Sin & Chocolate (Demigod of San Francisco 1)

“Perfect. If you’ll excuse me for a moment, the nurse will be in for some preliminary checks, and I’ll continue from there.” Mountebank Iams left the room and closed the door behind him, that wall white. He’d now go write down my selection and the time it took to make it.

A moment later, a red-faced nurse with a can-do expression and a tight bun strolled in.

“Good afternoon, Miss Price,” she said, her smile absent but her tone kind. She clicked a button on the machine next to me, and it whirred to life. I didn’t bother telling her it wouldn’t work. They’d just assume I was an idiot. “Let’s see what we have here.”

She put out her hand, and I relinquished the clipboard.

“You’ve been tested three times before, is that correct?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And each result was different?”

“Yes. Though the third was in the ballpark of the first.”

“Right, yes.” She traced her finger down the page on the clipboard before folding the sheet in half lengthwise. She traced her finger down the next page. “You can see those who haven’t made the transition to the afterlife?”

“Yes. There was one in the office area of the sterile check-in room.”

To her credit, she didn’t even pause.

“Have you experienced any fluctuations of power?”

“Nope.” Just like I’d answered on the questionnaire.

“Any reason to suspect your power has grown or changed in any way?”

“Nope.” Also like I’d answered on the questionnaire.

“Can you call people back from the Line?”

“Anyone close to a spirit can call them back from the Line. Are you actually asking if I can call them back from beyond the Line?”

Her eyes flicked up. “Can you call people back from beyond the Line?” Her emphasis had been slight, but it was there.

The marathon of annoyance had begun. It would start with her and spread to the other staff.

“Yes, I can,” I answered.

“Can you then send them back within the same session?”

“Yes. God, I hope people don’t call spirits if they don’t have the power to send them home again when they’re done. What turds.”

Her stern brown eyes held a warning about giving my opinion or talking out of turn. A warning I intended to ignore. They weren’t in control here. Nor were they in charge. They needed my cooperation to get what they were after, and I did not plan on giving it. I might as well amuse myself while I was trapped in the chair, waiting for them to exhaust their efforts.

“What percentage of the day are you able to see spirits?” she asked, back on target.

“It is a wonder I bothered filling out that questionnaire at all. A hundred percent of the waking hours.”

Her eyes drifted up from the paper, but I couldn’t read the look in them. Her assessment lasted only a moment, and I suddenly wondered if she thought I was lying.

Why the hell would a person lie about something like that? It wasn’t something to brag about. The opposite, in fact.

“And sleeping?”

“Your mind controls your dreams. Spirits don’t have access to your mind.” When she didn’t immediately continue her line of questioning, I simplified my answer: “None.”

“You don’t dream about spirits?”

“I dream about people who may have died, as I do about the living, but the dreams are controlled by me. They are puppets on the strings of my subconscious, or my conscious mind if I gain control of my dream.”

Her eyes were on me again, still unreadable. “You can control your own dreamscape?”

“Not like a Dream Walker. Anyone, magical or otherwise, can do what I’m saying. It’s called a lucid dream. You control your dream, but you aren’t physically in it. You’re…wakeful dreaming.” I crossed an ankle over a knee. “I feel like you should know what I’m talking about. They have schools for what you do, right?”

Her eyes hardened, and a little tingle at the base of my spine said not to mess with her.

I had rarely listened to my gut feelings in the past—why would I now?

“The spirits you see, how transitionary are they?” she asked.

“I’m not sure what that means, like I said on the questionnaire. Do you mean how close to the Line are they?”

“How solid is the form of the spirit?”

“Oh. Completely solid. Like looking at you.”

Her eyes were like Chuck Norris’s fists. “Every spirit you see is as solid as a living person?”

“Yes.”

“How are you able to differentiate between the two?”

“In short, I just can. I can feel it, I guess. Sometimes there is a soft inner glow, sometimes a soft outer glow, but mostly…I just know. I’ve never really thought about how. No one taught me to do this stuff, I just…do it.”

