Celebromancy (15 page)

“That sounds awesome!” Ree leaned in. “Did anything else happen?” she asked, making the leading question as clear as she could, Curiosity having since hog-tied Jealousy and left it in the alley.

At this, Drake blushed, picking up his drink and taking a sip, breaking eye contact.

“It did!” Ree said, a little bit too loud for the room.

Drake pursed his lips, drawing back from the bar a shade. “I do not feel comfortable discussing those matters, Ms. Ree.”

Ree wanted to push, to figure out just how tangled this love n-gon had become, but Jealousy had slipped its bonds thanks to Self-Restraint (irony!).

“Fair enough. Glad it was fun. You headed to Market tonight?”

“Indeed. Will you be Grognard’s purveyor of ale?”

“You know it. Only booth babe gig I could stomach.”

Grognard emerged from the back, as if on cue. “If you’re a booth babe, then I’m a shoo-in for a Sailor Moon costume contest.”

Ree raised an eyebrow. “You saying I’m not pretty?”

Grognard scoffed. “You don’t need to fish for compliments. You know as much about the mainstays of geekdom as nearly anybody there. As soon as you can give a full litany of all of the Robins in order, you’ve leveled out of ‘booth babe.’ Now come help set up the taps on the cart.”

“Roger that,” Ree said with a grin. On her way to the back room, she looked over her shoulder and asked Drake, “You headed over soon?”

Drake nodded once, then saluted Ree as he stood.

Chapter Eleven

Corner of Geneva and Talsorian

Pearson’s Midnight Market is one of the oldest in North America, dating to 1963. Watch your step and your wallet. The Midnight Market is officially neutral territory, but squabbles and rivalries often simmer close to the surface.

Local magicians and vendors hawk their wares, and there’s something for every discerning magician: a quartz for your summoning circle, an overclocked netbook that can dial directly to Spirit, or a rare graphic novel to complete your ritual.

Be sure to catch the auction, but don’t bother bringing cash; all bids are for barter. And watch your back as you head home.

—
Not For Mundanes: Pearson
, 2012

The Midnight Market was a zoning nightmare. Or it would have been if anyone who cared about those codes could ever find the place. Somewhere along the line, the city (or maybe not the city) had built a football-field-sized hall beneath street level, complete with ten-foot-wide pillars and blank-slate walls. Most of the time, it stood mostly empty, but once a month, it served as meeting place, trading post, and town hall for Pearson’s magical underground.

Ree had set up the Grognard’s Games and Grog cart in its place of honor, at the intersection of Geneva Lane and Talsorian Row. They weren’t actual streets, but since the Market had been active for more than twenty years, repetition had become tradition, and tradition had been enshrined. Folks told Ree the customary lanes of traffic had been named for a decade before people started making signs, but now, every intersection sported handmade signposts, with smaller signs attached at various angles, pointing the way to individual carts and booths, both the exits, and the auction area.

The market reminded Ree of a small city convention crossed with Diagon Alley. And it was awesome. Well, when she wasn’t ambushed fifty yards outside the agreed-upon neutral ground of the Market . . . like the first time, with Eastwood.
Screw you, Lucretia. My vengeance will be served with a side of dumping-beer-on-your-priceless-lacy-dress.

But the Market itself was safe, at least tonight. Like usual, her neighbor to one side was Uncle Joe’s booth, where he broke open his CCG singles collections to show and sell (alphabetized by artist, of course). Across Geneva Lane, one of the main “streets,” was Kuo’s Komics, specializing in independent comics and merchandise. Kuo had his head so deep into manga and comics that when he spoke, speech bubbles popped up in front of him—a side effect of decades of genre emulation. He restrained the effect out in the normal world, but according to him, that was like intentionally speaking in another accent—not hard to start, but very hard to maintain.

Across from Kuo was Mirrorshade Designs, the shop of a local technomancer who had come up in the ’80s and treated the oeuvre of William Gibson like a lifestyle bible. Some of the devices he sold were older than Ree, but they were painstakingly maintained, most of them in as good shape as a straight-off-the-line iPhone. Apple IIes stood proud beside ancient Ataris, boom boxes, and more.

But Shade’s real treasures weren’t the refurbished units, they were the kitbash stuff he made himself. Shade restricted himself to parts from ’81 to ’90, which as far as she could tell was some ritual constraint for his magic. But what he did with them was astonising—cyberware, magical radar scanners, laptops that took thirty-year-old parts and outperformed a retina-display MacBook.

To Ree’s left, across Talsorian Row, was Talon’s Blades, which looked like a generic Fantasy Sword Shop, complete with totally unrealistic blades and rows after rows of knives. Except Talon’s wares were all film and TV surplus, mostly lower-end, each one imbued with a special kick of one sort or another. Some were the knives used by sexy ninja chicks in bad action movies and would fly straight over twice the normal distance; some were holdout knives used by the hero to cut their bonds and would shear through steel cables.

