Chapter 30
Hawk already had her off-balance—how did he know her name? She didn’t post marketing pep talks while leaning casually on her BMW, mostly because she didn’t have a BMW but also because she didn’t post marketing pep talks.
Some of her confusion must have communicated itself, because he rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on, I have LinkedIn Pro. I can see that you’ve checked out my profile twelve times in the last week, and you’ve got your name and company right there on your badge.”
She flushed.
“And you’re the acting Head of Marketing? What are you, twelve?” he scoffed. “I don’t know why my guys are running scared of you.”
No way was she going to take that from this asshole, even if he did have an MBA and better hair than she did. She was so tired of people condescending to her, even when she deserved it.
“Maybe because they know they’re on enemy turf,” she shot back. “Your guys ready for war?”
He paused, clearly evaluating.
She cursed the business community’s obsession with using military jargon and tried to be clearer without outright accusing him of summoning demons.
If she pushed it too far, he’d declare that she was mentally unstable, and she was not looking to start that kind of scene.
“Your, shall we say, consultants didn’t tell you that part, did they?
That they’re operating in someone else’s sales territory. And that that comes with consequences.”
For a moment, he looked shaken, but he recovered quickly enough. “What, you’re telling me you’re the expert on this? I don’t buy it, kiddo. Go home to your dollies, this is too dangerous for you.”
“If it’s so dangerous, why did you give the files to Tim?” she challenged. “Didn’t care for your old roommate?”
“Give?” His eyebrows shot up. “That asshole stole files I paid good money for. I thought he was looking for a pep talk, and the sad sack fricking jumps on my laptop and sends himself my files. If I knew a court that could handle this stuff, I’d sue him for corporate espionage.”
Stolen? She hadn’t thought Tim had had it in him.
She simultaneously had more and less respect for the guy.
But that wasn’t the issue here. She had to get Hawk summoning.
Please, please could he take the bait? “Well, now you’ve met your match.
Unless you’re going to stop trying to keep up?
Or did you just miss our pivot? Hope you’ve got a manufacturing facility lined up to crank out the consumer appliances. ”
Hawk narrowed his eyes but didn’t seem confused.
Then again, if he’d been sitting near an aisle like a sensible person, he could have easily watched his competitor’s presentation and made it back to the booth well before Morgan had gotten here.
“Brad is a blowhard. We play smart. I see what you’re trying to do with your little soul-buying scheme.
We’ll see how long that lasts. You want war? Bring it, honey.”
She felt a rush of relief. That sounded a lot like a man about to call his benefactors. She hoped it wasn’t too late.
Hawk stalked off toward the private conference rooms that were hidden beyond the main exhibitor hall.
While the front two-thirds of the big open space held a dense grid of companies’ exhibition booths, the back had some sad folding tables and a warren of rentable temporary meeting rooms. It was a maze made of movable walls with cheap furniture in each little room.
The walls were maybe eight feet high; three walls were shared with the neighboring booth and the fourth had a flimsy door to the aisle.
No roof. The tops opened to the convention hall ceiling far above.
She couldn’t imagine they were particularly soundproofed, but everyone tried really hard to pretend that they weren’t listening to each other’s sales pitches.
She looked up which booth was rented by GreenField UnLtd. and called her mother.
“Pretty sure we’re going to have our demon-summoning in conference booth S-16 any minute now,” she reported.
“That’s great, honey, we’re on our way.” Morgan couldn’t help but notice her mother used the same endearment as Hawk had.
“But pumpkin, this is important—if you see a man in a full-length gray coat, kind of shiny blond hair, I need you to stay away from him, OK? I know you can’t see the angelic resonances, so try to avoid anyone who looks like that.
Even better, get out of the convention altogether. Your part is done.”
“Mother, I am literally at work right now, I can’t just—”
But she was talking to a dead line.
