Chapter 2

There's a Denzel Washington movie called Man on Fire.

I was that man—not because I was Dakota Fanning's hyperviolent bodyguard, but because I'd made the indefensibly idiotic decision to visit Florence, Arizona… in August. The thermometer currently read somewhere between "heart of an active volcano" and "the actual goddamn sun." It was so hot that my sweat evaporated the instant it left my pores.

Thankfully, I was hunkered down in the shade at a café, which meant the temperature was closer to "surface of a fired-up BBQ." I could handle that for now.

Sitting across from me at our small table was Miriam Baker, an affable woman in her sixties with sun-bleached hair and a perfect tan. These days, she worked part-time managing the mini-golf and arcade establishment adjoining the café, but before that, she'd been a middle school teacher.

And she was the reason I'd flown over a thousand miles to bake in the unrelenting desert heat.

"It's so strange to hear you call him that," she said with a shake of her head.

I shrugged. "It's his name."

"We always used to call him Benjamin. Or even Benny."

"Benny Kade." I snorted. "It makes him sound like a late-night talk show host from the seventies."

Miriam's amusement only lasted a second before her mouth flattened. "What kind of investigator are you, Mr. Morris? I don't understand why anyone would come all the way down here from Canada just to talk to me about a former student from thirty years ago."

On the surface, that was a perfectly reasonable question. She didn't know that her former student had grown up to be a terrifying, bloodthirsty assassin for a corrupt shadow organization with its influence running deep in the globe's secret magic community. And I wasn't going to fill her in on that little tidbit.

"I'm a private investigator," I fibbed.

She pursed her lips, unconvinced. "I tried looking you up online. I couldn't find anything."

"Emphasis on private."

"Benjamin is involved in your investigation?"

He was the investigation. After Kade had murdered S?ze and disappeared on a black helicopter, he'd become our precinct's enemy numero uno. Captain Blythe—once she'd recovered from his attempt on her life—had given me carte blanche to hunt the bastard down.

My investigation hadn't exactly been fruitful. MPD records on Kade were limited, and his personal history outside our agency was even harder to uncover. All I'd managed to discover was that he'd grown up in the Florence area and attended a mundane middle school called West Hills, where Miriam had worked.

"I can't divulge details, Ms. Baker." I tapped my pen lightly on the pad of paper in front of me. "But I would like to ask you a few questions about him."

Her eyes narrowed. "He did something, didn't he? Something bad."

"What makes you say that?"

She glanced over her shoulder, as though the coterie of white-haired snowbirds populating the café were all potential spies. To be fair, I shared her paranoia. To keep any eavesdropping geriatrics from sitting at the spot next to us, I'd given it a warped makeover: a smear of jelly donut innards across the table with a few additional droplets on one of the chairs.

It was a simple warp—one I would've taken for granted in my younger days. But ever since experiencing the magical vacuum in my mind after reality warping had zapped all my psychic powers, I was perpetually thankful for the magic I had.

"Are you recording this?" Miriam asked in a hushed tone.

I quirked an eyebrow. "Should I be?"

"I'd rather you didn't. In fact, I'd rather this be off the record altogether."

"That's fine." Leaning forward slightly, I lowered my voice. "You seem worried."

Tension suffused her shoulders. "Talking about him makes me… uncomfortable."

"Why's that?"

"Benjamin was always a troublemaker." She waved her hand as though swiping away her statement. "No, not a troublemaker. I've dealt with plenty of kids who made trouble—perpetually late, disruptive, didn't do their homework—but Benjamin… he was different."

I waited as she searched for the right words, using the quiet moment to jot a few notes on my pad.

"He was cruel," she finally said. "Kids can be meanspirited. Every teacher knows a bully when they see one, but a bully's behavior is easy to understand once you boil it down. They take the pain they feel and use it as a weapon against others."

She paused as a server showed up with a coffee for each of us. My guess was that the staff poured it cold and let it boil in the sun as they walked it over to our table. Why had I ordered a hot drink on a day scalding enough to cook prime rib to medium-well on the sidewalk? A cup of liquid nitrogen would've been a better choice.

I thanked the server before turning back to Miriam. "So, would you call Kade a bully?"