For the last three months, Ree had been ogling a hero copy of the knife Aragorn used in
The Lord of the Rings
while he was fighting Lurtz. But at two grand, ogling was all she could afford.

Talon hopped across the row to order a beer. Patricia Talon (Strength 15, Dexterity 15, Stamina 13, Will 16, IQ 13, Charisma 10—Geek 3 / Blacksmith 5 / Swordswoman 4) was second-generation Scottish Sword Geek, born and raised in the Society for Creative Anachronism. She stood five-eleven in flats (six-one in her stompy boots) and kept her brownish-red hair back and up, a feminine approximation of a
bushi
’s topknot, without the pesky pate-shaving. She dressed in leather over leather, her look boffer LARP by way of the biker bar. She wore three visible knives: one at the hip, another on her thigh, and the third stuffed into one boot, and Ree bet there were another four she couldn’t see.

“What gives, Ree? It’s dead tonight.” Talon was right. It was only eleven, but the crowd was still strangely thin. Ree’d been so caught up in her own drama that she had no idea if something else was going down. Drake had stopped by for a pint of beer with an awkward chitchat chaser, then wandered off to talk gears and gadgets with the merchants over in Clockwork Corner.

Ree shrugged. “No idea. I haven’t heard of anything going down. Maybe folks are taking a month off?”

Talon quirked an eyebrow. “You’re still new-ish, but the last time this many people ‘took a month off’ was when a mob of Cinemancers tore through town trying to buy up merch and IPs like we were a boomtown waiting to happen.” Talon shook off a chill. “Give me a pint of the Dunkel.”

Ree nodded, pulling a glass off the stack and pouring the drink. “Well, there are a lot of film crews here, right?”

Talon shrugged. “Yeah, but it’s been like that from March to October every year since Mayor Yu signed the new regs. But most of those crews don’t have Big-League Celebromancers.” Talon’s look told Ree to expect what was coming next, so she sipped some of her own beer.

“Hear you’ve been getting close with Konrad. I bet you don’t need anyone else to tell you that she’s trouble.”

Ree handed Talon the full glass. “No, but coming from you, it sounds even scarier. If
you
think she’s trouble . . .”

Talon took a drink, then set the glass down on the cart and indicated her ring. “Hey, I’m happily married.” Talon’s husband was an insurance lawyer, which had originally confused Ree. But then she’d heard how they met.

“Yeah, to a former Tuchuk,” Ree said. The Tuchux were a Gorean society that played with the SCA but weren’t really part of it. They dressed in leather and loincloths, featured Dom/Sub pairings with slave contracts, and, according to Talon, were fucking terrifying to come across on the battefield, despite the fact that they nearly all wore the bare minimum legal armor.

Talon laughed. “Dan never was much of a Tuchuk. He just fell into it with his buddies.”

“You still have the best meet-cute ever.” The two had faced off in the championship match for an armored combat tournament at Pennsic. She’d beaten him fair and square, and his fratboy-turned-Tuchuk buddies had never let him hear the end of it. But he’d ended up with a wife and a way out of the Tuchux, so he called it a win. At least, according to Talon. He had mostly retired from the SCA and had never been into the magic world to begin with.

Talon shrugged. “Just think. If he’d ducked that swing, I might never have known him from Adam.”

Ree tried to imagine the fight, making a storyboard in her mind, switching between medium shots of the fight and close-ups of their significant glances through the eye slots of their helmets.

“So what else have you heard about Jane Konrad? Or the show Rachel MacKenzie is working on? My sources tell me that MacKenzie has a hate-on for Jane, but I don’t know what she’s doing about it.” Ree didn’t feel like disclosing the fact that her “sources” involved sneaking into a closed set; not a detail Talon needed to know.

The magic community in Pearson was tight. But even tight, it was anything but homogenous. She’d tried to build a map of the factions and subgroups and had gotten tired when her graph had gotten more convoluted than the board on
The L Word
. Ree felt like she trusted Talon as much as almost anyone in the Market—not as much as Drake, but more than the average Geekomancer (though since there was no such thing as an average Geekomancer, making the whole thing even more complicated).

Talon took a long swig from her glass. “Haven’t heard much. MacKenzie has the mantle of America’s Sweetheart locked up, and Konrad’s in a death spiral. Seems to me all MacKenzie has to do is keep clear and Konrad will do herself in.” Talon shrugged. “You might take a lesson from her, Ree. Opportunities are great and all, but this one has disaster written all over it. They don’t make Celebromancers like they used to. These days the stars all get their power through sex tapes, online feuds, and reality shows.”

Ree shook her head. “That’s not Jane. And my loyal streak runs about as long as my stubborn streak.” A shiver hit her arms, and she tried to shake it off. Just nerves.

