“Cutler hardly ever comes in on a Saturday, and he never wakes up this early, even on a weekday,” said Sera.
“Exactly. He must be up to no good.”
Fred was convinced that at least half of the magic-grade mercenaries at Mayhem were up to no good at any given time. Sera wasn’t sure he was wrong about that.
“I’ll keep an eye out for suspicious behavior.” She gave him a conspiring wink. “Ok, I need to go hit the gym.”
Then she headed for the shaded glass doors at the back of the room. They slid open before her, and she entered the real Mayhem. Unlike the ostentatious reception area, the main part of the house was pretty bare bones. The floor of the corridor was concrete painted over in a thick layer of red paint. The walls were plain white, and from the ceiling hung a row of lights that resembled upside-down flying saucers. Sera followed the hallway to the end, then turned right into the locker rooms.
Five minutes later, she was stretching out on her yoga mat in the empty gym hall. Ten minutes after that, she was beating the crap out of a punching bag. In her mind, it had the dragon’s smug face and blue-glass eyes. Bam. Bam. He was a threat to her family, and she had to take him down. Bam. Bam. Wiping the satisfaction off that face was just a bonus. She spun around and kicked the bag hard. It swung back—then just froze midair.
“You are a violent woman, Sera.”
She stepped sideways to get a look at the man behind the bag. Not that there was any point. She knew who she’d find there.
Cutler stood beside the suspended punching bag, his arms crossed against his chest. His golden hair was stylishly disheveled, his turquoise eyes twinkling with mischief. He wasn’t even looking at the punching bag, as though holding it in place with his mind were no more taxing than breathing. It probably wasn’t. Cutler was a first tier mage, and his specialty was telekinesis. He could make forks and spoons waltz together across the dining hall’s table—by the dozens—and still hold a normal conversation. He was not lacking in the magic department, something he relished in demonstrating at every available opportunity.
“I was training, Cutler.”
“You’re always training. Don’t you ever do anything else?”
“You have your magic to protect you. My life depends on staying in shape.”
“Killing monsters when you don’t have any magic is crazy. You know that, right?”
Great, the crazy telekinetic—the guy who started levitating everything in sight whenever he got bored—was calling her crazy.
“Thanks for the assessment,” she said.
“I like crazy.” He stepped forward. “Crazy is fun. Crazy is exciting.”
Sera had the sinking suspicion that he was hitting on her. That was disturbing.
“Why are you here, Cutler?”
He stopped, confusion washing his mischievous grin away. “What?”
“It’s Saturday. It’s not even ten in the morning. And you’re here. At work. Why?”
“I came to see you.” The grin returned with a vengeance. “There’s a party tonight at Liquid. I want you to come with me.”
Liquid was the club where the spoiled sons and daughters of San Francisco’s elite magic dynasties hung out. It was stuffed full of people just like Cutler. Sera would be about as welcome there as a vampire was at a fairy slumber party.
“Liquid is not really my scene,” she said.
“Don’t be a tease.” As he started walking toward her again, jump ropes, barbells, and weights rose into the air behind him.
“I don’t tease. I tell it how it is. And Liquid would spit me out into the street if I ever presumed to enter.”
“Not if you’re with me.”
He gave her a long, assessing look. She was wearing a cranberry-red sport tank and black capris. Her clothes were skin-tight, something he hadn’t failed to notice. A flirtatious grin twitched across his lips.
“You have an amazing body, Sera.”
“It’s the constant training you were complaining so much about.” It had shaped her body into a lean and muscular killing machine.
“Then I take it back.” He stroked his hand down her ponytail. “Training is good. In fact, we should train together. Vigorously.”
He said ‘train’, but he meant…
“Just imagine the possibilities. With my magic and your body, our passion could ignite volcanos.”
Um. Yeah, just um. There were no words—at least none that she could think of. Did those ridiculous lines actually work on other women? Did they lose their minds and throw themselves at him?
“What do you say, Sera?”
That you’re really super creepy.
“Care to live a little?”
Sera was thinking up a cordial way to tell him to hit the road, when Naomi stepped into the gym and saved the day.
