"Oh, I know." She reaches out her hand to pat his cheek like she might a curious child. "I shouldn't be able to do this at all. You have precautions in place. I remember. I shouldn't have been able to do any of the many things I've done today, what with all the anti-magic work you've done in here. Don't worry, dear, your shields are working fine. I used to date a tech guy, you see."

  Tony's eye narrows slightly.

  "Yes, Jaccob Stevens, as a matter of fact," she says. "He taught me a few things. Of course, he didn't know he was teaching me anything--didn't know about my magic at all. In fact, that was a bit of a sticky wicket between us."

  Tony still isn't afraid. That's to his credit, and to her annoyance. How does Vivienne deal with this man? Well, she won't be doing that anytime soon, if ever again.

  "I felt the place out last time I was here," Ruby says. "And after I'd succeeded in bewitching you then, I was pretty sure I could handle whatever you had going on today. And, just in case, I brought a god for backup."

  "That would be me," Loki interjects, waving at Tony as though there was any doubt.

  "Now," Ruby goes on, folding her hands at her waist, "I came here to tell you in no uncertain terms that Vivienne is not your plaything, and I am not your pawn. You fucked with me to fuck with her, and I cannot let that stand. I have ended greater men for lesser offenses. But Vivienne insists I keep you alive; you can thank her for that later. And with that small-but-critical restriction in place, there's only so much I can do. I won't say I'm done with you after tonight. But I will say this."

  She closes the final inches between them, reaching out her right hand and placing it over Tony's heart in such a way that her nails dig into his chest even through the fabric of his shirt.

  "If you so much as come within twenty miles of this woman with malice in your heart, I swear to every god the damn thing will explode in your chest." Ruby growls. "And don't think I'll have to find you first--the magic can do that all on its own."

  The air around them swirls hot, like a blast from a furnace. Then Ruby steps away, her expression cool but stern.

  "Ginger--" Vivienne says.

  She shouldn't say anything. A year ago, she wouldn't have said anything. But today ...

  "Call me or don't." Ruby turns on her heel, her magic done. "Ball's in your court."

  Tony falls to the floor, coughing and gasping and not yet able to get to his feet. Ruby can feel Vivienne watching as she steps through the portal, taking Loki's hand as they return to the Beyond.

  Did she do the right thing?

  She doesn't know.

  Round Eight: On the Rocks

  April 2020

  This might possibly be the most tedious meeting Ruby Killingsworth has ever been forced to sit through. At the very least, it's proving to be the most interminable.

  She'd kicked herself at first when she realized she'd arranged for Vivienne to be flying in during one of her quarterly check-ins with the label presidents. After everything that had happened, it had been a bit of a production to get her to agree to the trip. So when she had agreed and named the date, Ruby had been excited enough she hadn't bothered to check her calendar for conflicts.

  That's what she gets for refusing to fully manage her own calendar. This meeting has been on the books for literally as long as she's been head of the company, and they don't get moved. Quarterlies come due when they come due, and a CEO's personal life is no reason to put them off.

  As the day had drawn closer, she'd changed her mind about being annoyed. Vivienne would be landing right as the meeting was getting started, she might pop her head in to say hello, and then head upstairs to relax until the end of the workday. It would be a little bit of a flex--showing Vivienne up close and personal what power she wields in the boardroom. Ruby likes that.

  She also likes the idea of giving Vivienne a little bit of space and a chance to get comfortable before the conversation they will inevitably need to have. And she doesn't want to seem too eager. Having a long meeting keeping her from running upstairs will help immensely with that.

  According to plan, she would head up when her business was done. And they can proceed with the make-up sex when she gets there. She'd fully convinced herself this was a perfectly brilliant idea.

  But that was all before the plane went missing.

  Twenty minutes past due made her annoyed.

  Thirty made her angry.

  Forty-five had her demanding an explanation, and she doesn't like the one she got.

  There's a terrible storm over the Great Lakes.

