That’s what this has always been about, right? ”
Burke’s hands began to glow brighter.
“Here’s what I learned during my stay in the Void. Immortality without purpose is just a longer prison sentence. And you? You’ve got no purpose except holding on. My brother lived twenty-one years and had more joy than you’ll have in a thousand.”
“ENOUGH.” Burke raised both hands, and the glow intensified into something blinding.
“Go ahead. Kill me like you killed Frankie. At least I’ll die doing something that matters.” He thought suddenly of Luna. About her laugh, and the way she’d looked at him in the Oyster Bar, before everything truly went to shit. About the fact that he’d never told her—
“My pleasure.” Burke fired.
Shaw dropped to the floor, backwards like a vaudeville pratfall. The killing spell screamed over his head and slammed into the tie-marked rack. The rack shrieked. Not a mechanical sound. Something else. Something that made Shaw’s vision blur and every nerve in his body shout wrong wrong wrong.
Magic ricocheted through the servers. Not just the one rack, but all of them, the entire network struck by Burke’s lightning.
Shaw was hit with a feedback wave like a building falling on his chest. He couldn’t breathe.
Couldn’t see. The world went white, then black, then colors that didn’t have names.
Somewhere very far away, he heard metal wailing, as if the spell itself was alive and angry. The mechanical hum of the servers distorted, twisting into a warped, magical echo that sounded almost like laughter.
His last coherent thought was: Luna, did it work?
* * *
A thousand miles away, Luna felt the explosion before she saw its effects. Some sort of break in the flow of magic. No, a reversal of flow.
Wherever CastR’s power came from, the source had inverted, yanking all the magic Vex had channeled through the network back toward Oak Haven with a roaring surge.
The effect was immediate and spectacular.
A herd of goats appeared in the middle of the green, then became a gaggle of Victorian children, then a pile of spinning bicycle wheels, then goats again, then zapped back to nothingness.
The trees all around the green turned to crystal, then gold, then back to trees again.
A dozen tiny tornadoes tore across the green and vanished back into the sky.
At that moment, Ashton Vex was mid-sentence, explaining something about “sustainable magical infrastructure.” He suddenly lost seven inches in height.
Everyone stared.
“What—” Vex looked down at himself, confused. Then horrified. “No. NO—”
Chuck the Investor threw his head back and laughed, clapping delightedly. “Damn, you’re short! Ashton, buddy! Have you been using some sort of glamour all this time, to make yourself look taller?! Oh, that’s fucking priceless. We got ourselves a short king! Or rather, ex-king, from the look of it.”
Vex stood helpless in the gazebo, looking like a child wearing his father’s clothes.
“Boss?” A minion tugged at Vex’s now very long sleeve. The young man’s voice had gone up an octave, and he was staring at the laptop like it had just bitten him. “Boss, you need to see what’s happening in the chat.”
“Not now!” Vex snapped, adjusting his jacket, his trousers . . . salvaging his presence. “We can recover from this. We just need to—” But then he looked down. His phone had gone soft and completely black. Smoke curled from the charging port.
“People’s phones have melted,” the minion said faintly.
“What?!”
“It’s all over the chat. Anyone with the app installed? Their phones all melted simultaneously.” The other assistants were displaying their own devices now, all transformed into squidgy rectangles.
They gathered around the laptop, their faces looking like variations on an Edvard Munch painting. “People are upset,” one minion vastly understated.
“Oh God,” gasped another. “Oh no, look. Someone’s asking if we took investments under false pretenses—”
“That investor from Singapore is demanding a refund—”
“At least ten guys say they’re contacting the Securities Exchange Commission . . .”
“Well, that guy says he’s with the Securities Exchange Commission.”
“We’re a hashtag, boss.”
“Ohhhh, we’re #CastRDisastR.”
“CastRDisastR . . . gotta admit, that’s pretty good.”
“Shut the fuck up, all of you!” Vex howled. One of the laptops suddenly made a sound like a dying seagull. He lunged for it and stared at the screen as his face drained of color. “I’m a meme,” he said in horror. “I’ve been memed.”