Should she go back to the Zabloom exhibit booth like Kelly would expect, or try to catch the last of the programming to make sure nothing else went weird with Brad, or go get in view of the GreenField conference room so she could be sure that the Council mages were suitably occupied and not going after Lucareoth?
She had to know, she realized. Even if her part was done, she’d never get the full truth from her mother unless she was there.
There was an extra wide aisle marked by cheap blue carpet at the end of the last exhibit booths, with a demilitarized zone of bare concrete before the conference room warren began.
She poked at the display iPad at one of the unlucky exhibit booths stuck at the back, where she could get a good view of the conference room she thought Hawk had disappeared into.
A hopeful salesperson tried to strike up a conversation with her.
She tried to demur, thoroughly failed to shake him, and ended up listening to the pitch, nodding vaguely while she stared over his shoulder and trying not to fret too obviously.
Fiona was drifting slowly in the direction of the conference room Morgan had indicated, her eyes on her phone for cover. Steve was coming up the back, checking each room as he went.
The hair on the back of her neck suddenly rose and her teeth itched. It was the same sensation as when Tim had first summoned Lucareoth. There was a flash of light from the top of one of the conference rooms.
“Excuse me,” she said, pulling away from the salesperson.
Steve and Fiona were moving with purpose now, closing in on the position like the practiced team they were. That Morgan was not part of, could not be part of. But this was still her life, and she had a right to be there.
Out of the corner of her eye, something glinted.
A man was leisurely strolling down one of the exhibit booth aisles toward the conference rooms. His hair gleamed gold under the lights high above them, and his gray greatcoat trailed behind him like wings.
The angel.
There was an aura of power around him that even mundane humans could sense.
Exhibitors who saw him coming rushed to straighten their arrays of swag and restart their video loops so he would see the best part.
People approached him with postcards and samples and offers of free coffee and beer, only to be waved off. They stared after him longingly.
Which gave her an idea. She turned back to the salesperson. “Oh, wow, I didn’t know he’d be on the floor today. That guy’s a huge investor, just huge. I heard he was listening to pitches.”
She said it loud enough that several people perked up and started angling his way. She hoped that would slow him down a little, hopefully without anyone getting cholera. They could cure cholera these days, right?
The mages were already inside the conference room. They didn’t know what was headed right for them. Morgan had to risk catching the angel’s attention. She ran to warn them.
“—outside your jurisdiction. In the name of Baphomet and according to the treaty of Antioch, you are hereby banished from this place, by which I mean the New York metro region, asshole,” her mother was saying. “Your Deal is concluded, no further expansion allowed.”
“Thissss one’s soul is already forfeit,” someone hissed.
“Yeah, yeah, he signed, we know,” Steve said wearily. “But he’ll have to be happy with whatever he got so far. No more interference.”
She cracked open the nubbly gray door, which wobbled in her hands, right as Hawk tried to make his escape.
There was a reason he wore his fitted button-downs so well—the man was built.
Or maybe that had been part of what he’d bargained for, because he slammed into the door as Morgan opened it, knocking her halfway back to the carpet.
The whole row of connected rooms, whose walls were mostly fabric stretched across metal frames, shuddered.
Inside the room, a serpentine demon, arms folded and lower body coiled, glared at the interruption.
Steve took the opportunity to slip in between Hawk and freedom. Hawk’s head whipped back and forth, and then up.
He must have been the kind of guy to watch ninja warrior training montages on YouTube: if Morgan had found herself surrounded in a small room, she wouldn’t have considered up-and-over a viable option.
She was suddenly glad Brad had not known that facet, because she could have imagined him demanding their office be turned into an obstacle course.
Hawk ducked under Fiona’s arm and vaulted over the table.
The demon hissed, jerking back. Hawk ignored the door completely, and instead jumped up onto a chair against the wall.
His parkour skills might have been enough if the conference organizer hadn’t gone for the cheapest possible furniture option.
