and he played in tournaments. In fact, with the other information August had compiled about him, it was safe to say that while Rate Your Hit might be Merlin’s job, Dungeons & Dragons was his life.
August wasn’t about to use the VoIP with Ricardo in the room, not after his less-than-stellar performance calling his sister. He typed I just went on the craziest campaign! I’m lucky I survived, lol. I need to learn some new spells fast—any thoughts?
He waited a minute. Five minutes. He finished his coffee, rinsed the cup and put it in the sink, grabbed a bag of Doritos and came back into the living room.
Crunch.
No response..
Crunch-crunch.
Still nothing.
Crunch-crunch-cr—
“Can you eat in the other room?”
August kept his smile small, but inside he was beaming. He looked innocently at Ricardo before popping another chip in his mouth. “Excuse me?”
“Can you eat those in the other room?” Ricardo asked in a manner that was ten percent asking, ninety percent ordering.
“Like, in the kitchen?”
“Sure.”
August pouted. “But there are no chairs in there. I want to sit and relax while I have my breakfast.”
Ricardo raised an eyebrow. “How are a bag of chips ‘breakfast’ to you? Don’t you have a private chef to make you perfectly poached salmon every morning, or something?”
August ate another chip as he considered the question. “Well, while I would never say no to a nice salmon benedict, the short answer is no. I don’t have any permanent staff at my house, and the cleaning service only stops by once every two weeks, and only if I’m going to be there. So while, yes, I was raised to appreciate the finer things in life, these days? I take what I can get. And right now, that’s coffee and Cool Ranch Doritos.”
“There are eggs in the fridge.”
“I don’t eat raw eggs, eww.”
Ricardo’s jaw worked silently for a moment. “I meant you could cook them.”
August shrugged. “I thought it would be presumptuous of me to just grab your pans and spatulas and start making breakfast for myself.”
“You could have asked.”
“I could have,” August agreed. “But then I wouldn’t be eating Doritos for breakfast, which I’m sure you’ll agree is—”
Your chat has timed out.
August immediately refocused on the phone. Timed out? It had only been half an hour—less than that. He checked the chatroom again, and Merlin’s icon had gone from a glowing green “Active” to amber “Passive.” That meant he’d been away from his account for at least eight hours—this app knew how long an adventure could take and programmed accordingly. Merlin had never taken more than five hours to get back to August on anything. Never.
“Shit.”
“Problem?”
August looked over at Ricardo, who had lost his mildly disgusted expression in favor of something more serious. August almost preferred mildly disgusted—Ricardo always looked so damn serious, it was a relief to see his mouth turn down in distaste or his eyes light up with interest. Not that August had seen much of that yet, but a man could dream.
“My liaison is acting irregularly.”
Ricardo did him the service of not asking how he knew, or whether he was sure. “Do you have any idea where to find him?”
“You know we’re not supposed to exchange any personal information with or have any direct offline contact with our liaisons,” August said.
Ricardo didn’t bat an eye. “But you know who and where he is anyway.”
“Of course I do.”
August was a lot of things, but rule-abiding wasn’t one of them. It had taken less than a month of working with Merlin to narrow down the man’s day job, where he lived, and his mother’s name. A little bit of digging had shown that two of these three things were linked—he still lived with his mother, although in this case he was the one paying for their new-construction, three-story house in a nice part of town. Not exactly the cliché of basement-dwelling gamer geek, but Merlin—real name Karl Pink, no lie—got a hefty fee out of each successfully handled contract.
Merlin’s day job was running a comics and gaming store downtown, in a tiny shop on a corner between a laundromat and a liquor store. It did a brisk business, despite technically being a front. August had actually gone in and bought a limited edition, holiday release Snowball the Beholder miniature. It was three hundred and fifty dollars well spent, to get fifteen rambling, detailed minutes of monologuing insight into his liaison’s head.
His conclusion had been that Merlin was a natural born researcher, could remember statistics like nobody’s business, and