  Followed immediately by:

  I'm sure if anything is wrong, we'd have heard about it, Miss Killingsworth.

  Her plane is missing with someone she very much wanted to see aboard, and she is stuck listening to earnings reports and the inane ramblings of middle-aged white men who cannot seem to wrap their minds around the success of an Asian American R&B performer.

  "Of course you don't understand it, Winslow," Ruby snaps.

  She isn't sure how the conversion got this far off topic to begin with; it's likely due to her divided attention. She refreshes the news ticker on her laptop again. If a brand new, seventy-five-million-dollar jet falls out of the sky, surely the vultures at some cable news network will report it. Still nothing.

  "You're not supposed to understand it," she says. "MerMeg Gilal is, in fact, the poster girl for all things old white men don't understand. She's a young, fat, unbelievably talented woman of color with a tentacle fetish. You are not her target audience; nobody in this room is her target audience. She's about sex and she's about kink, and she's about--"

  Ruby's voice catches in her throat.

  Fuck.

  So now she can't even talk about the existence of sexually empowered women without it making her think of Vivienne and wonder what the hell happened to that plane.

  She purses her lips before reaching for the bottle of mineral water the staff set at her place before the meeting began. Hopefully all present buy that break in her voice as a result of dehydration. While she drinks, she wakes the screen on her StarPhone.

  Still nothing.

  "All you need to understand, Winslow," she says, hoping to at least get the meeting back on track, "are the numbers she's bringing in. She outperforms herself every quarter, and if we don't have her in large arenas this summer, we're leaving millions on the table. Make it happen."

  She isn't usually so short with Winslow. She isn't usually this snippy with any of these people. But she isn't usually missing a whole-ass aircraft.

  She glances back at her phone.

  Vivienne Arriving

  She still hasn't dismissed the reminder. It's now nearly two hours old.

  Two hours.

  Maybe there's traffic at the airfield?

  Bullshit. That one worked at the twenty-minute mark. But it's long past holding patterns and crowded tarmac. Something is fucking wrong, and there's nothing she can do about it. There may be nothing in the world that could make her angrier.

  How she's managed to make it through almost two hours of this meeting with the plane overdue without completely losing her shit, she's not sure she'll ever know. She can feel the magic reacting within her; it feels feral, dangerous, and barely under control. She fears she's liable to blow her whole building to ash if she doesn't hear something soon.

  More than once she's been within an inch of storming out of the boardroom and demanding Bridget get the head of the FAA on the phone so she can scream "Where the hell is my missing aircraft?" at someone who might actually have an answer.

  Not that she hasn't already given similar marching orders to her staff. Everyone on this floor with a desk and a telephone has been tasked with using every means at the company's disposal to track down that plane.

  At the one-hour mark, Ruby had half a mind to call up President Prather himself and get him to put NORAD on the job. She would have done it, too, if she thought it would help. But she knows it wouldn't. Between Prather's general level of incompetence and how egregiously he's mismanaged the government, there's little chance of getting what she needs out of that phone call. It's been an entire hour since then, and she's this close to doing it anyway.

  As far as she can tell, the soldiers in Valhalla didn't identify her in their reports--either they didn't look closely enough to have recognized her or her sources at the Pentagon kept that little detail redacted. Either way, Prather hasn't blown up her inbox over it or appeared uninvited on her helipad at some ungodly hour of the morning. The United States isn't in a state of war against Valhalla. Indeed, the news hasn't even covered the incident, aside from a brief on the AP about some sort of industrial accident in the technopolis in Colorado and possibly the governor has gone on holiday? Ruby's heard nothing else out of there for some time, nor does she care.

  What she cares about is her damn plane with her g ... guest.

  The only thing that's stopped her from flipping her entire lid is the room full of people to whom she might owe an explanation. And the thought of how her magic might go off if she gets an answer she doesn't like, well ... Her tower has already been nearly destroyed once, the first time she let Vivienne Cain into her life, and she is certainly not going to be the reason it gets wrecked again. Best to get this meeting over and done with so she can escape to someplace where she can rant and scream without risking news of a "breakdown" winding up in the tabloids.