But as he grabbed the metal frame at the top of the wall that his cube shared with its neighbor, one of the chair legs collapsed.
His foot, instead of getting purchase on the wall, kicked straight through the fabric.
“What the hell, man?” someone demanded from the next room over as Hawk’s leg tore through their wall.
Fiona threw herself at Hawk as he scrambled up.
The wall he was climbing wobbled. The occupants of the next room screamed.
Morgan wavered, trying to decide if she should evacuate them.
Hawk flailed, his arm hooked over the metal frame.
His fancy haircut flopped all over the place.
Fiona yanked hard on his belt. The leg that wasn’t shoved into the next room kicked and connected with the front wall next to the door.
The front wall fell off.
Morgan, mercifully, had been standing in the doorway, so when the entire wall tipped toward her and slapped into the ground, empty space passed around her, her hair ruffling from the wind.
Since the wall of the room interlocked with the ones on either side, the entire wall of doors facing the exhibitor booths peeled off, collapsing in a wave that traveled the full length of the block.
The pace of the angel increased.
The row of conference rooms had been abruptly exposed, like an open dollhouse or a building after an earthquake.
Several of the interior walls came down with a shriek and a crash as well.
The occupants of the neighboring room stared in horror, he from his knees and her from where she had been perched on the table, skirt rolled up around her waist. The woman screamed but cut herself off immediately, yanking her skirt back down and her shirt closed.
Further down the row, someone else crawled, groaning, from the wreckage.
The angel had reached the final carpet before the concrete.
“Mom!” Morgan called, waving her arms frantically.
Fiona whirled, shouting something that might have been in Aramaic.
The circle around the serpentine demon flared.
The whirlpool of darkness Morgan remembered from her own ill-fated dismissal spell coalesced beneath the demon’s coils.
He clawed at the air, pushing against the invisible barrier, which suddenly started to stretch beneath his hand, like sparkly cling-wrap solidifying in the air.
Fiona’s eyes narrowed. She chanted something, and a small fireball leapt from her open palm to slam against his hands.
He jerked them back, the sparkles winking out.
The demon yelped and slid into the whirlpool.
Fiona finished the chant with a triumphant syllable.
The whirlpool vanished in a puff of smoke in the shape of a lion’s head, which quickly dispersed.
The angel paused. Frowned. Then every bit as slowly and deliberately as he had originally been moving, he turned and glided off back up the aisle from whence he’d come, pleading startup CEOs trailing in his wake.
To Morgan’s dismay, Ronaldo emerged from a booth, took one look at the parade, and dropped his popcorn on the floor to follow.
For a moment, she debated trying to intervene; whether to rescue Ronaldo from the angel or the angel from Ronaldo, she couldn’t have said. But she had to prioritize.
Morgan hurried over to where Steve was wrestling with the cursing Hawk. Fiona pressed something against the side of Hawk’s neck and he went still.
“Wow,” said the salesperson from the last booth, who had followed her over. “Was that some kind of, like, VR demo?”
She turned to him, incredulous. Turned to look at the wreckage. Turned back. “Yes. Just like that.”
“Cool.” He scratched an ear. “Not really sure I got the pitch, though.”
The Javits Center crew foreman and the on-site medics were hurrying over now, even as the embarrassed couple tried to make their escape.
Steve stood up, all professional charm, greeting them, starting to spin a story about a deal gone sour and an attendee who maybe should have had few fewer shots of Baileys in his latte from the free barista bar up the aisle.
The Shadow Council was great at damage control.
She wondered if Hawk would even get to remember any of the last few months when he woke up.
She didn’t want to be involved. No, she hadn’t really seen anything, no, she didn’t want to make a statement.
Please excuse her, her CEO had a demo presentation in a few minutes.
Her phone buzzed. She looked—it was Luke.
“Where did you go?” he whispered, sounding frantic. “I’ve got Brad and Bel’aliol, and they’re both looking for you!”