“Simmons wants to see us right away,” she said.
“Ok.” Sera looked at Cutler. “I guess we’ll just have to finish our chat later.”
Like when I have my sword on me. Or at the very least, a taser.
“Sure thing, gorgeous,” he replied with a wink, then swept past her and left the gym hall.
“What was that all about?” Naomi asked as the hovering objects dropped to the floor.
“You really don’t want to know.”
CHAPTER FIVE
A New Client
NAOMI DIDN’T SAY a word as they climbed the stairs to Simmons’s office. She did, however, snicker a few times. After the fifth time, Sera stopped and turned to her.
“Ok, what is it?”
“Cutler is smitten with you.” Naomi cleared her throat. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“He’s as fickle as a twelve-eyed cat in heat. He’ll find a new object of affection before the day is up. There’s no point in trying to come up with solutions to problems that will fix themselves.”
Naomi nodded. “A practical attitude as always, Sera.”
“And if that fails, I’ll just knock him upside the head. That tends to clear most men of their ill-conceived notions.”
“You certainly have a unique way of dealing with men.” A spark of magic twinkled in her aquamarine eyes. “But you might want to think twice before striking Cutler.”
“Because of his family?”
“Because he’d probably like it,” Naomi said seriously.
Sera had a feeling she might be right about that. Unfortunately. Well, she’d decimate that bridge when she came to it. She started walking down the hallway again.
“Did Simmons say what he wants?”
Naomi shook her head, and her hair feathered across the tops of her shoulders. Today, it was bubblegum-pink and glistening with silver sparkles. Most fairies had the power to transform their appearance, and some half-fairies did too, at least to some degree. Naomi could change her hair and eye color. Lately, she’d been putting in a lot of hours toward morphing her face, but so far she’d only managed to make her skin turn slightly blue. Of all the magical abilities, glamouring was one of the trickiest. It was more about subtlety and precision than about raw brute force.
“Maybe he wants to shower us with praise for a job well done,” Naomi guessed.
“The only way that would happen is if a demon possessed his body and forced him to be nice to us as part of some grand, sinister plan, probably something that involves the consumption of copious amounts of magic mushrooms and dancing naked under the moonlight.”
Naomi blinked. “I often get the feeling that you’re keeping your best stories to yourself.”
Sera grinned back.
A smile cracked her friend’s lips. “What do I have to do to hear some of these crazy tales?”
“I only share when under the influence of pizza.”
“I’ll remember that.”
Sera raised her hand to the closed door and knocked. A moment later, a gruff voice beckoned them to enter.
The director of Mayhem had spent decades building the company up from nothing. Yes, he worked hard, but the organization’s success could be boiled down to two things: his knack for discovering talent and his ability to persuade them to come work for him.
The majority of the talent pool was made up of monster-fighting mercenaries. He called them the Street Team. They killed well, but most of them weren’t exactly genteel. Simmons knew to keep them and their crude mouths in the field and far, far away from Mayhem’s upscale clientele.
For dealing with their paying customers, he had the House Team. They wore silk and pearls, not leather and steel. They were polished and polite. They would never, ever consider punching some snooty old mage lady with a purse full of purple poodle in the face—no matter how much she talked down to them. The old lady, not the poodle. Poodles didn’t usually talk, not even the purple ones.
“Sera. Naomi. Please sit down,” Simmons said as they entered his office.
Giving Sera a worried look, Naomi brushed the door shut behind them, then quickly walked across the room to sit down on one of the chairs in front of Simmons’s desk. Sera followed, her pace slower, her eyes scanning their fearless leader’s face for any hint of what he wanted. He didn’t look annoyed—well, at least not more annoyed than usual.
Simmons had to be at least fifty, but his face was as smooth and fresh as a man half his age. There were a few magical creams you could buy that would do that, but they were really expensive. Not that he had to worry about money; Mayhem was doing better than ever.
His sandy hair was combed back from his face, revealing a wide forehead and a sturdy jaw. He wore black pants and a black vest over a cerulean-blue dress shirt. His tie was a shade lighter than the shirt, just different enough to match, but not blend in completely. On his left wrist, he wore a fancy watch and on his right hand, a fat class ring from one of the country’s magic universities.