Over by the bookstore, Scarlett was on her phone, too. “Ye gods, ladies . . . Just look at this.” The top post—the one with 10,000 shares and climbing—featured a photo of the smoking wreckage of a stack of computer servers. Melted equipment and cables. The caption read: “VEX’S CAREER IN ONE IMAGE.”
The top comment said, “Goodbye, #DumpsterFireGIF, hello #CastRDisastR.”
Below that post, a second photo was gaining traction: a side-by-side comparison of Vex at his previous height versus Vex now, five inches shorter. Caption: “WHEN YOUR APP DOESN’T MEASURE UP.”
Vex made a sound like a balloon deflating.
“The livestream,” one of the assistants said weakly. “Boss, we’re still live—”
Indeed, they were. The cameras were still rolling. The chat was still scrolling at impossible speed—thousands of comments, most of them variations on “SCAM,” “FRAUD,” and “I WANT MY MONEY BACK.”
Chuck’s phone rang. Everyone turned to look at him.
CastR’s top investor couldn’t look more at home in his folding chair, legs stretched out, ankles crossed one over the other.
He looked at the screen, raised one eyebrow, and answered.
“Hello?” Pause. “Yes, this is he.” Longer pause.
“Oh really? A class-action lawsuit? How fascinating.” Chuck looked directly at Vex.
“Yes, I did invest, quite substantially.” Another pause.
“Oh, I’m very interested in joining. Please do send me the paperwork. ”
He mouthed to Vex: You’re fucked, boyo.
Vex’s face had gone from red to purple to an unnatural shade of grey. “You . . .you can’t—”
“Do you know how much media this is going to get? So much. Lawyers, news coverage, maybe I can squeeze a congressional inquiry out of it . . . Hell, Ashton, I thought the demo was going to be my big attention-getter, but this?” He practically shivered with pleasure. “This is magnificent.”
“Boss,” said one of the minions cautiously. “CNN wants a comment—”
“The BBC is asking if we’re shutting down—”
Vex looked like he might cry, vomit, or both.
“Boss,” a helper whispered. “What do we do?”
Vex opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Like a goldfish.
In the absence of Vex’s leadership, the young man turned to the camera and said, in a voice of pure defeat: “We’re experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by.”
The chat’s response was immediate and merciless:
“STAND BY FOR WHAT? BANKRUPTCY?”
“FUNNIEST SHIT I’VE SEEN ALL YEAR”
“SOMEONE CALL THE FBI”
“MY GRANDFATHER’S INVESTMENT IS GONE, YOU ABSOLUTE CLOWN”
Luna watched all of this from her position with the other witches, still trying to process everything that had just occurred.
The CastR app had collapsed. The demo had failed spectacularly.
All those investors they’d hypnotized were losing both their shirts and their minds.
Vex’s entire operation was imploding in real time.
It was everything they’d hoped for.
And somewhere out west was the smoking wreckage of a server farm. Scarlett still had the image open, the destroyed rack still visible on the screen.
Something about the image nagged at Luna, though.
Something minor, something everyone else had overlooked.
Something the color of an expensive glass of wine.
She reached out and took her sister’s phone to see for herself.
With finger and thumb, she expanded the image.
There, hanging lifelessly amid the twisted, smoldering wreck.
Shaw’s tie.
Which meant—
“No,” Luna heard herself say. The word came out broken. “No, he can’t be—”
The phone slipped from her fingers. Her legs stopped working. Suddenly she was on her knees on the sidewalk, not remembering how she got there.
Shaw was dead.
Delilah made a sound like she’d been hit. “Oh my gods . . . He called Luna. He called, and I didn’t tell you because I thought . . . He must’ve been trying to warn us. Oh, Luna . . .” She dropped to the ground and wrapped her arms around her sister. “My sweet sister, I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, honey.” Mama’s arms were around her now, and Scarlett’s, and Delilah’s, all three of them trying to hold Luna together while she came apart.
Around them, Vex’s meltdown continued—lawyers, investors, the press—but Luna couldn’t hear it anymore. There was only the image of that tie, burned almost beyond recognition. The crushing weight of what it meant.