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Sure, through no one’s fault but my own, but who’s counting? Morrow should have taken that into consideration and volunteered himself. My brain was already all fried from spell fragmentation without the looming threat of being mind controlled by a piece of jewelry.

“Okay, so it’s like we agreed,” I said. “If I do go under, you have to do your best to snap me out of it.”

Morrow nodded. “If you fall under the spell, I slap you out of it, just like we discussed.”

“That is not at all what we discussed, and you know it.”

He held his hands up, fingers crooked a tempting distance away from my throat. “So I just choke you a little bit?”

I glowered. Like that time when Paralumen had taken over his mind, too, in what I’d come to think of as the Battle of the Occultech Basement. I had to admit — I kind of liked it. But that reminded me that we’d both succumbed to Paralumen’s horrifying hexing charms ourselves, just in different ways.

“Just watch me, okay? Trust you to be so weird and start messing around at a time like this.”

“I was trying to lighten the mood. Sorry.”

His lip turned up like I’d wounded him. Great. So now I had to feel conflicted on top of being afraid of potential mind control. Why did Morrow have to look even hotter when he was pouting?

I took a good, long breath, then gave him an apologetic nod. “Fine. Didn’t meant to be so snippy. Okay. Here goes nothing.”

I gritted my teeth as Morrow looped the cord over my wrist, then fastened the closure. He took a swift step back, his hand already halfway inside his windbreaker, because even with his ridiculous, totally radical vintage outfit, he was apparently still wearing his super sexy scroll holster underneath. I held my breath.

And kept holding it, staring hard at the three charms dangling from the black cord. Huh. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, maybe for them to go warm or start glowing. I tapped the side of my head, then patted my chest. No fuzzy feeling in either my brain or my heart.

“Nothing?” Morrow asked. “Well, this was anticlimactic.”

“What were you expecting, exactly?” said a voice from the mouth of the corridor. “Even more of your notorious arcane distortions? Hasn’t the city suffered enough?”

The heels of Angelica’s white boots clicked as she approached us, her hair in braids threaded through silver beads. Houston followed in her wake, now dressed in his more familiar suede jacket and jeans, tipping his hat and grinning as he drew closer.

I pursed my lips, still a bit wary of our uncertain alliance with the SeraphiCorp agents. If Xavi started dating Houston, then I’d have to be a lot nicer to him. Which wouldn’t be a very hard thing to do, really. He was pretty chill at Club Debussy, a sweet guy, not a bad hang at all.

Angelica was a different matter entirely, the way she looked imperiously at me and Morrow like we were peasants who had somehow found our way into her manor’s back garden. Her gaze swept down my body, head to toe and back again, stopping at the charm bracelet still looped around my wrist.

“Impressive,” she said, in the voice of someone who wasn’t actually looking at anything very impressive at all. “Does Occultech always have such a hands-on approach to investigative work?”

Houston rubbed the scruff on his chin and chuckled, somehow always successfully straddling the line between taunting and charming. “Gotta admit, that’s an interesting way to see how those bracelets work, huh, Angie?”

“I told you not to call me that in the workplace,” she hissed, turning on him with her icy gaze.

Houston doffed his hat and cleared his throat. “Sorry, Angie.”

She winced, then turned to me and Morrow again. “So, have you discovered anything interesting about those charms yet?” She smirked. “Have you found what it is that makes them tick?”

“Not just yet, but we’re definitely trying,” Morrow replied, somehow penetrating Angelica’s cloud of celestial smugness with his weird brand of occupational apathy. I could say what I wanted about him, but the guy was effortlessly professional, through and through.

Which was probably why Angie — sorry, Angelica — seemed so determined to throw him off his balance. SeraphiCorp knew something that we didn’t, and it was clear that she meant to lord it over us and stretch this out for as long as possible.

“And you’re carrying on undercover, I see,” Angelica continued. “Well, one of you, at least. Looks like someone visited a few garage sales over the weekend. Or does Occultech have its own moldering costume department somewhere?”

Morrow stretched his arms out and glanced down at himself. “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”

“Don’t bully him,” I said, feeling oddly defensive of Morrow — possessive, even. “I think he looks nice.”

Beside me, Morrow grew at least an inch taller, his shoulders broadening. Maybe I shouldn’t have mocked his totally tubular outfit so much.

I crossed my arms and sighed. “You obviously know something that we don’t, Angelica. Why don’t we cut the crap and get down to business?”

Her eyebrow twitched, but her mask of confidence never broke. “Very well, then. Far be it for us to withhold information that could support both our causes.”