  Maybe a trip down to forty-six is in order. Although not omniscient, Loki is still a god; surely they have means of information gathering unavailable to mere mortals. And if the news isn't good, they're the only being she can think of who might survive whatever hell she might unleash. They might even enjoy it.

  The meeting just keeps dragging on and on. The head of Wakulla Records, one of the smaller Bluegrass and Zydeco labels, is giving her a brief-but-positive overview when Ruby steals another glance at her StarPhone. The two-hour mark comes and goes, and she really isn't sure how much more of this she can take.

  When she looks back up, Ruby feels her heart leap into her throat. Hot tears are in her eyes, and it's all she can do to contain the magic that wants to erupt out of every pore. Her knees go weak, and her palms go clammy. She isn't altogether sure she's not about to faint.

  Standing just outside the glass wall of the boardroom, dressed uncharacteristically in winter white, and looking as though nothing in the world is even the tiniest bit wrong, is Vivienne Cain.

  The damn woman gives her a winsome smile.

  Ruby slams her laptop shut, snatching it off the table. She snags her phone as well, as she leaps to standing.

  "You'll have to excuse me," she manages to say as she storms out of the boardroom. "My office," she growls at Vivienne as soon as she's through the door. "Now."

  ~

  Vivienne grins. Not exactly the greeting she'd expected, but she'll take it.

  She wasn't sure whether they'd made up enough to cut straight to the spicy stuff, but if Ruby wants to skip the talking part, Vivienne is happy to oblige.

  It's rare Ruby is so into taking charge in matters between them. Maybe it's just her office persona. After all, she's the CEO in this place: stern, decisive, powerful. Or maybe Vivienne's arriving extremely behind schedule has Ruby wound a little tight and in need of immediate release.

  Whatever it is, it's kind of hot.

  Ruby says nothing further as the two of them hurry down the narrow hallway, past the executive receptionist, and into Ruby's private office. Vivienne doesn't think she's ever seen Ruby move with such intention. She's at least five paces ahead--already setting her things on her desk by the time Vivienne makes it through the door.

  "You're late." Ruby turns on her heel, flicking her fingers in a gesture that causes the office door to slam shut.

  "There was a storm over the Great Lakes," Vivienne says. "I don't have weather powers."

  "Do you think--" Ruby snaps, then moderates herself. "You think I didn't know about the storm?"

  Her eyes are narrow and her tone as harsh as anything Vivienne has ever heard. When she first came to Cobalt City to confront Ruby, she'd expected to meet a cold, heartless, wicked witch, but this is the first time she's ever seen shades of that. Oh, she's seen Ruby cold and aloof before, but never this much outright rage.

  If Vivienne was anyone else, she'd probably be a little afraid. Hell, if she were most people, she'd rightly be terrified. But Vivienne is not anyone else. Rather than frightened of the powerful sorceress fuming at her, she's mostly annoyed at being blamed for a flight delay when she'd come here to finally set things right between them.

  This isn't the greeting she expected. And it's pissing her off.

  "All right, listen, your Worship," Vivienne says, crossing her arms over her chest, "I get that this is maybe the first time in the history of you ruling the entire world that someone has dared to be late for an appointment with you, but it just so happens I was on a plane that I was not flying that encountered what can only be described as fucking severe weather, and I got here as quickly as I humanly could. If you want somebody to be mad at over this, you ought to be looking at your pilot. Or Lake Michigan. Or Indra the lord of weather or whatever. Because this is absolutely not my fault. Here I was thinking you'd be happy to see me, and instead--"

  Ruby has turned her back. She's facing her desk again, looking down at something Vivienne can't see.

