Lucky stared at him, nonplussed.
“You made reservations?”
“On my phone! Isn’t that amazing?”
“Yeah, Scout. Those things are little miracles. I just… I mean, don’t you want to go have fun?”
“Well, yeah! That’s why I want to tour Charleston! It sounds like fun, and we can do some research, and that’s fun too!” He stared at Lucky for a moment, his brow wrinkled with apprehension. Oh no. They’d said things the night before. They’d done things, things they couldn’t take back. What if… what if in this one small, enormous thing, what to do on their day off, they were completely incompatible?
Scout’s heart started to beat threadily, and for the first time since he’d found himself in the woods in New York, he felt vulnerable and stupid and small.
Then Lucky’s expression relaxed, his square-jawed face growing handsome with his smile.
“No, I get it. I’m sorry. I just… you work so hard. And you really wiped yourself out last night. I worry, you know? That you’ll spend all this time working for other people and not for you.” He grimaced. “Us.”
Scout nodded, seeing his point, and waved his hands wildly over his cereal bowl to see if he could explain. “I know this probably sounds nuts to you,” he said, “but this mystery thing? Thisisfun. For my entire life, minus the last five to six weeks, my perfect day was spent slipping away from Alistair’s lessons and all that grim disapproval, and being allowed to read books about the world and practice magicIwanted to practice and explore as much of the natural world as I could find. The entireworldwas a mystery to me. And getting to go on a tour of a town, particularly a bustling one like Charleston? And explore a bigger mystery than I ever imagined inreallife? This is exciting! It’s not even work!”
Lucky laughed then, and shook his head. “Yeah, but Scout, for you, work isn’t work.”
Scout felt his smile stretch his cheeks. “Well, no. It’s not. It’s a blast.I… the whole world can be so much fun. I just want you to come with me and see it. Is that so bad?”
“No,” Lucky said softly. “We still have people after us, but, you know, I’ve got my coin, and you can make people disa-fuckin’-pear. You’re right. A few tours of Charleston shouldn’t be a bad thing.” He grimaced. “But we’ve got to meet that Miller Aldrun guy in the coffeehouse before the first ferry leaves.”
Scout chuckled. “Yeah, and we should probably shower and wash your sheets.”
Lucky’s eyes slid slyly to his phone. “We’ve got, uhm, a couple of hours before we have to meet everyone. You, uh, want to make sure those sheets are totally ready for the laundry?”
Scout practically danced where he sat. “I thought you’d never ask!”
THEY REACHEDthe coffeehouse a little before 10:00 a.m. and found Kayleigh pacing back and forth, muttering to herself, in their customary place in the back.
“What’s wrong with her?” Scout asked Larissa, puzzled.
“Apparently she’s not good at the magician thing,” Larissa answered back.
Scout rolled his eyes. “She’s great! She might need to practice a little—”
“Shut up, Scout,” Kayleigh muttered, not stopping her pacing. “Go meet with your new luck mechanic and let me finish freaking out. It’s part of my process.”
“Ooh,” Scout said, impressed. “You have a process! I need to find one or I’ll never get any better.”
“Shut up, Scout!” Kayleigh roared, and Scout hurried back to the furthest corner away from her.
“I forget how nervous she gets,” he told Lucky sincerely, and Lucky nodded like he understood something Scout didn’t.
They made their way to the tables and the couch and found Miller and Piers deep in what looked like earnest conversation. Scout smiled at them, feeling sunshiny to his bones, flipped one of the solid wooden chairs around, straddled the seat with his long legs, and leaned against the back.
“Hi,” he said brightly. “So, uhm, what did you want to talk about?”
“Well, I don’t know about you,” Piers said dryly, “but I was telling him about Larissa’s stalker so he knew what to look for in case he got one of his little feelings.”
Scout’s eyebrows went up. “You know, that’s a really good idea. We should know about that—”
“We don’t know what he looks like,” Piers interrupted blandly. “But we assume he’s sort of an average-looking white guy because our parents don’t know many POC and they would stand out. He does creepy personal things—leaves flowers on her pillow while she’s asleep. Drugs her cat so it won’t wake her up in the morning.”
“How did you know it was drugged?” Lucky asked, alarmed.
“It started puking,” Larissa interjected. “We had to take it to the vet, and they said someone had given it an anesthetic that hadn’t been measured correctly.”