Sera took the seat beside Naomi, folded her hands in her lap, and looked up calmly at Simmons. Whatever he wanted, it couldn’t be
that
bad. She’d been trying extra hard to behave herself lately. Well, at least since that purple poodle lady incident. Which hadn’t even been her fault. The crazy old bat had followed her when she went to deal with the army of angry garden gnomes plaguing her estate. She’d almost gotten them both killed, so Sera had told her off for being a moron. The lady hadn’t taken that well and neither had Simmons. Ever since then, he’d been really careful not to give her any jobs with hardheaded clients who felt the need to loom over the ‘help’ while they worked.
Simmons took his seat. “You did an excellent job on Wednesday at Magical Research Laboratories. You contained the mage before he could cause any substantial damage to either the facility or the surrounding areas. And no one was hurt. Very clean work.”
Naomi cupped her hand to her cheek, masking most of her face from Simmons. She arched her eyebrows and mouthed, “Demon possession?” sideways at Sera.
Sera kept her face neutral and her gaze fixed on Simmons.
“The mage who went mad was returned unharmed to Drachenburg Industries, just as our client specified. He’s a cousin of the director of the San Francisco office, and they’re now all trying to figure out why he went berserk.”
Sera had been doing this long enough to know that was code for ‘recreational magic drugs gone wrong’. With those filthy rich magic dynasties, it was nearly always drugs. Not that they’d ever admit to it.
“Mr. Drachenburg was very impressed with your work. He’s applied a bonus of one thousand dollars to his payment.”
That was spare change to someone like Mr. Drachenburg. Someone that high up at Drachenburg Industries probably had at least that much money buried between his sofa cushions. But to Sera, a thousand dollars was a whole lot of money. Too bad Mayhem got to keep most of it. Between their cut and splitting the remainder with Naomi, she might see fifty dollars from it. Fifty dollars was nothing to sneeze at either. She could put it toward a new pair of boots, which was right at the top of her shopping list right now. The caterpillar guts had turned out to have an appetite for leather.
As Sera and Naomi began to stand, Simmons held out his hand. “Sera, stay for a minute.”
Naomi gave her a sympathetic pat on the shoulder on her way out. She seemed sure Sera was going to get into trouble for something. But what?
The unruly drunk vampires? They’d trashed three different bars before she even arrived on the scene. As soon as she was there, though, she’d rounded them up pretty quickly.
The centaurs? Their battle had been on a whole other scale compared to the bar fights. But she hadn’t been the one in charge. Simmons had sent half of Mayhem’s mercenaries and put Zan in charge. She’d done what he told her to do and hadn’t even teased him about his silly new hairdo.
Maybe Mayhem’s disposal team was grumpy about the pile of caterpillar parts she’d left for them to clean up, and they’d complained to Simmons? But then if they were going to complain, they wouldn’t have looked so happy about getting the chance to study a new monster species back in the lab.
Which left the vampires who’d attacked her at home last night. He was going to grill her on them. If only she knew what to tell him.
“Sera,” Simmons said after the door closed behind Naomi. He held an open folder in his hand.
“Yes?” she replied, trying not to sound too guilty. She hadn’t done anything wrong. She repeated that over and over again to herself in her head until it sounded believable.
“I want you to go to this address.”
He pulled a thin strip of paper out of the folder and handed it to her. An address was written on the paper. Somewhere in the Financial District. Maybe where he sent misbehaving mercenaries to get shot. Sera chewed on her lip. Or maybe this wasn’t about Mayhem at all. She looked up from the paper and stared Simmons right in the eye. Did he know? Had he figured out what she was, and now he was doing his duty as a good citizen of the supernatural by delivering her to the Magic Council?
“What is it?” Her heart pounded in her ears. Her hands were sticky with sweat. She set them palms-down on her knees.
“The San Francisco branch office of Drachenburg Industries.”
Wait, huh?
“Mr. Drachenburg was so pleased with your work, that he wants to hire you for another job. He asked for you personally.”