Page 82 of Dead Beat

This at least he knew the answer to. “The Alex Stern way. You take any beating they dish out and then you do your opponent the discourtesy of getting back up.”

Alex grinned and Darlington knew that if he ended up dead, drowned, or simply damned, he had done at least one good thing in this life.

29

They were gathered in the dining room at Il Bastone and Dawes had placed her laptop on the table. Turner was on an open line back at the NHPD so that he could access their computers.

Alex sat facing the black screen. They’d set the chat for 7 p.m. on the West Coast, when Mira would be back from work and yoga. Alex and her mother had only talked this way a couple of times. Alex liked to stick to text or the occasional phone call. Something about seeing her mother sitting in the California sun made the shadows of her own world seem far darker.

Mira’s life had never been easy. She had a way of picking boyfriends who were allergic to paying rent and choosing friends who had an amazing opportunity Mira just had to get in on the ground floor of. Money slipped away from her like water as she stood there watching it trickle downhill. She was generous to a fault, the kind of person people took advantage of. She was a woman at the edge of the river forever cupping her hands but never quite able to find a bucket. And yet Mira seemed happy, especially now that her dark cloud of a daughter had drifted into other skies. Things were just simpler when Alex was a phenomenon to be viewed from a distance.

“We’re five minutes out,” said Turner. He’d be able to run a search if they managed to get a name or identifying information from Mira.

Part of Alex wanted to shoo Dawes and Darlington away. They’d been in Alex’s head. They’d seen far worse than her new age mom with her living room full of crystals, and yet Alex felt an acute sense of exposure.

She watched them fussing over the compulsion spell they intended to work, arguing over dove feathers and whether they would need to pivot to newer, tech-based magic that had a tendency to go wobbly. Some of her embarrassment receded. These weren’t the monsters of her youth. They weren’t going to tease her about Mira’s clothes or the weird food she packed for Alex’s lunch. They were soldiers in the same army. Darlington’s mother had been poised, perfect, lean, and effortless, a paragon of glossy hair and good taste. But Alex had held Harper Arlington’s soul in her body, a sullen prune pit of resentment; she’d felt her apathy toward her son. Mira might be a mess, but she’d step in front of a charging bull for her daughter if she had to.

Alex had been hungry for so long and now here she was in a room full of plenty. She knew the worst about Turner, Dawes, Darlington. They knew the worst of her. And somehow the worst and the best had all blended together. That was the real marvel, that one could not be divided from the other.

She had assumed her life would be lived at a remove. She had never told Hellie what she could see. She’d been too grateful for her golden scraps of affection, for the unexpected, delirious pleasure of not being alone. But looking back, she saw how scared she had been that Hellie would tire of her or decide Alex was weird or that, most frightening, most shaming, Hellie would somehow sense the depth of Alex’s need.

Dawes leaned over and entered her password. She opened up a browser.

“We’ll be creating the compulsion at the same time,” Dawes said.

“But you won’t use it until I say so, right?”

“Not a moment before,” Darlington confirmed.

She believed him. They trusted her. She could trust them too. She was new to this kind of pact, but she understood it: I will keep your stories safe. I will never use them against you.

Dawes and Darlington positioned themselves on the other side of the table where Mira couldn’t see them. Alex had no doubt her mother would be thrilled to meet her friends, but they had other business tonight. The enchantment was almost entirely silent, worked with the Eyes of Narcissus, matched mirrors that could turn any object into an object of persuasion for a short period of time. The question was whether it would work through a computer screen, because the viewer was gazing at a camera lens not at the object itself.

Mira appeared on time, filling the screen with her sunshine hair and her wrists laden with bangles.

“Little star!” she exclaimed, and Alex wanted to drop through the floor. Darlington and Dawes grinned, and she could imagine Turner raising a brow in the evening bustle of the police station.

She let her mother chirp about work, about a new cleanse she was considering, and the fact that there were kittens available for adoption and she thought she might like one.

“I’m not used to this much space,” said Mira. “I need another being in here to fill it up.”

“The new place is barely bigger than the old place.”

“But it feels bigger.”

Alex hadn’t actually seen Mira in the bungalow, and it was a little eerie to watch her chatting away in front of a shelf that was nevertheless familiar, that she only knew from the vision Golgarot had granted her, cluttered with seashells and geodes, books on meditation, numerology, astrology, vegan cooking, the Enneagram.

“Mom,” she said at last.

“I know, I know, you’re busy. I won’t keep you. I just love to see your face.”

“I don’t need to go. Not yet.” Alex didn’t want to use magic on her mother. She had tried to think of a way to approach this subject that would get her further than she’d managed in the past.

“Is something wrong?”

She understood the fear in Mira’s face. Other kids might be worried about a class they weren’t doing well in, or they might try to soften up their folks before they asked for money for a spring break trip. But Mira knew her daughter always brought real trouble to her door.

Alex resisted the urge to reassure her. “Actually, yes. I know you don’t like talking about him, but I need to hear about my father.”