  "I cannot fucking believe you're angry about this," Vivienne says. "Of all the things to be angry about, and there's plenty--"

  Ruby's shoulders are heaving. Magic crackles in the air all around her, visible without the aid of any arcane assistance. Vivienne is growing leery of an impending magical eruption. She has never seen Ruby like this, not even when they were mowing down Nazis in Valhalla, and she doesn't like it. Not one bit. This is sure as shit not what she flew across the country for.

  Vivienne suddenly fears this is the part where getting into bed with an evil sorceress comes back to bite her in the ass.

  Wary of the magic that is likely about to be loosed, Vivienne looks down at the jeweled bracelet on her wrist. If this is about to get ugly, she'll need all the ammunition she can get. Without a second thought, she slides the bracelet off her wrist and moves to slip it into the pocket of her jacket.

  And she's immediately overwhelmed.

  Ruby has no emotional defenses up. Vivienne can taste and feel every one of her feelings. Ruby isn't furious, she's ... she's overwrought. She's afflicted. She's ...

  Vivienne can't even process everything she's getting.

  Vivienne's hand is still in her pocket when Ruby turns around to face her. "There was a storm over the Great Lakes." She takes a step toward Vivienne, shaking her head. "And you were two hours overdue."

  Vivienne can barely stay standing. The force of Ruby's feelings overwhelms her. She isn't sure she's ever felt anything this powerful from just one person--and that includes everything she's ever felt from Tony. This is something altogether new.

  She reaches out her hands, stepping forward just enough to take Ruby by her forearms and pull her closer.

  "I was late," she says softly, hoping to diffuse some of the tension in the air, "and there was bad weather. And you didn't know--"

  Before Vivienne can finish her sentence, Ruby is kissing her. The kiss is hard. It's rough: angry and needful. Vivienne feels magic tingling across her scalp from where Ruby has grabbed the back of her head. It radiates down her spine and out to her fingertips. It's intense and stirring and Vivienne leans into it with all she has.

  When their faces part, there are tears in Ruby's eyes.

  "I didn't know," she whispers.

  "Hey," Vivienne says, tilting her head until she's sure she has Ruby's gaze. "I'm right here." She kisses her again--softly this time, sweetly, tenderly.

  "You're right here," Ruby says after a moment. She sniffles a little as she steps back. "And you're wearing white again."

  "I am." Vivienne unbuttons her collar suggestively. "Did you want me to stop it?"

  "No--yes, later, but--" Ruby blinks. "Those are my clothes."

  "I was wondering how long it would take you to mention that." Vivienne chuckles softly. The ivory wool midi dress and matching ivory leather jacket aren't her usual style.

  "Why my clothes?" Ruby asks, seemingly very focused.

  "There was a storm over the Great Lakes," she says, "and the pilot wanted to take us above it. But the cell went too high, so we had to go around ... along with every other plane that managed to take off this morning. Meanwhile, even going around the storm, we hit some turbulence and I had a rather unfortunate encounter with a porcelain tureen full of tomato soup. Sorry about your upholstery, by the way. So I thought I should change clothes before I came down to your very dignified office. I didn't think you'd mind."

  "You're the one who insisted we feed you on the flight." Ruby's voice is gravelly, and she sniffles when she's finished speaking.

  "Well, after last time--" Vivienne slides her hands down Ruby's arms until their fingers are touching.

  "Last time you made me order that abysmal pizza."

  "And you didn't even let me eat it."

  "It was terrible."

  "It wasn't that bad," Vivienne argues. "At least it was a better idea than tomato soup on an airplane."

  "That's a low bar."

  "Thanks."

  "That dress looks good on you," Ruby says, stepping back just enough to size Vivienne up, but not enough that their hands lose contact.

  "I have to say it was exciting to find a leather jacket in your closet, white as it is."

  "You should keep it."

  "This jacket probably cost more than my motorcycle," Vivienne says. "I'm not going to turn that offer down."

  "But you still won't let me buy you a condo."

  "You're wearing me down."

  "Speaking of 'wearing down'," Ruby says, moving in closer again, "did you change into my lingerie, too?"

  "Maybe."

  "V."

  "R."

 

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