Page 54 of A Witchy Spell Ride

I hate “sir” from eager men with more torque than sense. But I let it ride. He needed a leash; he just didn’t want to feel it.

Inside, Briar met us with an energy drink and a grin that meant she’d gotten away with something small. “Selene’s sleeping,” she said, softer. “Twenty minutes. Maybe thirty. She pretended not to need it and then she face-planted.”

The image soothed and needled at the same time.

“Dusk walk’s in two hours,” Reaper said from behind the bar. “We do it whether or not he shows his face. Eyes are already on the river route.”

“Briar’s decoy?” Cross asked.

“Obviously,” Briar said, flipping her hair. “New haircut. Same attitude.”

“You break routine but not silhouette,” I said. “Shorter hair means different sway. You’ll need to exaggerate her shoulder carry to sell it.”

Briar mimicked Selene’s walk and somehow made it look like a dare. For a second I had to look away, because something in my chest did that tighten again, and I didn’t need an audience for it.

I went to find Selene.

She slept like she was fighting. Not tossing, not soft. Braced. As if her body didn’t trust rest but her mind had mutinied. I stood in the doorway and watched long enough to be sure her breathing held steady, then left before I decided I had the right to watch longer.

In the hall, Reaper was waiting because of course he was. “You went back,” he said.

“I had to.”

He nodded. “You find the line?”

“He drew it for me.”

“Good,” Reaper said again, and it was worse this time. “Because when he crosses it, I don’t want to have to hold you back.”

“You won’t,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “That’s what worries me.”

We didn’t look at each other when we said it. That made it truer.

The plan set itself the way good plans do, because all the bad ones had been tested and thrown away long before. Cross took the west angle on the route toward the river, Bray with him because Bray looked like a tourist until he didn’t. Bones would drift two blocks back on foot and then peel off if the sedan appeared; Vex would play the helpful idiot near a corner and log plates like license numbers were Sudoku.

Briar would be Selene, jacket, and all. Selene would be two cars back in a truck that looked like nobody’s truck because it was too clean to belong to us. I would be the tide — in front, across, inside reflections and behind pedestrians, moving when the music changed, stopping when the street wanted a statue. Reaper would be the cold star everything orbited whether it liked it or not.

At 6:14, we rolled.

Dusk peeled the day off the buildings and left everything raw and hot. The Quarter did its costume change, beads, drinks, a saxophone arguing with itself two streets over. The river pulled light away like thread.

Briar walked like Selene on a day she wanted to be left alone. Shoulder set. Chin lifted. A thousand-yard stare that meantI see you and I don’t.She passed a storefront, caught her reflection, adjusted the tilt of her head. Perfect.

The sedan came in not like a shark, but like current — subtle, steady, unhurried. I caught it first in a restaurant window, the curve of a hood where there shouldn’t have been a curve. The dent in the passenger door. The tint is too dark to be legal. The rhythm of its crawl. He’d changed plates. Of course he had. People like this read advice columns they should’ve ignored.

I texted left to Reaper and slid into the mouth of an alley to cross without being seen.

Briar paused at a corner like Selene would, not to check traffic, but to check distance. She fixed a strap on her bag and turned her head just enough that a man who hadn’t studied her would think she hadn’t turned it at all. The sedan’s brake lights feathered and then let go.

Selene’s truck rolled past ordinary. Reaper’s car ghosted behind extraordinary.

We made the river and the air got bigger.

Briar leaned on the rail. The sedan pulled into a parking lane thirty yards back and pretended to be a coincidence.

I moved to the far side of the promenade, phone to my ear, no call placed. Across the water, the other bank baked. Behind me, footsteps I catalogued and discarded, a couple arguing in low voices, a kid with a skateboard, two men who looked like contractors complaining about concrete.