Chapter 13
Morgana! It’s been, what, a decade?”
Morgan squinted as she stepped out of the shade of Bethesda Terrace.
Stavrula had suggested taking a walk in Central Park for their meetup, which had seemed both very public but also a weird way to get coffee.
But when she saw the sphinx making her way through the crowd of tourists, who didn’t seem to notice that they unconsciously parted to make room for Stavrula’s invisibly glamoured back half, she understood.
She wasn’t sure if Stavrula had cast her own glamour or purchased it, but the leopard-print skirt was a nice touch.
The cats-eye glasses may have been real.
“I go by Morgan these days,” she said, accepting the cheek kiss. Stavrula smelled faintly of sandalwood and hot sand. “How have you been?”
“I shouldn’t complain, but I probably will,” Stravrula laughed.
“I’m embarrassed to even tell my aunts and uncles what I do for a living.
All I ever hear about is how my cousin is Games Editor at the New York Times, and what riddles have I set or unraveled recently.
Remind me what your company does again?”
That did make Morgan feel a bit better. Stavrula came from an ancient and proud pedigree, and it was nice to know the disappointment of your family was universal. “Quantum-based hiring—I mean, HR platform.”
The developers looked increasingly panicked these days.
If the point of the shuffleboard had been to increase collaboration, it had failed.
Josh was in a cast, which clearly couldn’t have helped his typing speed, Ops had accused the biting victim of stealing his lunch in retaliation, and now neither was allowed to be in a room with the other without a third party.
Ayumi appeared to be giving the entire office the silent treatment.
“Oof, that’s a mouthful of buzzwords there,” Stavrula said. “Let’s go pay our respects.”
“Do we have to?” Morgan followed her unhappily back through the cool, beautifully tiled arcade that smelled only a little like pee, back onto the tourist-packed Esplanade.
Beyond the Terrace glimmered the lake bordered by the leafy shores of the Ramble, all with the elegant high rises of the Upper East and West Sides as a background.
In between loomed the massive fountain, capped by a blackened bronze angel with a lily in her hand.
“One family tradition I do hold with,” Stavrula said. “Anyone turned into a statue deserves memorializing, regardless of the origin or reason.”
Morgan supposed that someone with the Great Sphinx in their family tree would feel that way about petrification in general.
Still, she put ancient home-grown tyrants in a different category from invaders from other planes.
The Angel of the Waters was one of the bogeymen of any mage child who grew up in the New York City area.
She looked beautiful, one hand stretched over the fountain’s waters in blessing.
Angels appeared rarely and mysteriously, manifesting on this plane as divine punishment for sins the locals were often unsure of.
The Angel of the Waters had appeared in the early 1830s, immediately followed by a cholera outbreak that swept through the city.
So when she appeared again thirty-odd years later, the Shadow Council of the time had moved swiftly.
It had taken a Working circle of twenty-four mages to entrap her in bronze.
A number of the gargoyles on St. Patrick’s Cathedral were similarly trapped incursions from other planes, including the Infernal Plane. Morgan looked up at the bronze face of the Angel and imagined Luke’s face similarly frozen. She shivered.
Stavrula, who had bowed her head, finished whispering whatever she was going to say. “Overpriced ice cream?”
“Sounds great,” Morgan answered, wondering if she could expense food cart ice cream. “Would you let her free, if you could?”
“Who, the Angel?” Stavrula asked, choosing a fancy frozen fruit bar.
“No way, I don’t want cholera. But I can still pity her, even if she were the one who started the fight.
This plane isn’t kind to other-planar entities.
Which reminds me, I wanted to ask—I heard a rumor your mom was skulking around.
Is it true she’s after a demon summoner this time? ”
Morgan took her time picking between the different options at the cart, as if she were going to choose anything besides a Chipwich. What had Stavrula heard? “She may have mentioned something about that.”
“Interesting. Zabloom’s in an adjacent space to GreenField UnLtd., right?”
“Yes.” Stavrula had done her homework, apparently. Which meant that her opening question hadn’t been so much a request for information as an experiment to see what Morgan would say. “That was an interesting transition.”
“Mmm.” Stavrula took a sharp bite from her popsicle as they strolled.
Morgan could hear the stick crack. She remembered that sphinxes were generally considered neat eaters —the kinds who, once upon a time, did not necessarily leave a lot of bones from their victims behind.
