When he returned, after making sure to pay for the two comped pastries, he slid his and Scout’s on the table in front of him and looked over to where lightning guy was sitting—alone now.
“Where’s your cousin?” he asked.
Lightning guy shrugged. “Your modern romance section, I suspect.” He gave Scout a meaningful look, and Scout winked at Lucky.
“I may have mentioned we saw his little trick,” Scout said quietly. “And that we had a theory.”
“Little magic,” Lucky said promptly, trusting Scout. “Little tools in the magic chest. Some of us have ’em. It was nice of you to help him out when he wasn’t giving you the time of day.”
Lightning had the grace to blush. “I had no idea he was taken,” he mumbled, looking uncomfortable.
Goddammit. Lucky might not be able to hate this asshole.
“Well, it’s new,” Lucky conceded. He gave Scout a fond look. “And he wasn’t making it easy on you.” He sighed. “I’m Lucky. Nice to meet you.”
He stuck out his hand, and snooty rich guy shook it. “Piers,” he said, and Lucky grunted.
“Can’t I just call you Lightning?” he asked. Or “snooty rich guy.” Because Piers. Seriously? No.
“The name is not my fault,” Piers said, grimacing. “So sure. Lightning is fine.” He smiled a little. “I might actually prefer it.”
“This here’s Scout,” Lucky said. “Shake his hand. We can’t talk about the book now anyway.”
Piers smiled winningly and stuck out his hand, which Scout shook dutifully.
“Why can’t we talk about the book?” Scout asked. He glanced at Piers—Lightning—and frowned before looking at Lucky. “Trust him or not?”
Lucky gave Piers a smile that was all teeth and then disappeared behind the bookshelf and took out his coin. “Heads we trust him, tails we don’t.”
Heads it was.
He came back from around the bookshelf and said, “Tell him, Scout. I got seven minutes left on my break, and I want this over with.”
“You’ll need more than seven minutes!” Scout blurted, and then at Lucky’s exasperated look began to talk. “The book I’m reading is about ghostly apparitions and their meaning,” he said. “And yes, they’re real.” He grimaced at Lucky. “That’s what I saw last night. Here, look.”
He held the book open and shoved it across the table at Lucky, who scanned the text. It appeared to have been typed and published on an old linotype press with handwritten notes in the margins.
The illustration he was looking at consisted of a sprinkling of dots with a suggestion of a human figure in the center, made up of a denser application of dots.
“That’s what appeared to you when you were asleep?” Lucky asked. He shivered—thatwould have freaked him out.
“It’s a Wisp, I think. The book isn’t great at naming things. Just says, ‘Hey, this is what it looks like and sort of what it does.’ Anyway, it says here they show up in the twilight stages between sleeping and waking,” Scout told him, running his finger along the text. “And that’s where I was. And it appeared and wanted me to follow it. I-I guess I… uhm, my sleeping self? My unconscious self? Followed it.”
“So it felt like you were still behind me on the couch,” Lucky said, thinking. “And then what happened?”
“Well, it took me to the place, and—” Scout started to thumb through the book quickly, obviously looking for something he’d seen before. “—I saw the four tableaux, the different pictures of people locked in grief, and then, standing over them, I saw this.”
“Bwah!” Lucky said it, and Lightning echoed it over his shoulder.
“That’s terrifying!” Lightning gasped, his lean, tanned body shuddering all over. “You saw that?”
“I think it attacked him, didn’t it, Scout?”
Scout swallowed, visibly shaken, his Adam’s apple bobbing with distress. “Worse than that—itsawme. It turned andsawme, andateme, and submerged me in the ocean!”
Lightning made a sound of disbelief, and Lucky turned to him, as deadly serious as Scout had been.
“No, seriously. One second he was lying right behind me and warm and breathing, and the next he was in the same place but sopping wet, like he’d been dumped on the couch with half the ocean. There was seaweed on the floor, and his fingers were blue. It was that fast.”