"No." She poured cream into her coffee. "He didn't torture other kids to deal with his pain. He did it because he reveled in it."

"‘Torture' is a strong word," I observed.

She met my eyes over the rim of her coffee mug. "It's an accurate word for Benjamin."

I thought back to the sickening glee on Kade's face as he'd explained to Lienna and me all the ways in which he would slowly, painfully kill us. It seemed that wasn't a trait he'd developed as an adult.

"Can you give me an example of him torturing other students?" I asked.

She huffed a sigh. "That's the problem. I never caught him in the act. He was slippery."

"Slippery?" I echoed. "How so?"

"When he was in seventh grade, our class had a pet turtle named Donatello."

I couldn't help but smirk. "Classic."

"The kids really loved him. They all took turns feeding him, cleaning the aquarium, that sort of thing. One day after lunch, one of the students went to check on Donatello."

I grimaced, already having a pretty good idea where this anecdote was headed.

"The poor kid—he screamed and screamed," she continued. "It took me a minute to calm him down, and by that time, a bunch of students had gathered around the aquarium. Let's just say, Donatello did not go out pleasantly. It was gruesome. The kids were absolutely distraught."

"What about Kade?"

"I remember his face." She let out a slow breath. "He wasn't looking at the turtle's remains. He was watching the other kids… enjoying their reactions."

She paused to gather herself. "I pulled Benjamin aside and asked him why he'd hurt Donatello. He looked me straight in the eyes and told me no one saw what happened. Anyone could have killed the turtle."

"Could it have been someone else?" I asked. "Another student? Or a staff member?"

"Not a chance," she answered quickly. "I know it was him. I tried getting the principal involved, but he said there was no proof."

Had the principal been protecting murderous little Benny or just super committed to upholding due process in his elementary school?

"I could tell you a dozen more stories about Benjamin," Miriam said. "He was the most frightening student I have ever taught. Manipulative, arrogant, remorseless, aggressive. He was a compulsive liar. A few of the boys in the class looked up to him, but most students were terrified of him."

A manipulative, arrogant, violent liar who lacked empathy and delighted in murdering small animals? According to my armchair psychological assessment, that ticked off all the boxes on the psychopath checklist. It was chilling to realize Kade had always been this way. Evil was in his DNA.

"Was he ever punished?" I asked. "Any suspensions or anything like that? I know he transferred out of your school during seventh grade. Was he expelled?"

"Not that I know of. He had his fair share of detentions, but like I said, he was slippery." She leaned back in her chair and sipped her coffee. "In the middle of the second semester, I was doing parent-teacher interviews, and for the first time, Benjamin's father attended."

I perked up. Nowhere in all my searching had I found a single reference to Kade's parents. As far as MPD records were concerned, the bald-headed shitstain was decanted from a cosmic vessel of unfiltered malevolence.

"What happened?" I asked, somewhat too eagerly.

"I'd met his mother before." She tapped her fingers against her mug. "I can't remember her name now. She was a timid woman. Whenever I'd bring up Benjamin's behavioral problems, she'd promise to talk to him, but nothing ever changed. His father, on the other hand…"

"Do you remember his name?"

"Peter," Miriam answered. "I don't think they were married. Or, if they were, he wasn't around very much. He was a severe man. The kind of person I always imagined—always worried—Benjamin would grow up to be."

I jotted the name down on my pad of paper. I would most definitely be doing a deep dive on "Peter Kade" as soon as I got back to Vancouver.

"I told him about Benjamin's issues, even what happened to Donatello, but he was very dismissive. He had a ‘boys will be boys' attitude about the whole thing."

I scrunched up my nose. Gross.

"But his demeanor completely changed when I brought up Benjamin's slipperiness."

"Changed how?" I asked, drawing a circle around the word "slippery," which I'd written on my pad the first time she'd used it.

"He got very serious," Miriam said. "I told him that his son had a sixth sense that helped him get away with all sorts of bad behavior. He seemed to always know when other people were around or not. It was unsettling, to be frank."

That lined up with my experience battling Kade. Even when I was invisi-warping or Darius was hiding himself with his lumina magic, Kade had known where we were. It hinted at a psychic ability, but according to all the official MPD files, Kade was a standard sorcerer and nothing more.