Talon toasted with her glass. “Good luck.” Ree raised her own glass in salute, and they both drank. Talon took her pint back across the row when a graying man with a Radio Flyer wagon full of miniatures cases wheeled his way into Talon’s booth.

The hall filled out a bit leading up to midnight, and a notable proportion of the crowd stopped by the cart for a drink to nurse during the auction. She’d miss the auction itself while womaning the cart, but the steady trickle gave her the chance to pump more people for information.

“I heard MacKenzie took a
geas
to never wear anything but couture,” said Uncle Joe, who collected another Guinness, still thumbing through a stack of cards.

“Last I heard, she’s putting everything she has into the divorce,” said a short black woman with an anime-patterned hijab and a broadsword bigger than she was strapped to her back. “They’ve got the biggest baddest lawyers at it, and no one is pulling punches.”

“She’s making a bid for an Arcana spot, I heard. Going for Empress,” said a small white woman whose name Ree didn’t know. She showed up to every Market in a TOS Star Trek communication officer outfit, complete with boots and earpiece. Ree knew the Tarot, but had no clue how a mortal could become part of/supplant one of the major Arcana. And frankly, she had enough on her mind. Still, she dutifully filed the rumor under
WTF?
and went back to business.

Finnish ass-kicker-for-hire Sven Carlssen neglected to answer her query about Rachel MacKenzie, but he wasn’t too proud to swing by for a bottle of imported Finnish Ale (which Grognard stocked for that express purpose). The mountain-sized mercenary didn’t seem to harbor Ree any ill will, despite having tried to maim her in the sewer six months ago. Ree, however, had vengefulness for everyone.
A little for you, a little for Lucretia, and a lot for Wickham. One day, I will be the fucking Oprah of Vengeance.

Luckily, other people had more to say than the Finn.

“I hear she loves to find little out-of-the-way fountains and read. She doesn’t take her guards, even uses a glamour to avoid notice,” said Shade. Shade Turing, of the Obvious Pseudonym Turings (Strength 10, Dexterity 12, Stamina 8, Will 16, IQ 17, Charisma 14—Geek 4 / Rigger 6 / Cyberpunk 4 / Salesman 3), was a thicker African-American man of fortyish, wearing a two-piece royal purple suit and matching mirrored shades. The techie held up a pair of totally outrageous sunglasses. “But with these, you can see through any veil!”

“Nearly any veil,” Talon said from across the row. Ree raised an eyebrow, but Talon just shrugged.

Shade smiled through Talon’s comment, grabbing Ree’s attention again, his drink forgotten. “Nearly any veil! Money-back guarantee, cross my heart and hope to de-rezz!”

He was charming, in a Max Headroom kind of way.

But charms wouldn’t get her past a half-dozen Hollywood toughs and fifty twitchy PAs. Probably. The shape-shifting had worked, just not long enough. And if she could pin down MacKenzie’s picnic spot, then it might be her best chance of forcing a confrontation on her own terms.

“But she brings guards, right?” Ree asked Shade.

“Of course. But usually only two or three. And I heard she prefers places without cell signal so she can avoid calls. So, what do you say?” Shade produced a tape from seemingly nowhere. ”Only a hundred bucks, and I’ll throw in this Betamax tape of
The Rocketeer
!”

Not that she had a Betamax player, but still!
The Rocketeer
topped Ree’s Underrated Pulp Adventure Movies list, along with
The Shadow
and
Dick Tracy
.

Ree checked her wallet. “I don’t have a hundred on me. Can I pay you half today and half tomorrow?” she asked.

Shade produced his smartphone, which had a credit card swiper attached. “Baby, I’ll take it any way you like.”

Ree snorfled a laugh. “Sure, just don’t call me
baby
again.”

The merchant held the phone out, swiper toward Ree. “Sure thing, sugar.”

Ree rolled her eyes as she swiped her card. Shade consulted the phone, and a few seconds later, he passed it to Ree to sign with her finger.

I love living in the future
, Ree thought, handing the phone back to Shade. He set the shades on the cart, along with the tape, then picked up his pint of Russian Imperial Stout and toasted Ree as he stepped away.

This is almost sounding like a plan. Assuming I can figure out where she takes her getaways. And assuming I can get past her guards. And that she doesn’t just blast me off the face of Earth with Fame-doukens when I try.

Ree got a few more tidbits about MacKenzie from other visitors throughout the auction, but nothing she hadn’t already gotten from Charlie’s Twitter info-dump.

•   •   •

Midnight Market closed up around 2 AM, leaving Ree to wheel the cart through the sewers back to Grognard’s. It wasn’t a long trip, and it stayed clear of all of the known monster dens, but it was still one woman and a cartful of expensive beer.