Page 56 of Wicked Deeds

Maia’s face went professionally calm and controlled. Which told me she wasn’t calm at all. “I have to tell Mitch.”

“Yeah, and I have to tell Cassandra.” I turned away, looking for Gwen. She was still so focused on the action, I doubted she’d even noticed I was gone, but I wanted to make sure. “Gwen didn’t see him, did she?”

Maia made a ‘maybe’ gesture with one hand. “She’s been watching the game. She might have got a glimpse of who you’re drinking with, but, if she did, she didn’t show any signs she recognized him.”

Well, that was a relief. I didn’t need her to be freaked out. I was freaked out enough for both of us. Gwen might be okay with my magic but I doubted she’d be anything resembling calm if she knew Usuriel was nearby.

“Is he still here?” Maia demanded.

I shook my head. “I invoked the contract on him, told him to go. Hopefully he did. But someone like him, well, I don’t think he feels any obligation to stick to the rules.” He’d done his best to trick us in the realm. I wasn’t going to trust him to do any differently out here.

“This is not good. Combined with your furry visitors, I don’t like it.”

“Me neither.” It was one thing to deal with a nixling or two. Another to deal with the one who’d sent them. But it was also my fault. I issued the ultimatum. “But they’re kind of the same thing. He sent the nixlings.”

“He did? Why?”

“He said he’s concerned about Jack. And no, I don’t know why that equals keeping tabs on me. I told him to leave, but there’s nothing I can do if he didn’t. Not unless he decides to show himself.” I glanced back at the stage, where Damon was running across the airfield, pursued by his competition. “How long do they have left?”

The timer in the top corner of the screen said thirty minutes but that was in-game time. I didn’t know if they were taking breaks.

“Do you want me to pull him?” Maia asked.

“No. I think you-know-who has gone. Stopping the game would be more trouble than it’s worth.” There would be a shitstorm in the gaming world if Damon pulled out of a competition bout like this for anything less than a true emergency. And as much as Usuriel was a boatload of trouble if he chose to be, currently there was nothing to indicate he was an immediate threat. I didn’t need Damon to get bad publicity because of me.

“All right.” Her voice was reluctant. “But I want you standing by the stage where we can all see you. We’ll be escorting you out the back of the building as soon as he’s done with all his obligations. No flashy exits to please the papps, okay? Everyone got enough shots of you coming in.”

That was part of the deal with Decker’s. A mini red carpet with Damon and I and various celebrities, gamers and staff from Riley Arts on the way in. Damon and I had posed. Gwen had stayed in the background with Maia.

What else had Damon signed up for? I pulled up the schedule Cat had sent me for the event. “There’s supposed to be a meet and greet after this, but that’s it unless Damon’s having drinks with Alexei after.” Alexei Decker owned the club. He owned several of the most popular game clubs in the city.

“If he did, try to get him to back out. Tell him you have a headache.”

I was hoping for hot sex tonight, so a fake headache was not my preferred plan A. But nor was telling him that Usuriel had been here. I wanted one night with no drama. Was that too much to ask for? “I’ll tell him Gwen’s tired. He’ll think she still has jet lag. But there’ll be more pictures after they’re done playing. He won’t be able to skip those.” I resisted the urge to scowl. It was going to be a long night, even if Damon did only the bare minimum.

Maia scowled for both of us. “Just try to wrap things up fast.”

“No arguments here.”

I went to stand with Gwen. She was still fully engrossed in the game; the fascinated expression on her face was familiar. Nat used to wear it when she watched gamers. Benji and Eli and the other Righteous programmers still did. So did Zee. All the people who’d made games a huge part of their lives. Gwen would fit right in.

I nudged her gently, and she blinked, half-startled, and turned to me.

“Having fun?” I asked softly, trying to sound perfectly calm.

“Yes. They make it look so easy.” Her mouth twisted a little as though she was judging her own performance against theirs and not liking the result. She’d done well when we’d played. She had a knack for puzzle solving and held her own in combat.Serenity Fallswas more gunfights and spaceship encounters than hand to hand, but she’d flattened an NCP who’d tried to hit on her in a bar with a couple of well-placed punches.

I didn’t know if she could fight in real life but her avatar could handle herself. “They’ve had a lot of practice. Lia is a pro. And Damon’s, well, Damon. But hey, you have plenty of time to practice. I’m sure Damon would play against you if you asked him. He can show you plenty of tricks.”

Her face lit up. “That would be brilliant. I’ll ask him, thanks.”

“Not a problem.” I nudged her attention back toward the screen.

Damon was climbing into a rickety gyrocopter, one of the better forms of transport in the first stages of the game. He wasn’t in danger, but it still made my heart catch slightly to watch him soaring to the air in a temperamental bucket of bolts inclined to not infrequent sudden explosions in the game. I’d died that way once, and the sensation of falling toward the earth before the game cut in and removed the sensory feedback because I was dead, had been distinctly unpleasant enough to make me vow never to parachute in real life.

Fortunately Damon stayed unexploded and escaped to the next sector, the last one of the bout, involving breaking into a black-market spaceport to make off with a small planetary transit ship to get to the next stage. There were many ways to die. But Damon knew the game backward and so did Lia, based on what was unfolding on the screen.

When the game ended, Damon was fractionally ahead on points. When he logged out and disconnected from the chair, he was grinning. Lia shook his hand, and Damon bent to say something in her ear. She’d probably scored herself and her team a wild-card entry into the next tournament, judging by the ecstatic smile that spread across her face as she blinked at him as though not believing what she’d just heard.

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