Geekomancy by Michael R. Underwood Read Free Book Online

where the main character never gets hurt, or maybe a Looney Tunes. Something to make you tough—until we can do more training.”
    Ree checked her watch and did the mental math of how much sleep she’d be able to get before rising from the dead in the morning to open Café Xombi. Less than six hours. Not great. But weren’t all the best detectives insomniacs, anyway? Maybe it would help.
    She slipped the papers into her coat and left the basement lair. Outside, the chill winds of autumn had picked up. They sliced at her face and legs on the way home as she pondered.
    So, am I actually going to do this? Question the families of suicides, tag along with a possibly mad magician?
    That can be Future Ree’s problem. Right now, bed.
    By the time she reached The Shithole, she was rubbing her face to get the feeling back in her nose. It wasn’t supposed to get this cold in the Northwest, not unless you were way inland. Portent or random vagary of weather? Ree harrumphed at the fact that such questions were now a valid part of her life. There were no lights on in the apartment, except a crack of white at the bottom of Sandra’s door. Ree poured a glass of water and took it to bed, placing bets with herself on what crazy-ass dreams she’d have from the day’s insanity.

 
    Chapter Four
    A Study in Sherlock
    When the air-raid-siren alarm on her phone went off in the morning, the first thing Ree did was grab the phone to paw at the snooze button.
    The second thing she did was groan in dissatisfaction at having to be up at an hour that was beyond monstrous, beyond unearthly: It was Shift-X painful. During college, Ree had been the No Classes Before 10 AM sort, finding that her natural hours for sleep were 2–9 AM. After that, the barista schedule tried both body and soul.
    The third thing she did was stare at the leather fold-over that contained the slip of seemingly psychic paper.
    Which meant the whole thing was in fact not a dream, and that she had for realz fallen through the cracks in the world and discovered that magic works and trolls lurk in alleys.
    Clearly, the only thing to do was take a shower.
    As the paper was still there when she was done with her shower, she accepted unreality and dressed for work. She slipped on a pair of work jeans and a black cami, then a Superman Kingdom Come T-shirt, and a hoodie over that. Layers, kid, layers. That was one of the first lessons she’d learned when she moved to the Northwest with her dad, after he’d moved them around from job to job and place to place before landing in his current cosmetics cooperative. She topped off her outfit with a Wonder Woman beret to hold back her hair.
    Properly equipped for the day, Ree grabbed the wallet off her dresser and stuffed it into a pocket to keep it safe. And maybe a little to let her prove she wasn’t crazy.
    There wasn’t any use in having breakfast at home, since there would be pastries to eat at work. But in deference to “healthiness,” she poured herself a bowl of cereal and wolfed it down to the dulcet dorkiness of the last night’s Daily Show on her laptop while catching up on email.
    While Ree was eating, Sandra emerged from her turn in the shower, and they talked for a few minutes in that glorious sliver of time while the world was waking up, before the day started in earnest and the weights of life came dropping down like globs of snow falling off trees during a thaw.
    •   •   •
    Bryan was already at the café when Ree arrived, oven wafting the comforting smells of sugary carbs throughout the room. Xombi’s owner and manager was a fairly typical geeky guy of fortyish, with bushy brown hair, a full beard, and a bit of a paunch that had expanded in the last few years alongside his family’s expansion from one child to three with the arrival of the twins. His wife, Amy, worked for a restaurant goods wholesaler, currently selling from home so she could stay with little Luke and Leia full-time.
    As Ree walked through