The Hex Files

1

There was a building in Brooklyn that didn't appear on any map.

The few people who had seen would have told you it was an old brick behemoth, held over from a time when gangsters walked the streets and fire escapes criss-crossed the New York skyline. It was something of an urban legend in the neighborhood, and those lucky enough to catch a glimpse rarely saw it twice. But perhaps, if the stars were aligned and you were just the right sort of lost, after a long walk, you might just find yourself on the doorstep of the Marley Place Hotel.

Once there, you might feel compelled to venture inside. Up the stairs, to the fifth floor, past closed doors and shuttered blinds. Down the corridor, passing the third door on your left, something might cause you to draw pause.

The plaque would have proved difficult to read for any mundane onlooker; the harder you looked, the more obstinately the letters rearranged themselves. But if, perchance, you were one of the city's magical residents, you would see something rather different.

New York's Number One Supernatural Detective Agency, the plaque declared, in the distinctive flourish of serif in brass. The name was a bit of a stretch, of course. But New York's Only Supernatural Detective Agency didn't have quite the same ring to it.

Inside the agency's waiting room on that hot July afternoon, a ceiling fan whirred high above while a beat-up old coffee pot gurgled away in the corner. The walls were line by squashed couches, deep and forgiving; the tables papered over with old magazines. And at a desk at the far side of this room, sat Solomon Lovelace.

The waiting room might have looked ordinary to a mundane onlooker, but Sol knew better. Take the young woman sitting across from him. It was the lipstick that gave her away. It was smudged around her incisors, two red streaks hinting at the protrusion of the troll's invisible tusks.

"I'm afraid that Ms. Ortega isn't in at the moment- but if you'd like to take a seat..."

The young troll responded with a hiccup sob. She had already made her way through one box of Kleenex and was making good headway on another.

Sol sighed. He wished Val was here- she was better with the criers than he was. But after a phone call from a number he didn't recognize, she'd told him to cancel the rest of her appointments for the morning and dashed out the door. That was well over three hours ago.

"Don't you know when she'll be back?" the girl sniffled. "You are her secretary- aren't you?"

Sol gave her a tight smile.

"Executive Assistant. And I'm afraid not."

Truth be told, the private investigation business wasn't quite as glamorous as it seemed, particularly when you were the one sitting in a waiting room all day stapling things.

Still- it was better than nothing. It wasn't like people were dying to hire a disgraced warlock.

Besides, Sol thought. There were upsides to doing something staggeringly dull for a living. The time it allowed him to devote to other pursuits, for instance.

He had been in the process of trawling through an auction portal for magical artifacts when the waterworks began. Mostly just art projects by clueless mundanes- the Arcane Artifacts division was quick to crack down on anything genuine that wormed its way into the system. But once and a while, something slipped through the cracks. And when they did, he was going to be there to catch it.

Today he had struck gold, or so it seemed. The staff looked genuine enough. Sol was in the process of checking the focus runes around the handle- or at least, he was trying to.

Sol didn't understand how anybody could let themselves turn into a mascara streaked mess like the one in front of him. Sol was a firm believer in the principles of good grooming. He made a point not to leave the house unless his shoes were shined and his socks matched his pocket square. He wore his hair in long, neat locs wound into an elegant knot at the back of his neck, and spent more on waistcoats than he did on rent- which, in New York, was quite a feat.