I tapped my pen against my notepad. "Is there anything else you remember? Another example of his slipperiness?"

She squinted in thought, then nodded slowly. "During the lunch break one afternoon, I was tidying my classroom on the second floor, and I happened to glance out the window. I saw Benjamin near the bike racks. He was crouching beside a pink bicycle. It wasn't his. He took the bus to school.

"All of a sudden, he straightened and walked away. It was very abrupt, the way he jumped up. A few seconds later, a teacher rounded the corner. Nothing came of it that day, but the day after, someone punctured all the bikes' tires. No one saw who did it."

"A real mystery," I remarked dryly.

"I had no doubt it was Benjamin's work. What stood out to me was the way Benjamin abandoned his first attempt. He couldn't have seen that teacher coming, and she was far enough away that I don't think he could have heard her either. But he still seemed to know she was about to come around the corner."

"Weird," I mumbled. "When you were talking to Kade's father, what did he say after you mentioned Kade's sixth sense?"

"He told me he could tell I was scared, but that I didn't have to worry. Benjamin would no longer be attending our school." She paused, frowning at her half-empty coffee mug. "I think he meant to sound reassuring, but it came across more like a threat."

I arched an eyebrow. Assuming the apple didn't fall far from the tree, I suspected Peter Kade had indeed been making a threat. "Did you ever see Kade again after that?"

"No." Miriam looked up, unease deepening the wrinkles around her eyes. "And to be honest with you, Mr. Morris, I hope I never do."

Less than an hour later, I stepped into the deliciously cool atmosphere of my hotel's air-conditioned lobby. It was like receiving a long-awaited hug from a benevolent frost giant. Bad for the environment, good for the Canadian boy who'd lost a significant fraction of his body weight to sweat on the walk back from the café.

I had my head down, eyes on my phone, swiping back and forth between my contact list and a page showing flights to LA from Phoenix, which had the nearest airport to Florence.

It'd been five months since Lienna had flown home to help her family while her dad underwent cancer treatments. Since I was already this far south and I'd accrued a hefty number of vacation days, maybe I could extend my American work-cation and pay her a visit.

My finger hovered over her name. One little tap and I could call her, propose my travel plans, and book a flight.

But …

I groaned internally. I wanted to call her. I just didn't know if she wanted me to call her.

Before leaving, Lienna had asked me about Gillian, promised to tell me about her own childhood, fallen asleep cuddling with me on the sofa… then taken off to the airport without saying goodbye. Since then, our communication had been normal but kind of distant.

Undoubtedly, some of that distance was due to Lienna's stress levels while living at home with her family, dealing with Papa Shen's illness, and trying not to ask questions about my investigations that I couldn't answer via phone call or text message. But I also wondered how much of the distance was because of the awkwardly unacknowledged cuddle session followed by her painfully abrupt departure.

But that's all it was, right? Once the miles between us were reduced to zero and I was face to face with her again, things would go back to normal—or some semblance of it, at least.

I stared down at my phone, practically tearing myself in half with indecision, then glanced up to make sure my weird, hesitant hovering wasn't inconveniencing any hotel-goers sharing the lobby with me. And that's when I saw a well-dressed man with salt-and-pepper hair reading a newspaper in one of the cushy chairs across from the welcome desk.

My reunion with Lienna would have to wait.

Pocketing my phone, I crossed the lobby and dropped into the chair opposite him. "Fancy seeing you here, Darius."

His gray eyes analyzed me from over the top of the newspaper. "How was your interview?"

"Interesting. How long have you been in Florence?"

"I landed in Phoenix this morning and came straight here."

"What brings you to the land of sand and cacti?" As I asked the question, I took in his standard vest-and-dress-shirt getup. "And why in the name of Seth are you wearing long sleeves in the desert? It's, like, a bazillion degrees out."

"Linen is a very breathable fabric," he informed me with a hint of amusement. Folding up the newspaper, he set it on the glossy end table. "We have a meeting."

Of course we did. There was less than a zero percent chance that Darius had flown all the way to Phoenix and then driven to Florence for an impromptu social call.

"Which of your old friends is it this time?" I asked.

"Tino. He's the last one."

