Read Online Hexomancy by Michael R. Underwood - Free Book Online Page A

over. “The lead guy said, ‘Give us all your money, and we’ll let you go.’ ”
    Priya continued. “I went for my wallet, but Drake stepped forward and tried to defuse the situation.”
    Ree’s bullshit sensors started going off, but she let her friend finish, already suspecting she knew the story behind the story.
    “He said, ‘Are you quite convinced of the rightfulness and propriety of accosting a young couple in the middle of the night, when there is a police station not three city blocks from this location?’
    “And the little guy said, ‘Shut your trap, Gov’ner, and give us your money.’ The guys with the knives moved forward, and Drake tried to disarm them. He got one’s knife away from him, but then the other one came in. They both grabbed him and threw him against the sidewall.
    “I yelled for help, and the two guys started beating him. He fought back, and the whole time, the guy with the gun was just looking at me, with the most terrifying look on his face, like the Cheshire cat on meth. The thugs went for him again, so I jumped in and sprayed one with my mace. He yelled, then swung at me. I ducked under that, but the other one grabbed my arm and threw me into the wall, too.”
    Priya pulled her hair back, revealing the hastily-bandaged wound at her eyebrow, face still crusted in blood. “Drake got back up and clocked one of them over the head, then pulled a knife of his own. The guy with the gun shot Drake in the chest, and he went down.”
    Fuck . Ree was already suspecting that this story came from the Doubt and not from what really happened, but if Priya was reinterpreting it as a shooting, Drake must be truly hurt.
    Ree looked at her glass as she finished a sip. It was already empty. Priya continued. “Then a police siren started, and the muggers ran down the far end of the alley. I grabbed Drake and pulled him up to his feet. But where he’d been shot, there wasn’t much blood, just a hole in the shirt. He was wearing a chain mail shirt. ‘I’ve been thinking of taking up historical combat; wanted to see how much these things really weighed.’
    “It didn’t really make sense, since I didn’t hear it. . . .” Priya’s eyes glazed over again, and she leaped back into the story.
    “But he was okay, and we walked back here.” Priya’s glass was empty, too, and she topped off both women’s booze.
    “We patched up,” Priya said. “But when that was done, he was all closed off, looking over his shoulder, nervous. He apologized fifteen times in that way only someone like he could, this long litany of his failures and deficiencies all the way back here, about how he should have been able to protect me, that he shouldn’t have tried to fight and that they should have run.
    “He said that if he couldn’t protect me, then he didn’t deserve my attentions, like it was his fault that those guys came after us.” She stopped, looking down at her glass. She held it in both hands, squeezing hard like she was trying to crush the thing.
    “He fucking dumped me twenty minutes after we got mugged in the middle of the warehouse district, then he just left, still apologizing, and told me that I should call you and the others, that he would do what he could to, I don’t even know, something. And then he just left.”
    Ree’s internal monologue ran a string of curses, her heartbeat stepping up with sympathy and anger.
    “Who the fuck does that? What the hell, Ree? He was all Prince Charming perfect, more than a bit weird, sure. Maybe too into the scene. But one mugging and he completely loses it like some bro idiot, when he got hurt worse than I did? You know him, right? Through that catering job? Has he pulled something like this before?”
    Ree reeled at all the different angles of this clusterfuck unfolding before her. Fifty bucks she didn’t have said that the “mugging” was the result of the Doubt, so she needed to get the story from Drake to see if something magical had been the