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“Ah. They’ve certainly tried.” Abel frowned, and his glasses seemed to gleam. He pointed towards a wall with a standing lamp leaned against it.
Florian followed Abel’s finger. “Well, that’s a lamp.”
Quilliam scoffed. “No. Not just a lamp. Look closer. Behind it.”
Behind it? All I could see back there was a large, black stain on the wall. Maybe some mold that really should have been contained a long time ago, or – wait. The stain was vaguely in the shape of a man. Ah. That wasn’t a stain at all. Those were burn marks.
“Oh,” Florian cooed as he began understand.
“Indeed,” Abel said gravely. “I don’t keep a very large selection of spells in mind myself, but a well-placed disintegration can end an argument very swiftly and efficiently.”
I cleared my throat. “Duly noted.”
Quilliam stepped up to the counter, placing his hands face down on the wood. “Abel,” he said, in a voice far kinder than anything I’d ever heard out of his mouth. “Do you have anything new for me to look at?”
Abel nodded eagerly. “Quite a few things have come in, in fact. I can close up the shop if you’d like to go into the backroom to peruse them.”
Quilliam’s smile was sweet, and, I hate to say, genuine. “If you would be so kind.”
Again Abel nodded, his jowls and wet black eyes making him look very much like an enthusiastic pug. “Just as soon as I complete this transaction. Mr. Albrecht, here you go. Will you be needing an envelope for that?”
I shook my head and accepted the fattest stack of bills I’d ever held in my life in two hands. “No, this is all right, thanks.”
Resting an elbow on the counter and his chin in his hand, Quilliam grinned at me. “My, my, Mr. Albrecht. We’re moving up in the world, are we?”
“He’s just trying to get to you,” Florian mumbled. “Don’t engage.”
Quilliam’s smirk stretched from ear to ear, his eyes trailing up and down my body again, but this time in a way that I could only describe as sticky. He batted his lashes and leaned his head at an even more exaggerated angle when he spoke again.
“Maybe that gigolo gig really is working out for you, then. Or perhaps it’s all those extra hours you’ve taken up working as a go-go boy. How else could you have possibly made all this money?”
The glyphs all across my body lit me up like a lantern as anger boiled in my blood. Florian, being the good friend that he was, took charge at that point. First, he took the wad of bills and stuffed it all into my pocket. Then he picked up Box, coaxed him into shrinking to his diminutive form, and put him in the same pocket. Finally, with me simmering in rage and frothing at the mouth, Florian picked me up, threw me over his shoulder, and marched me straight out of Abel’s Appraisals.
Quilliam J. Abernathy cackled, then twiddled his fingers at me as he waved goodbye. I waved goodbye, too, but all I needed was one finger. The middle one.
7
I had nothing against gigolos and go-go boys and all the other flavors of men who worked their bodies for the sake of a paycheck. Actually, that probably got me even more pissed about Quilliam and his bullshit privilege. He was just the kind of asshole who thought it was fine to judge others by how much money they made, or how they made it.
“Damn mama’s boy,” I grumbled. “That man wasn’t raised right. Spoiled brat. Garbage human. I mean, we both know that he’s an asshole, right? Like a grade A asshole.”
“It’s okay, buddy.” Florian patted me on the shoulder, his arm draped across my back. “You’re okay.”
Fortunately I’d cooled down a little by the time we got to Beatrice Rex’s shop, but that didn’t mean that just being within a ten-meter radius of the place didn’t put me on guard. You understand. I guess Florian and I could consider Beatrice an ally of sorts, or at the very least an acquaintance, but she’d never exactly been the friendliest when it came to me.
A certain measure of triumph fluttered in my chest as I pulled the gigantic wad of bills out of my pocket. I watched with relish when Beatrice very carefully contained her eyeballs in their sockets as I took my sweet time counting out the ten grand she’d been asking for so long.
“We’re still on the same page, right?”
I raised
my eyes to meet her gaze, impressed at how quickly she wiped the look of quiet awe off her face. It was a strange feeling, being both vindicated and offended by her fleeting expression at the same time.
“Yes. Ten thousand it is.” Beatrice Rex sniffed and lifted her nose, her palms planted on her counter, to show that she was firm on the number and wouldn’t at all be willing to budge. “Shimmerscales are very rare and very expensive, like I told you.”
They were special scales, as she explained, harvested from merpeople, and not just any mer. They had to be the magical type, even rarer among mer than mages were among humankind. I had to hope that Beatrice’s supply of them was ethically sourced, though. For all her obnoxiousness, I still clung to the belief that she wasn’t fundamentally a terrible person.
“Excellent. I’ll work with the Fuck-Tons on this, and we should have your item ready and fully enchanted within a week.”