Her look said she wasn’t impressed. In her head, she was certainly saying “I see” in a disbelieving sort of way.

“Do they talk to you, these spirits?” she asked.

And on she went, sometimes asking for a painful degree of explanation to a question I’d already answered. Finally, when her efforts were exhausted and her patience had worn thin, she gave me a crusty look and told me the mountebank would be in shortly.

A half-hour wasn’t shortly. By the time he strolled in, clearly without any sort of urgency, I was tapping my foot and wondering how Mordecai was getting on. I hoped he wouldn’t be done before me. They might just send him home without waiting. Which would’ve been fine, had I been positive he’d end up at home.

“Hello again, Alexis,” the mountebank said, his attempt at being chummy ruined by his lack of a cheery voice and eye contact. “Now, we’ll just connect you up and get a reading, and you’ll be all set.”

I was tempted to let them get what they wanted without hassle. Tempted, but not willing. Kieran was trying to put me in a box to use at his leisure. Besides which, the governing body kept more records on powerful magical people—and they also encouraged them to move into the magical zone. Even if I could afford it, I didn’t need a bunch of busybodies sneering at my weird magical traits.

So I settled in, squishing my magic into a little ball and shoving it way down deep, where even the strongest machines couldn’t read it. Tubes and bands and whirligigs in place, on went the machine.

It took three minutes for the mountebank’s face to droop into a grimace. Another minute for his brow to bunch. One more to peer down at the machine, then over at me.

Yup. That’s how it’s going to go. Your expectations, no matter how hard you try, will not be met. Good day, sir.

And he did try. He moved me from one machine to the other. Then back to the first. The tubes sucking strangely at my skin were checked. The headpiece altered. My vein slapped before another sample was taken.

All the while, he kept getting different results. If I were better at this, I could target one result and keep hitting that. That’d satisfy him. But alas, I was only human.

“Now, Alexis,” the mountebank said twenty minutes later with sweat standing on his brow and frustration in every line on his face. The no-nonsense nurse stood by the machine on the red wall, accusation clear in her stance. “Something is not adding up.” His smile was condescending. He pointed at the long sheet of perforated white paper in his left hand. “We’ve taken these readings three times. All are different, but all of them suggest a lower-powered magic.” His eyes flicked up, then back down. That was as close as he usually got to checking my expression. “And yet the type of magic you’ve described is indicative of someone with a substantial power level.”

“Huh.” I tapped my chin. “Conundrum. Maybe there’s a plate in my head that I’m unaware of? You know”—I snapped—“everyone always says my personality is electric. Maybe that is messing up the machine.”

The nurse’s lips tightened further. The mountebank shook his head, reading the printout again. He glanced at the machine. “I need to make a call. Nurse Jessub, come with me, please.”

She glared at me all the way out the door. We wouldn’t end up friends, she and I.

Fifteen minutes later, I was unsurprised to see the mountebank bring in a lanky man with a buzzcut, keen eyes, and a smile that said people did what he wanted if they wanted to keep their appendages. The nurse filed in after him with an expression that said, This is for your own good.

“Hello, Miss Price,” the new guy said, his hands behind his back and his smile oily. “I’m Rob Stevens.”

“Hi, Rob,” I said.

“I am an Authenticator. Do you know what that is?”

My heart sank and a bead of sweat ran down my back.

His smile spread. “I can see that you do. Yes, I can read the shades of truth within lies, and vice versa.”

I hadn’t reacted because of what he could do. He could figure out the problem all day long, but that didn’t mean they could get any closer to discerning the level of my magic. Not unless shock treatment had returned to medical practice (they never had given me an answer on that).

No, my problem was that magic like his was rare and prized. He could demand a good price for his work. The fact that they’d brought him in with me, paying him an arm and a leg for his services, meant Kieran was not messing around. He wanted proof of what I could do, and I was scared by the lengths he was willing to go to get it.