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At least having a solid problem to hammer on meant Adam could tune out the rest of the day. It made the time slip by but didn’t leave any spare hours for the reclamation work. He needed to get as many of those done and sold as quickly as possible to close the gap in their savings that the security system had opened.

He wasn’t Bobby. He didn’t have the education or the money that came from a career like that, but he could work, at least for now, until Vic had his dream.

It would take more than elbow grease. It would take luck and good fortune.

They could handle a few small emergencies, financially, but his bruised ribs and the ugly yellow-purple mark on his right arm reminded him that their health insurance was shit. They’d be on the street if something went catastrophically wrong.

Adam pushed it all aside and focused on finding the source of the grinding sound in the Toyota’s wheel. He finally tracked it down and fixed it, at least he hoped, as the day was ending.

Adam washed up and clocked out. He was heading for the exit when he noticed that most of the crew had paused to check out a car in the lot.

It was a real beauty: sleek, ultramodern, definitely foreign, and an EV.

Jesse was talking to the driver.

“I do most of my own maintenance,” she said in that slight, clipped accent that Adam had heard called continental but his brain thought of as slightly British in the same way his mother’s iced tea was a cousin to what they drank over there.

“That’s so cool,” Jesse was saying. “How does it handle?”

Argent smiled. “Like a fairy tale.”

Adam came into the lot.

“There you are,” she said.

The Queen of Swords had hidden her nature with a glamour, rounding her ears and coloring her skin closer to human tones. Dautre had told him recently how a glamour was more than a disguise, it was a reduction. To wear a glamour for a being of pure magic was to squeeze them into a skin suit, perhaps not unlike the soul bottles.

Adam appreciated that she’d do this for his sake.

She looked at him over her designer sunglasses. “Are you ready to go?”

“I, uh—sure.”

“Great.”

She nodded toward the car, because of course it was hers.

“Is that a Rimac Nevera?”

“Good eye.” The doors rose, tilting upward like a grasshopper’s legs, as she clicked a button on her fob. “Get in. We have business.”

Adam was happy to oblige. The crew, Jesse included, tossed him a few jealous glances as the doors swung down.

“Is this thing even street legal in the US?” He buckled his seatbelt.

“Do I care? It can hit sixty miles per hour in under two seconds.”

She demonstrated, accelerating out of the lot and onto Colfax, swerving with supernatural grace to avoid the endless potholes.

Adam hadn’t actually been in many electric cars before, but the quiet engines always surprised him. It sat low to the ground, but the interior didn’t give the impression of a spaceship like some of the others he’d been in.

“So much construction,” she complained as they hit another rough patch in the road. It was like driving over a dinosaur’s spine.

She shifted them to the spirit realm where the road was alive, but smoother. The asphalt took on the sheen of watery dragon scales. It undulated a little, side to side, but Argent navigated it with expert ease.

“Where are we going?”

The sky was lit an icy blue, a lingering bit of winter that tangled with the light of the emerald crescent moon.