Hawk was still beside me. He tended to be more patient than I was, but my gut said this was killing him too.
Finally, Xazier shrugged, still looking at Lou. “I’ll tell if you do. Not sure there’s much harm after what happened yesterday anyway. Only a matter of time.”
The hill. Were we going to find out what the hill was? It might be bad news, and my breath faltered as I waited for Lou to respond. Good or bad, at least we’d know, and the answers seemed so close.
Lou took another second, playing hard to get. Being the angel of the two, it was a bit shocking that he seemed to be the bigger jerk. Nah, that wasn’t really fair. They both sucked equally.
Lou took a step away, crushing any hopes.
Then he stopped, back still to us. “Fine. Might as well.”
It was something. I’d be getting some kind of answers. One of the many knots I was tied up in came undone.
Lou turned and waved at Xazier. “Go ahead. Tell them.”
“You do it,” Xazier said.
Lou looked Xazier up and down, sighed, and shook his head. “Are there no depths to the levels I’m supposed to sink to in the name of good?”
“Oh, please. Like you’re good. We both know you aren’t. That’s why you have the job you have. If they didn’t need a necessary evil, you’d be rolling around in the muck with me every single day and lo-ving it.” Xazier leaned forward with a big smile on his face, as if he knew Lou better than he knew himself.
“Not true.” Lou looked away.
Not exactly a convincing argument.
When they both stopped talking, Hawk said, “Can we keep this meeting moving?”
“I always have to do the dirty work,” Xazier said.
Lou laughed. “Yes. And that’s fitting, don’t you think? Why break with what’s working?”
If these two started fighting, no one was ever going to tell us what was going on.
Xazier shook his head before looking at me and Hawk. Was he going to talk?
“This could take a while. I’d prefer somewhere warm and comfortable.” Xazier looked around at the harsh landscape I’d come to love.
Why did he even want this place—or did he?
“We can go back to the broker building,” Hawk said.
Xazier nodded, and then all four of us were in the back room. I wasn’t sure who had moved us here, but my coin was on Xazier.
The place was eerily quiet, but that would be Hawk’s doing. This was not a situation that needed any more company.
Xazier took a seat on one couch. I took a seat on the opposite one. Hawk remained standing beside my couch. Lou looked at Xazier’s couch and rolled his eyes, as if there were no way he’d sit anywhere near him. Lou took a step toward mine. Hawk shook his head.
“Fine,” Lou said, taking a seat in a chair.
Xazier finally began. “A couple of hundred thousand years ago, give or take fifty, right around the time of…” He looked at me and shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. You weren’t around to know any of this. Point is, when you people, humans, started showing up and then talking, there became an increase in workload.
“All you people did was pray for things. Ask for things, barter, promise, blah, blah, blah. In the beginning, we tried to accommodate some of your wishes here and there, if it fit our purposes. But the load became tedious. That’s when Xest was formed. In essence, we needed to contract out some of the work. It was just too much—”
“And too tiring,” Lou said. “We had no time for fun anymore. You people just got needier and needier.”
Xazier nodded as the two found common ground on how irritating people were. “It was ridiculous, wasn’t it? And they wouldn’t stop breeding, either. How many do they really need to have? Take a breather.” He rolled his eyes. “We couldn’t take it anymore. We weren’t in the business of worrying about your everyday wishes and desires. You live your life, and after it’s done, we judge you for it. That’s the way we wanted it.”
Lou cleared his throat, turning to Xazier. “By the way, have you noticed how underrated judging is these days? Everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too. Are we supposed to let just anyone in?”
Xazier tilted his head back. “You don’t like that part? I find that the most entertaining. I love watching as I play back their greatest hits of sin. Best part of my day. I have specific orders that I’m to be alerted when someone really good, or bad if you want to look at it like that, is about to cross over.”
“I’m sure it’s wonderful. Can you get back on track?” I asked. Did witches have the same afterlife? Was I going to end up with one of these two ruling my ever after? Please let me have a different end, even if that was a hole buried in the ground. It might be preferable.
Xazier glanced back at me. “Oh, yes, sure. So we were getting killed by the workload, but neither of our bosses cared. After all, like most businesses, we ran most of the show and carried most of the weight. We decided to call a little meeting, where we agreed that some outsourcing needed to be done to dump some of the work, you know, all the I need and I want and I have to have. We agreed quickly, too, which nearly never happens, that something had to be done or our quality of life would continue to tank.”
Lou kicked his heels up on the coffee table and a brandy appeared in his hand. “We didn’t want it anymore. We’d put our dues in. It was time to relax a bit.”
Xazier pointed to Lou’s glass. “Is that the twenty-four?”
“Yes. Would you care for one?” Lou swirled his glass.
“Of course,” Xazier said.
“Anyone else?” Lou asked.
“No,” Hawk said.
“No, thanks.” Bibbi would kill me if I drank that. That might rank almost as bad as drinking Gillian’s cocoa.
A glass appeared in Xazier’s hand. He took a sip before he continued. “We had one issue. If you think of Xest like a business, it required some startup cash, so to speak. You needed some resources to get it going, which both sides were supposed to invest equally.” Xazier shot a look at Lou, and the apparent truce seemed on shaky ground again.
“I didn’t do more than I was supposed to. You did less than you were supposed to,” Lou said.
“We set an amount agreed upon. I did the right amount,” Xazier said.
“You can say that all you want, but why did our contribution seem heavier?” Lou argued.
“If you were so mad that mine was light, why did you care when I fixed it?” Xazier said.
Lou dropped his feet to the ground so he could lean toward Xazier, pointing. I wasn’t overly concerned. He wasn’t bothering to put his drink down, so he couldn’t be that mad.
“Because I had to add more after you did. You didn’t fix it. You weighted it, which made me have to add on, and you know that’s a problem.” Lou leaned back in his chair again with a huff.
“You wanted it that way so Xest always leaned a little bit to your side,” Xazier said, but the tension had already eased a bit.
It was hard to decide whether I wanted to keep letting the information flow as it was or ask for some explanations. I was getting the gist, but being sure would help out a lot, especially in wondering how I’d ended up with the same magic that was in that hill.