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“Hmm,” Jackson said, turning the charms this way and that, pinching them between his fingers. “Hmm.”

“They’re certainly magical,” Xander said. “I can sense them buzzing all the way from here.”

“There’s something else you should know,” I said, looking to Morrow. “We mentioned that these are being sold by a rival corporation, Happy, Inc. What we didn’t mention was how we recently discovered that the corpo is run by a god. Loki, to be specific.”

Jackson flinched. The charms tinkled onto the workbench as he dropped them. See? A sensible man. I wasn’t the only guy in the arcane underground who knew to be cautious around entities.

“That would have been helpful to know beforehand,” he grumbled.

“It’s very strange,” Xander said, reaching out to pick up one of the charms. Jackson watched him warily, but made no attempt to stop him. “Because I don’t really sense any trace of divinity around these things.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “But Loki’s the one selling them. He did say that he had a whole line of people producing them — an entire factory, I’m imagining — but, you know. Trickster god and all that. I just assumed he was lying.”

“He still could be,” Jackson said. “But there’s one way to find out.”

He reached for a pair of goggles above his workbench — no ordinary glasses, either, the lens like gemstones with the color and clarity of ice. Like Morrow, Jackson somehow looked even handsomer with glasses on, or something spectacle-adjacent, at least. Meanwhile, I just looked like a dork. I took a quick moment to study Xander’s face, positive that he would look great in glasses, too. It just wasn’t fair.

How I’d missed the heavy leather and metal glove in the corner of Jackson’s workbench I’ll never know. Maybe it was how it blended in with the rest of his projects, somehow maintaining a similar aesthetic with everything else, like a modern technological twist on the medieval. The man stuck to his branding, if nothing else, but something told me that the goggles and the glove weren’t just your average workshop tools.

“Fancy glove you’ve got there,” I said. “Almost looks like you could knock someone’s lights out with it.”

“I have,” Jackson said, picking up a handful of charms with his gloved hand.

“It’s his Gauntlet,” Xander said. “His favorite invention. I’d stand back a little, if I were you.”

Morrow and I did as we were instructed. Jackson stared at the palm of his Gauntlet for a few seconds. I gasped when tufts of blue fire danced along its length, terminating like candle flames on the tips of his fingers. Then he clenched the Gauntlet, pulverizing the charms in his fist.

The magic stored in the charms flashed, crackled, then fizzled. The flames snuffed out. Morrow cleared his throat.

“Not to be rude, but whatever you’re doing, I hope it’s worth sacrificing our specimens.”

“And you could have hurt yourself!” I said. “That’s so risky of you to go crushing magical items just like that. Those things could have blown up in your face.”

“Can’t do magic,” Jackson said, still hyperfocused on the powdered charms in the palm of his hand. “But can’t be hurt by it, either. I mean, it hurts like hell, but it won’t kill me. You know what? Don’t worry about it.”

Xander shook his head. “He’s right. It’s this whole thing. Don’t worry about it.”

Jackson sifted through the golden dust with the tip of his finger, three piles of them sitting in a row on his palm. His brows knit tighter as he grunted, squinting through the ice-blue gemstones of his goggles. He raised the Gauntlet, offering Xander a closer look.

“You seeing what I’m seeing?” Jackson asked.

Xander pinched a bit of powder from each pile, rubbing it between his fingertips.

“Oh, dear,” he muttered.

“You guys,” I said. “The suspense is killing me.”

Jackson removed his goggles, setting them down on the table with a clink. “So Loki told you that a whole team of people made this. Like an entire production line.”

Morrow and I nodded.

“You were right to doubt him, at least,” Xander said, “because these charms weren’t manufactured by different people. Their arcane signature all feels the same.”

A shiver ran down my spine.

“They were all enchanted by a single person,” I said.

And I had the most horrible inkling of who that person might be.