Chapter 1
The wizard’s apprentice came sprinting into Tom’s Seaside Old-Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor on a Wednesday morning, dove over the counter, and pleaded from behind double-cherry chip and butter-rum refrigerated tubs, “Hide me.”
“From what,” Tom demanded, looking down, “why are you on the floor, and that was my favorite scoop you made me drop—” and then looked up automatically as the bell rang again.
Two men ambled into the shop. They did not look like men hunting strawberry-cheesecake swirl, unless they planned to trap it with binding-spells and compulsion collars. Knotwork and herb-pouches dangled at hips; their expressions might’ve come out of a badly-scripted low-budget Western film. Sunshine and ocean breeze peeked in behind leather jackets, curious and incongruous.
Please, Nicholas mouthed from the floor. Hair fell into his eyes, dark red—ember-red, the color of banked coals—and his golden-coin eyes were wider than Tom’d ever seen them.
Tom had, in fact, had too many inappropriate thoughts involving those eyes over the last three months. Ever since the first day they’d sauntered in from the ancient wizard’s ramshackle shop next door, ordered a wild-honey-and-ginger-cream milkshake, and glinted at him with unabashed appreciation over a straw.
The appreciation’d felt good, in a rather startled way. Tom, being lean and gawky and generally sort of light brown, skin and hair and eyes, had never thought of himself as unattractive, but also not especially interesting either. Ordinary. Medium. Unremarkable.
He was aware that those adjectives were all lies, of course.
He’d definitely earn remarks. Attention. Comments. If people knew who he was. If someone knew that secret.
It’d been nice to have Nicholas, who did not know, look at him. Just him, just Tom the friendly ice-cream person. Someone with no responsibilities, no other life.
Nicholas at the moment was trying to make himself even tinier behind the counter, on the floor. Tom did not glare that direction—no giving him away—but wanted to. A problem. To be dealt with. One of the reasons he’d fled here, that’d been: lots of problems. Requiring that he deal with them.
He said, “Can I offer you any samples today?” to the visitors as pleasantly as he could, mostly to be irritating.
The taller and marginally less unpleasant-looking new arrival suggested, “We’re looking for a Nicholas Incandesco,” in a tone that fully expected immediate compliance.
Tom put on his best helpful smile, said, “No, sorry, haven’t seen him today,” and kicked Nicholas in the shin out of sheer annoyance. He hated lying. Another reason he hadn’t been good at his former role.
Nicholas poked him in the calf with what was probably the knocked-over ice cream scoop. Tom considered this to be highly unfair, and added, “Why do you want him, anyway?”
“He comes in here every day,” said the other magical bounty hunter—Tom was guessing, based on scruffiness, paraphernalia, and the general aura of roughshod but focused competence—and smiled.
The smile was not friendly. Neither were bounty hunters, generally, with a few exceptions; the current North American Arch-Mage had tried to put a stop to the capture of escaped familiars and therianthropes for money, and it’d partially worked. Not completely. Not immediately.
The man went on, “Asked around. Found out. He likes your place.”
“I work next door to him,” Tom pointed out. “Difficult detective work, was it?”
Nicholas poked him again. This probably meant don’t antagonize the bounty hunters; Nicholas, Tom decided, was in no position to comment on rhetorical choices. “And we make an excellent double-fudge vanilla swirl, can I convince you to—”
“Hand him over,” grunted the taller one, returning from a leisurely perusal of the shop. Fortunately the morning’d just begun; nobody had yet wandered in for peach sherbet or delicately frosted cakes. No other bodies in the place. Only the intruders, and Tom himself, and the wizard’s apprentice currently huddled at his feet behind a frosted counter
“Fugitive,” explained the shorter one. “Reward. A lot. Maybe youwant the reward.”
“I really don’t. What’d he do?”
“More what he is.” The man was trying, with a fair amount of stealth and some skill, to weave a locator-spell out of red thread between casually lowered fingers. Tom let him expend power for a few more seconds, and then sighed mentally and tapped a fingertip on the counter.
The bounty hunter blinked. Broken thread snarled around his hand.
“What,” said his partner, “are you doingover there, get this search done, he’s just some guy in an ice cream parlor—”
“About that,” Tom said, “you’re not entirelywrong. What did you mean, what he is?”
“He has wards up,” snapped angry behemoth number two, and then, glaring at Tom, “why do you have anti-hex wards up, how are they this strong, who’d you pay to—you areprotecting him, you—”
“Who says I paid anyone to do it for me?” Tom flicked a hand through a sunbeam. The sign on the door flipped from open to closed, potentially of its own volition but almost certainly not. “Quit trying to see over the counter, by the way. There’s no one here.”
“There’s no one here,” echoed the man, bemused. The tattoo on his knuckles proclaimed danger; the ink-spiral across the back of his hand was a more or less standard strength-building spell. This provided no challenge.