Free Fiction River: Hex in the City by Fiction River

plaid lumberjack coat off a hook on the wall as he went.
    She tucked Ruby into her sweatshirt pocket and swallowed any argument. It didn’t matter what he thought she knew or didn’t know about magic. He was willing to help her save a little boy and maybe kick the shit out of the bastard who had hurt Ruby and taken her down.
    “Fine,” she said. “Do you own any guns?”
    Cord’s cedar-scented spell, which he’d bound to a small shard of smoky quartz wrapped in a chunk of her bloody sweatshirt, took them out of Detroit proper and out toward Romulus and the Metropolitan Airport. Warehouses lurked behind the pools of streetlights, each one an indistinct shape in the night, hiding secrets.
    “Here.” Cord turned his Chevy in and stopped beside a two-story metal building, whispering even though in the temporary solitude of the car, no one could have heard them. “We’ll have to rely on the rat from here. You ready?”
    The light from the dash glowed blue, making her feel like she were drowning and reinforcing the unreality of the situation. Ruby, sensing her distress, squeaked and burrowed against her stomach.
    “Why are you doing this?” she asked.
    “Having second thoughts? Guess you could call your buddies. Though you’d lose your job, we’d both go to prison, and they’d probably throw the kid into some government program that isn’t supposed to exist.”
    “I left my phone at home.”
    Cord shut off the engine. “Why are you doing this?”
    “I need to do something,” she said softly, “Day in, day out. I just watch and point. Everyone else deals with the messes. If it weren’t for Ruby…” she trailed off, staring down at the bulge in her sweatshirt, heat rising in her face.
    “All right, Detective. Detect.” Cord’s smile was in his voice and it barely sounded forced.
    There were no cars parked around this warehouse and no marks on the outside to tell them anything about what was inside. Cord ghosted alongside Verity, a shotgun held lightly in his big hands, as they followed Ruby’s white shape down the pocked asphalt along the edge of the building. Verity hadn’t bothered with a leash. Ruby wouldn’t run away anymore than Verity would willingly slice off her own hand.
    There was black magic slime all over this place, making it difficult to track the salt and sweet scent of the boy’s power through the miasma of rot. The trail led them around the side and to a closed roll-up door. Parked up against the building was a new model Toyota. Verity and Cord shared a look. Probably weren’t natives, driving a Japanese car like that in Motor City.
    Ruby paused by the roll-up door and tossed her head in the air, whiskers twitching as she indicated this was the place. Verity pressed herself to the side of the building and crouched down, holding out a pellet, which her rat came to get, taking it with her delicate pink paws before scarfing it down.
    She listened for a long moment, hearing only the occasional rush of traffic on the road behind them and a plane taking off from the airport somewhere in the distance beyond the rows of metal and cement. Then, muffled voices, coming from inside, and a light came on beyond the truck, shining through a window that had previously been hidden in the dark, blending into the wall. It illuminated a small gap beneath the roll-up door.
    “Think there’s a button inside to raise that?” Verity whispered.
    “Maybe, but what good does that do us?”
    “Rats are better than cats at getting into tight spaces.”
    She pushed the link between them as open as she could get it, going deeper into Ruby’s mind than she usually did. Verity’s head hurt and the white rat rubbed at her whiskers and ears. Focus. She took a deep breath and pictured the memory game, sending Ruby the images of what she guessed the button for the door would look like.
    Ruby seemed to understand. She scurried along the door and crammed herself in where the uneven cement and the bottom of the door