Chapter 5. Annette
Annette
I parked on a little side road off Lafayette Street and walked a block to an out-of-the-way dive on a dead-end street. The exterior was gray brick, two stories high. Colorful flyers covered the windows, advertising everything from local bands to deals on weed.
Gargoyles lined the edge of the sloped metal roof.
Unlike traditional gargoyles, these had been carved into monstrous caricatures of video game characters.
A distorted Pac-Man with bulging eyes stood over the entrance.
A pair of finches had built a nest in his mouth.
To Pac-Man’s left, Donkey Kong raged beside a creepy, wide-mouthed Mega Man.
There was no sign, and the green metal door was closed. If you didn’t know the Gauntlet, you probably didn’t belong here.
The door scraped the frame when I yanked it open. I stepped inside and let my eyes adjust to the low lighting and the flashing screens of the video game cabinets lining two of the four walls. Electronic sound effects cut through the buzz of conversation.
The Gauntlet was half-bar, half-arcade, and almost entirely patronized by those of us with at least one nonhuman ancestor swinging in the branches of our family tree.
There were no rules against pureblood humans. The Gauntlet didn’t bother posting a werebear bouncer at the door or anything like that to make sure everyone who entered passed the sniff test. Indeed, tourists searching for an out-of-the-way place to drink wandered right in from time to time.
Most of them wandered right back out, never consciously realizing why they felt so uncomfortable. It led to the occasional nasty online review grumbling about the “unwelcoming” atmosphere, but that just made things all the better for the regular clientele.
I’d come there a lot after Jenny dragged me out to Salem. But I’d messed things up as usual, and it was going on fifteen years since I’d last set foot in this noisy, cramped, beer-and-pickles-smelling place.
A young man with too-perfect teeth waved from behind the bar. “Have a seat wherever. You can use the QR code on the table to order.”
I glanced at the nearest booth and the black-and-white square taped to the center of the dinged-up wooden table. QR code menus. That was new. It looked like the mutant offspring of incestuous bar codes. I hated it.
Strong arms enveloped me from behind. I drove an elbow into beefy ribs and had a hand on the hilt of my knife before I recognized that musky scent. I wriggled around. “Anton?”
The werejaguar lifted me off my feet. “Annette Thorne! You look as tasty as ever.”
I endured one more spine-popping squeeze, then wrenched free of his grip. “And you look . . . gray.”
The gray was mostly in his beard. His dirty blond hair had simply thinned since the last time I’d seen him.
He was shorter than me, but broader, and he’d acquired a bit of a gut over the years.
He smelled good—a hint of green apple from his aftershave mixed with a muskier, masculine smell.
He squinted at me through black-framed glasses and flashed his lopsided smile.
“You are the same. How is this possible?”
“Good genes.” Anton knew what I was, but it wasn’t the kind of thing I liked to talk about in public. Even in a relatively safe space like the Gauntlet. “How are the kids?”
He chuckled ruefully and finger-combed his tousled hair. “Wild and uncontrollable and good, very good. I don’t know if it’s the beast in their blood or if all young children are such devils. They destroy so much furniture! Come, sit, have a drink with me and my friends. I’ll show you photos.”
I didn’t move. “The ring’s new.”
He glanced at his left hand. “Not so new. Two and a half years since Reiko and I paid for the human paperwork, but we were mated long before that.”
“I’m happy for you.” I meant it. Anton was a good man, and any pangs of envy about his situation were easily kicked aside. I’d done the family thing long enough to know it wasn’t for everyone, but Anton looked as happy as I’d ever seen him.
“One drink, for old times,” he said. “You still like daiquiris?”
I wanted to say yes. Being back was making me miss my younger, wilder days. I rarely got out of the house anymore, and when I did, it was usually with Jenny and Temple. Both of whom were worse than worthless as wingmen.
Instead, I shook my head and stepped back. “You’re going to be in enough trouble going home with my scent on you from that hug.”
“Reiko loves your scent.” He winked. “It makes her feisty. Maybe you come home with me after the kids are in bed, and she’ll show you.”
I was ninety-five percent sure he was joking. “I’m afraid I’m working tonight, Anton.”
“Bookshop business?” He raised an eyebrow. “Or your other work?”
“The second one.”
“Such a shame.” He hugged me again. “You’ll come back when you’re not working?”
