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“Archie,” Doc rumbled.
Beck just rolled her eyes, although I knew if she had anything particularly sassy to say, she probably just said it to him directly. Don’t get me wrong, Beck can come out with some pretty epic snark, but she also tends to keep it to herself when working. Well, to herself and her dead interlocutor.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?”Archie wanted to know, rubbing his insubstantial hands together.
“The Ordo,” I told him, and his happy face quickly scrunched up into a frown.
“Didn’t we get rid of those bastards?”he wanted to know.
Ward sighed. “Apparently not,” he replied. “There have been three more Ordo assassinations in the last year. And Picton”—the way he said the name was acidic—“is dead.”
“Wrong type of gun, anyway,” I put in. “This killer is using a nine mil, not a rifle, but the magic making the damn thing go through walls and shit is the same.”
Archie started shaking his head.“I don’t know nothin’ about that,”he said.
“You’re here as backup, dead man,” I told him. “We’re going to pull the victims.”
“You’re calling dead guys for backup?”he scoffed.
“We’re calling a necromancer for backup,” Doc corrected.
Archie smirked.“Nice to be needed,”he remarked.“You think this is necromancy?”
Doc shrugged. “We don’t know exactly what’s going on,” he replied.
“You know anything about Aztec magic?” I interrupted.
“About what now?”
Okay, so a redneck Southern necromancer from a couple decades ago maybe wasn’t the best choice to ask about Aztec rituals, genuine or fabricated. “Nevermind,” I muttered.
“Central American,” Doc explained.
“What, like Kansas?”
Beck snickered.
“More like Mexico,” Doc answered Archie, his tone dry.
I couldn’t quite decide whether Archie was fucking with us, or whether the guy really was that clueless.
“Mexico? Don’t know shit about Mexico,”came Archie’s response.
I tensed up, but when Archie didn’t keep going, I relaxed. And then I felt a little weird about the fact that I was getting preemptively defensive about anything bad that might be directed at Taavi, even if it was just ignorance.
The surge of protectiveness was unsettling—not that I thought it was a bad thing that I wanted Taavi to be safe, but I wasn’t used to the anxiety that seemed to be accompanying caring about him.
It was fuckingconstant.
I worried about the fact that he was under both physical and emotional threat from people who wanted to harm him, who wanted to strip away his rights, who wanted to kill him, either because they thought he didn’t deserve to live or because they thought that killing him would end the world. And I worried about the fact that even though there were very real threats, the thing that I was most afraid of wasn’t the fact that I might have to kill or get killed trying to protect him.
It was losing Taavi.
But as long as he was safe—
I forced myself to stop that line of thought. Not only was it really not productive, but I was literally in the fucking middle of a goddamn séance trying to solve a triple homicide that the police were refusing to investigate.
Get your fucking shit together, Val.
