“Excuse me,” she said, pulling away from the salesperson.
Steve and Fiona were moving with purpose now, closing in on the position like the practiced team they were. That Morgan was not part of, could not be part of. But this was still her life, and she had a right to be there.
Out of the corner of her eye, something glinted.
A man was leisurely strolling down one of the exhibit booth aisles toward the conference rooms. His hair gleamed gold under the lights high above them, and his gray greatcoat trailed behind him like wings.
The angel.
There was an aura of power around him that even mundane humans could sense. Exhibitors who saw him coming rushed to straighten their arrays of swag and restart their video loops so he would see the best part. People approached him with postcards and samples and offers of free coffee and beer, only to be waved off. They stared after him longingly.
Which gave her an idea. She turned back to the salesperson. “Oh, wow, I didn’t know he’d be on the floor today. That guy’s a huge investor, just huge. I heard he was listening to pitches.”
She said it loud enough that several people perked up and started angling his way. She hoped that would slow him down a little, hopefully without anyone getting cholera. They could cure cholera these days, right?
The mages were already inside the conference room. They didn’t know what was headed right for them. Morgan had to risk catching the angel’s attention. She ran to warn them.
“—outside your jurisdiction. In the name of Baphomet and according to the treaty of Antioch, you are hereby banished from this place, by which I mean the New York metro region, asshole,” her mother was saying. “Your Deal is concluded, no further expansion allowed.”
“Thissss one’s soul is already forfeit,” someone hissed.
“Yeah, yeah, he signed, we know,” Steve said wearily.“But he’ll have to be happy with whatever he got so far. No more interference.”
She cracked open the nubbly gray door, which wobbled in her hands, right as Hawk tried to make his escape.
There was a reason he wore his fitted button-downs so well—the man was built. Or maybe that had been part of what he’d bargained for, because he slammed into the door as Morgan opened it, knocking her halfway back to the carpet. The whole row of connected rooms, whose walls were mostly fabric stretched across metal frames, shuddered.
Inside the room, a serpentine demon, arms folded and lower body coiled, glared at the interruption.
Steve took the opportunity to slip in between Hawk and freedom. Hawk’s head whipped back and forth, and then up.
He must have been the kind of guy to watch ninja warrior training montages on YouTube: if Morgan had found herself surrounded in a small room, she wouldn’t have considered up-and-over a viable option. She was suddenly glad Brad had not known that facet, because she could have imagined him demanding their office be turned into an obstacle course. Hawk ducked under Fiona’s arm and vaulted over the table. The demon hissed, jerking back. Hawk ignored the door completely, and instead jumped up onto a chair against the wall.
His parkour skills might have been enough if the conference organizer hadn’t gone for the cheapest possible furniture option. But as he grabbed the metal frame at the top of the wall that his cube shared with its neighbor, one of the chair legs collapsed. His foot, instead of getting purchase on the wall, kicked straight through the fabric.
“What the hell, man?” someone demanded from the next room over as Hawk’s leg tore through their wall.
Fiona threw herself at Hawk as he scrambled up. The wall he was climbing wobbled. The occupants of the next room screamed. Morgan wavered, trying to decide if she should evacuate them. Hawk flailed, his arm hooked over the metal frame. His fancy haircut flopped all over the place. Fiona yanked hard on his belt. The leg that wasn’t shoved into the next room kicked and connected with the front wall next to the door.
The front wall fell off.
Morgan, mercifully, had been standing in the doorway, so when the entire wall tipped toward her and slapped into the ground, empty space passed around her, her hair ruffling from the wind. Since the wall of the room interlocked with the ones on either side, the entire wall of doors facing the exhibitor booths peeled off, collapsing in a wave that traveled the full length of the block.
The pace of the angel increased.
The row of conference rooms had been abruptly exposed, like an open dollhouse or a building after an earthquake. Several of the interior walls came down with a shriek and a crash as well. The occupants of the neighboring room stared in horror, he from his knees and her from where she had been perched on the table, skirt rolled up around her waist. The woman screamed but cut herself off immediately, yanking her skirt back down and her shirt closed. Further down the row, someone else crawled, groaning, from the wreckage.
The angel had reached the final carpet before the concrete.
“Mom!” Morgan called, waving her arms frantically.
Fiona whirled, shouting something that might have been in Aramaic. The circle around the serpentine demon flared. The whirlpool of darkness Morgan remembered from herown ill-fated dismissal spell coalesced beneath the demon’s coils. He clawed at the air, pushing against the invisible barrier, which suddenly started to stretch beneath his hand, like sparkly cling-wrap solidifying in the air. Fiona’s eyes narrowed. She chanted something, and a small fireball leapt from her open palm to slam against his hands. He jerked them back, the sparkles winking out. The demon yelped and slid into the whirlpool. Fiona finished the chant with a triumphant syllable. The whirlpool vanished in a puff of smoke in the shape of a lion’s head, which quickly dispersed.
The angel paused. Frowned. Then every bit as slowly and deliberately as he had originally been moving, he turned and glided off back up the aisle from whence he’d come, pleading startup CEOs trailing in his wake. To Morgan’s dismay, Ronaldo emerged from a booth, took one look at the parade, and dropped his popcorn on the floor to follow. For a moment, she debated trying to intervene; whether to rescue Ronaldo from the angel or the angel from Ronaldo, she couldn’t have said. But she had to prioritize.
Morgan hurried over to where Steve was wrestling with the cursing Hawk. Fiona pressed something against the side of Hawk’s neck and he went still.
“Wow,” said the salesperson from the last booth, who had followed her over. “Was that some kind of, like, VR demo?”
