Fine. If they didn’t want to talk about it, I’d find out when I went to see Maeve later. I took a bite of my burger. Juicy, hot, nothing fancy, but as soon as I got a bite of it, I discovered I was starving.
The door opened, letting in the brisk wind and a man and woman.
The man was at least six feet tall and wide as a football field, his long, shiny black hair pulled back at the base of his neck. He wore cargo shorts, flip-flops, and a black and red Blazer jacket, even though it was February and cold, and moved with that island-warmth vibe of his birthplace. Detective Mackanie Love.
With him was a blade of a woman. Thin, unsmiling, dark and cool as a rainy midnight, she was wrapped in a gray coat and gray scarf that did nothing to soften her angular but pretty features. Detective Lia Payne.
I used to run all my Hounding jobs that dealt with illegal use of magic past them before Detective Stotts and the MERC, a secret branch of the law that dealt with magical crime, came into my life. We were maybe not fast friends, but friends just the same.
Just as I spotted them, they spotted me.
I smiled and waved.
“Tell me you did not just wave down the cops,” Shamus whispered.
“Tita!” Mackanie strolled over, a smile on his face. He took in my company, with what seemed to be friendly interest.
Zayvion Jones looked Love in the eyes, but had slouched into his slacker-drifter bit he did so well, and Shame motioned under the table, breaking the Mute spell before Mackanie got too close.
“Food any good today?” He stopped between Zay’s and Shamus’s chairs.
“Good enough that it’s almost gone,” I said. “Have you met Zayvion Jones and Shamus Flynn?”
“Jones and I have met.” He nodded at Zay.
“Detective Love,” Zayvion said.
“I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure, Mr. Flynn.” He held his hand out to Shame. They shook.
“Pleased to meet you,” Shame said with very little tone inflection. He’d fallen into his sullen goth-boy act pretty fast. What was it with these two and the cops?
Oh yeah. Most of what they did would probably be considered illegal if the world ever knew magic could do what they could make it do.
“So, you talked to Stotts today?” Love asked me.
“Should I?”
“He knows how to find you, yah?”
“He has my number. There a case he wants me on?”
“Not sure. He’s got your number, you got no worries. But that warehouse of yours. There’s a worry. I hear they’re gonna condemn it.”
I grinned. That warehouse of mine was the building next to Get Mugged. Grant had decided to buy it, and agreed to let me lease two of the floors for an office, a meeting space, a couple bunks, a kitchen, and a workout room for the Hounds. To say it had been a learning experience was a serious understatement. I’d never repaired or renovated anything in my life. Yes, I hired a contractor to do the big fixes, but then I dragged as many Hounds into manual labor as I could.
Not one of my brighter plans. Hounds are loners. Working together was so far out of their natural tendencies, it was laughable.
And with how much I’d spent doing it, I think it would have been cheaper to just knock the place down and build from scratch. But Grant loved the “vintage” feel of it, and so did the ghost hunters who were renting out the bottom floor. Therefore, the old building remained as it was, standing proudly. Well, leaning proudly, anyway.
Plus the location-right next door to my favorite coffee shop-was pretty hard to beat.
“Too late to condemn it,” I said. “Paint’s dry by the end of the week, and the landline’s being hooked up tomorrow.”
“So you got emergency response plugged in, in case of trouble?”
“No drug use allowed on the premises. No guns. No brawls. No troubles.”
He just stared at me. Yeah, we all knew that things went to hell when too many Hounds got together for too long.
“Fine,” I said. “Yes, I’ve set things up.”
“Good, then, good,” he said. “You Hound, Flynn?” he asked Shame.
“Wash dishes at my mum’s restaurant, Feile San Fhomher.”
“Maybe that’s where I’ve seen you, yah?”
He shrugged. “Unless you worked juvie a few years back.”
I turned and stared at Shame. He had a record? “You have a record?” I asked. See how tactful I could be?
“Did some tagging when I was fourteen.”
How come I figured it was a lot more than that?
“Gang?” Love asked.
“Just art and anger.”
“You get that out of your system?” he asked.
“Let’s just say I’m not fourteen anymore.”
Love grinned. “Yah, live and learn. I got some eating to do, though this place’s got nothing on your mom’s blackberry cobbler.”
Maeve’s inn was a working restaurant. Which meant a lot of people went there, including cops who had no idea she was one of the voices in the Authority and her entire inn and restaurant was built over a secret, hidden well of magic.
This kind of stuff gave me a headache. There were layers and layers of who knew what in this city. Zayvion said he had a spreadsheet to keep track of what secrets were spoken where. I had yet to see it.
Every time I thought these things out, I was more impressed that the Authority hadn’t been discovered yet. Of course, they had one ace in the hole no one else in this city had. Closers, who could get in your head, make you forget anything they wanted you to forget-like a secret you shouldn’t have heard or maybe how to use magic. They could Close away your desire to stay in the city. Take away your life, and give you a new one if they decided the situation warranted it.
Kill you, if you got in their way.
I glanced at Zay. He was drinking his Coke and trying hard not to look over at Love’s partner, Payne, who sat in the booth across the room. She was staring at him.
She caught my gaze and gave me a considering look, her mouth pressed together in a thin line. I wondered how, exactly, she and Zayvion knew each other. I remember Mackanie Love being there when Frank Gordon had dug up my father’s body and tried to kill me. Zay had been there too. So it was possible that their only connection was Zay being a witness to that crime. But if I remembered right, Love and Payne had been looking for Zay prior to that.
Interesting.
I stretched my foot under the table and rested it against the side of Zay’s tennis shoe.
The contact let me concentrate on his emotional state: tense, which was not at all what I’d have guessed from his body language, with a side order of worry and dread.
He must have sensed my curiosity because he gave me a sideways look and sat up, pulling his foot away from mine.
Like that would stop me from finding out why he was all worked up over Payne.
Even though it had taken only a couple seconds, I’d sort of lost track of the conversation Love and Shame were having. I had a hard time listening in to Zayvion’s emotions and listening to the real world at the same time.
I tuned back in just in time to hear Love say, “. . lunch. Later, Tita.”
“Bye,” I said, wondering if I’d just made a lunch date with him.
Love rambled over to Payne. She stopped staring at Zayvion and stared at her menu instead.
“You don’t like the police, do you?” I asked Shame.
Shame flicked up a couple fingers in a dismissive motion. “They do good work. I just like them better when that work has nothing to do with me.”
“Juvie?” I asked.
“It happens.”
“Would have thought your mom had some pull to keep you out of there.”
“She did,” Zayvion said. “So did his dad.”
Shame looked up at me. He didn’t grin, but there was a sparkle in his eye. “They let me sweat it out for a week. Said it’d help me rethink my priorities.”