“I’ll try.” A lot would depend on how Duke reacted to me being back in his place this evening.
Anton started back toward his table, where three other middle-aged men waited. He waved his phone at me and said, “I’ll send you a message on the Facebook so you can see pictures of my little beasts!”
I smiled and nodded and hurried away, ducking my head as I waded through the bar toward the blue door at the back with Tech Support stenciled in dingy white letters.
“Excuse me,” said the bartender. “You can’t go up there.”
A stone statue of a jouster riding an ostrich stared up at me from beside the door. The ostrich’s stone eyelashes almost hid the lens of the camera.
I waved at the camera, then punched a six-digit code into the keypad by the door. I worried that Duke might have changed the code, but the latch whirred open. “What were you saying, hon?”
The bartender flushed and turned away.
I climbed narrow stairs into an equally narrow hallway with four green doors.
Two were Duke’s home and workshop. He rented the others.
A garbage bag that smelled like old Chinese food sat outside number three.
I heard a television playing inside—a children’s cartoon, from the sound of it.
A wood mezuzah case was mounted to the doorframe of number four.
Door one was open. I stepped into Duke’s workshop, a small studio apartment packed with old desktops, laptops, printers, tablets, smartphones, and other electronic devices, all labeled with different colors of sticky notes.
Fast, heavy footsteps thudded across the scratched hardwood floor. I found myself face-to-face with a three-foot-long white stone cat with stubby legs and dragon wings. It spread its wings and lashed its tail. Stone claws dug new gouges in the floor. Its ears were flat against its head.
I kept still. If this was anything like Duke’s other creations, those teeth and claws were hard as diamond.
“It’s just me. Annette Thorne.” He would have seen me on the video feeds when I unlocked the Tech Support door, which meant letting his pet threaten to eat me was a deliberate choice. “Who’s your friend?”
A deep, raspy voice from the back of the apartment answered, “Her name’s Chunk.”
Chunk circled me twice, then trotted away to sit in a torn, flattened computer box. Her tail continued to twitch as she watched me.
“Nice work,” I said. “The whiskers are amazing. How do you keep them from snapping off?”
A grunt was the only response. So much for small talk.
“I need a favor, Duke.”
That got a snort. “I figured.”
“I’ll pay.”
“Damn right you will.” A lamp switched off in the back, and Marmaduke Stone stepped out from behind a workbench piled high with a wall of partly disassembled electronics.
Duke looked less like a computer whiz and more like a boxer—both the fighter and the dog breed. He was six foot four and heavy with muscle. Not the sculpted lines of a bodybuilder, but the thick build of a man who spent hours on end working with heavy stone when he wasn’t running his bar.
He stopped five feet away and crossed his arms.
His jowled face was just as I remembered, covered in salt-and-pepper stubble. He’d started shaving his head since I last saw him. That was a surprise but not an unpleasant one. The warm, bronze skin of his scalp looked good: confident and sexy with a light sheen of sweat.
He wore tight jeans and an even tighter T-shirt. His feet were bare, reminding me of the way his toes used to curl and clench when we—
I was here on business, dammit. I pulled out my phone and showed him the screenshots I’d taken. “I’m looking for a kid named Ronnie. He stabbed a harvester last night, then showed up at the shop this morning packing an enchanted knife.”
Duke took the phone from my hand, careful to avoid touching my fingers. He held the phone on his palm, and the screen started to flicker, jumping through the recent photos. The shop’s security app opened next and began playing back this morning’s footage.
My body clenched, but I swallowed my protests about the violation of my privacy. He was trying to make me uncomfortable. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.
Duke was an old-school elemental wizard. He specialized in stone, but he was pretty good with metals, too. He had a side gig selling custom jewelry online.
He used to make gargoyles for the Catholic church in the late 1800s, creating guardians who could be called on to slash and crush and kill. But it was the dawn of the computer age that brought out his true gifts.
Duke could read silicon like a book and follow circuit paths like an Eagle Scout with a map and compass.
He could even fix cracks and chips in your phone screen.
He’d resurrected every one of the arcade games in the Gauntlet, and his little studio apartment was the best tech-repair shop in the country. Maybe the world.
I was pretty sure he had some elemental blood himself. It would explain why he was still around and looking so good at a hundred and fifty.
“Who’s Blake Davis?” he asked.
My muscles tightened further. “My son. Stay out of my text history.”