“You know, when I chose journalism, I had images of hard-hitting exposés. Maybe I should have gone into podcasting, try to get true crime suspects to confess on tape. Turns out we’re a generation too late for serious journalism. No one cares these days.”
Morgan’s mind was racing. “GreenField UnLtd.’s been splashing around an awful lot of money lately.”
“They could have landed a very quiet angel investor,” Stavrula said, crunching off another inch of her popsicle. “Not Angel of the Waters style, of course. Or…”
Morgan felt her eyebrows creep up her forehead. She’d assumed that was where GreenField’s new capital was coming from, if not from a venture capital firm. It hadn’t occurred to her she might not be the only one with other options. “Or the other way on the planes axis?”
“Something maybe for your mother to look into,” she said. “While she’s nosing around. Although I’m kind of surprised your company didn’t take a similar strategy.”
“Brad? I wish,” Morgan said. Then she thought better of it and added lightly, “Maybe we’d get our bonuses, then.”
“Not Brad, the other guy. The one who died, although maybe that’s why he didn’t get that far.”
“Tim?” Startled, Morgan let a drip of ice cream escape down her arm.
“He and the GreenField UnLtd. guy who’s all over LinkedIn were college roommates, you know,” she said.
They ambled past a saxophonist doing a credible cover of Billy Eilish’s “Bad Guy.” Under the dazzling sun with Japanese tourists excitedly taking pictures of squirrels in the background, it all felt a little too cloak-and-dagger to be real.
She half-expected to see some 1980s-style Soviet spies feeding bread to the ducks and misinformation to their CIA counterparts.
“You really looked into this.” It was hard to imagine the schlubby Tim and the suave Hawk as roommates, but college was weird.
“Something about GreenField UnLtd. bugs me,” Stavrula admitted. “I didn’t know about the two of them, though, until this morning when I went to prep for this. LinkedIn’s connections are useful, sometimes.”
If someone at GreenField UnLtd. had really made a Deal and they were friends with Tim, it might answer some questions.
Morgan wasn’t sure what to do with that.
Maybe if she sent her mother in that direction, it would get her off Luke’s tail?
Unless it circled around and led her back to Zabloom, of course.
And Morgan had just tipped off a journalist, who was exactly the last person she should have clued in. Well done. She rubbed her face.
“Ice cream headache?” Stavrula asked sympathetically.
“Something like that,” Morgan said. She tried to sound casual. “Are you going to take this public? Or at least to the Shadow Council?”
“Shadow Council, maybe. I don’t have anything concrete,” Stavrula confessed. “That’s a lot of why I took this meeting, to be honest. I thought you might be able to pass it on to your mom.”
Everyone always seemed to think Morgan spent more time with her mother than she actually wanted to. Or even had, back when she’d wanted to.
“Public, though?” Stavrula continued. “No way. Not unless they fail their IPO, or literally kill someone. And only maybe, for the second one. Everyone wants them to be a unicorn. Wall Street, not our kind. Plus, they’re throwing a lot of that suspiciously large pile of cash our way, from what I understand.
Forbes, I mean. Bylines, dedicated ads, the works. ”
“Wait, they pay for the bylines?”
“Oh sweetie, you’re adorable. Of course they pay for the bylines, both someone to write them and us to publish them. You didn’t think their CEO is naturally a brilliant writer, did you? We’re a glorified content mill.”
There was something very sad about Brad longing after this, or there would be if she cared enough about Brad to feel sad for him.
“How much?” This could be a very solvable problem, for once. And maybe divert Stavrula’s attention, although Morgan doubted it.
Stavrula quoted a number that was annoyingly high, but still much lower than the tech platforms.
“So if my CEO were interested?”
“Write him an essay and write us a check,” Stavrula shrugged. “I mean, there’s supposed to be a wall between us in editorial and the sponsorship people, but it’s not like most newsrooms can afford walls these days.”
“Open office plan?”
“You, too?”
Stavrula raised the last bite of her popsicle like she was toasting with a champagne flute, then tossed the remainder in her mouth, stick and all. Morgan toasted her back silently and then threw her stick in the trashcan. Unfortunately, her jaws had not evolved to bite through bone.
* * *
“Knock, knock?”