Page 17 of Snag
“Give me a starting point,” Coda mutters, already pulling various feeds up on their screens. A wall of text is scrolling over another. Some sort of coding, maybe. “I got rough highlights from Rought about your last twenty-fourhours, and I’ve got the tracking off your phone.” Coda casts a narrow-eyed look at me over their shoulder. “You know, keeping the fucking phone on you would be way more helpful.”
“For stalking purposes?” Rought mutters from behind us.
“For cleaning up your fucking messes,” Coda snaps, focusing back on the multitude of screens.
“A beauty salon in town. In Newport, I think,” I say, ignoring the minor pissing contest taking place between the two techs. “Yesterday afternoon at best guess. Cayley’s family owns the chain. The … um …”
“The Nail Bar,” Rought says. “On First Street.”
Before the shifter even finishes speaking, Coda’s screens are already flashing through what appear to be vid feeds along with multiple social media profiles.
“Kitsune,” Coda mutters, flicking their eyes behind their blue-tinted glasses over various screens as if they’ve pulled Cay’s background up somewhere, though I don’t see it. It’s also possible the tech is simply recalling the info. “Cayley Harvey, sister of Kiki. Both interconnected with your timeline, Zaya. About eighteen months ago, when you rescued Kiki and the other teens from the shifter-trafficking ring in Tokyo.”
Rought’s arm jerks, as if he’s just stopped himself from grabbing for me. “That was you? You’re that fixer?”
Coda cackles. “The universe has a sense of humor when Zaya is involved.”
“I’m not laughing,” Rought snaps.
Coda shrugs one shoulder, eyes still glued to the monitors. “That’s a choice.”
Rought’s gaze is heavy on me. “I tried to pick up the kids and Cay from the airport, but fucking Reck got therebefore me, flashed his badge, carted them off. Were you … were you on that plane?”
The real question he’s hesitant to ask is: Was his older brother hiding the fact that I was alive from him?
“No,” I say. “I was … otherwise occupied.”
“Dead, she means,” Coda interjects unhelpfully. “Fell right off the fucking grid. Took me three days to find her. And only then because Muta got a little feisty at the morgue.” The tech cackles.
At the mention of the enraged death god trapped in the body of a snake, the gold-and-brown-topaz bracelet on my right arm gets slightly heavier.
“Muta’s still pissed about being curtailed,” I mutter. “In defense of me, of course.” That last bit is sarcastic and aimed at the sulky bushmaster. Because though the care and feeding of Muta has been passed down through my family for generations, he neither likes nor dislikes his minders. Still, my waking in the middle of my own autopsy did seem to be what set him off that particular time.
Thankfully, when Coda and I are working together, the tech always has a line on mage-brewed antivenom, so no one died at the morgue. Not that it always works. Muta is rather powerful, and I was too incapacitated to get him under my control quickly.
“Perfectly understandable.” Rought’s voice rumbles through his chest. He’s crossed his arms, presumably because he wants to be doing something else with his hands. I can literally see all the questions flitting through his mind in his sharp gaze. Then he inhales deeply and lets those questions and concerns all drop away.
Because we’re living in thenow, he and I. If only for today.
I, rather sappily, just grin at him.
An answering self-deprecating grin eases the remainder of the tension threaded around Rought, around us. “Why do you think the dire mage was at the nail salon, Zaya?”
“Something Kris said to Precious. Doc Z’s sister,” I add for Coda, just in case. “Last night after I picked the three of them up at the warehouse rave but before I brought them to the Outcast clubhouse.”
“Rave …” Coda murmurs, adding in the keyboard on the left and amazingly adept on it with only one hand. “I need access to your security, AD. Unless you just want me to crack it.”
In a blink, I can suddenly see cobweb-thin threads of essence twisting around both the tech’s hands, flowing through their fingers into the keyboard and its built-in trackpads.
Rought steps forward, leaning over the right-hand section of Coda’s main keyboard to pull up some sort of scrolling script on the monitor directly in front of him.
Coda grunts, pissed but keeping otherwise quiet about the intrusion.
“The clubhouse feeds are fried from last night, but here’s access to all the backups,” Rought says.
The threads twined around Coda’s hands feather outward to the keys Rought is touching. The gryphon shifter steps back, flicking his fingers as if he feels the touch of that essence.
I blink again, clearing my sight.