Over the past five months, Darius and I had met up with—or in some cases, unexpectedly dropped in on—four of his former acquaintances and allies from Ye Olden Times, AKA when I was still in diapers. Or, more relevantly, when Darius had been an MPD-contracted assassin undertaking assignments that were not only above my pay grade but above Blythe's too. Or, in straightforward numbers, about twenty years ago.

Each of these former accomplices held a piece of the very dangerous puzzle we needed to complete. It was like one of those video games where, in order to acquire an enchanted sword, you needed to beat a handful of minibosses. Except instead of battling three-headed dragons and undead goblins, we were tracking down mythics who didn't want to be tracked down and asking them to hand over valuable—and potentially deadly—information.

"Tino is an archivist from El Paso," Darius continued. "He's rather skittish, so we'll need to keep things light and easy. Deception, surprises, or power plays will send him running."

"We're going to Texas?" I asked with a frown, already sorting through possible excuses to give my captain for yet another impromptu change in my travel plans and wondering if we could hit up a brisket joint along the way.

"He's coming to us," Darius clarified. "A direct train from El Paso to Maricopa. He'll be arriving in"—he glanced at his watch—"just over an hour."

So, ixnay on the isket-bray.

"A train?"

"Indeed." Dry amusement touched Darius's expression. "Tino doesn't trust air travel. But he's bringing what we need, and that's all that matters. Assuming he shows up," he added as an afterthought, as though it would only be mildly inconvenient if a skittish archivist carrying the ultrasecret documents we needed disappeared somewhere in the desert.

I took another look at Darius's attire, then glanced down at my own ensemble of board shorts, a plain white t-shirt, and flip-flops. "Where are we meeting this guy? Because if it's another one of those members-only cigar joints, I didn't pack my formal wear."

"There will be no cigars to tempt you this time," Darius said, rising to his feet. "We're meeting Tino at the train station for a quick handoff. It should be very straightforward. Tino won't want to linger."

Sounded like a charming guy, this Tino.

As we headed toward the elevator so I could collect my belongings from my room and check out, I wondered if it would indeed be the quick handoff Darius had promised. This wouldn't be the first time the ex-assassin had—perhaps unintentionally—glossed over the potential for hair-raising complications.

Like the cigar incident.

Our previous meet-up had been with a Croatian ex-pat named Josip, who ran a string of elitist clubs in Quebec City. Darius had been light on details, but from what I'd gathered, twenty years ago, Josip had been a master networker of sorts. You know in spy movies when someone says, "I know a guy who knows a guy"?

Well, my understanding was that the Croatian was the guy who knew the other guy.

I'd already been in Montreal on a fruitless hunt for one of Kade's former work comrades, putting my high school French to work, which, not to put too fine a point on it, was très mal. Darius co-opted my Blythe-sanctioned work trip so we could drop in on Josip, who was "a difficult man to contact," according to Darius. Or, as I'd come to realize, he was a man who might immediately make himself unavailable if he knew we were coming. While we could have utilized our respective invisibility skills to sneak inside the Croatian's smoky establishment, we needed to blend in once we were past security. So, under Darius's guidance, I dropped an appalling percentage of my monthly salary on a tailored suit in downtown Montreal before we drove east to Quebec City.

Yes, I could have technically warped a suit for myself, but maintaining a halluci-bomb with all the details of a fine, hand-tailored masterpiece would have been too taxing—and I didn't know the difference between a shawl lapel and a welted pocket. So, I opted to pay the price in dollars instead of brain cells.

Our plan was going swimmingly right up until, in an ill-advised attempt to look like I belonged among the club's seven-figure patrons, I lit up a Cuban cigar and promptly hacked my lungs out like an aging coal miner in the middle of a toxic tire fire.

Luckily, Josip escorted us into his office before his clientele could get too curious about the wheezing, college-aged guy in their midst. He was apparently only mildly miffed at our unannounced arrival, because he offered us each a glass of whiskey old enough to call Darius "kiddo," handed over his share of the documents, and wished us good luck.

I came away from that little adventure with another piece of the puzzle we were assembling, a new Italian suit, and a stinging distaste for tobacco.

"I'm not expecting any problems this time," Darius told me, interrupting my unpleasant reminiscing.

I shot him a startled look.

He didn't quite smirk. "Your expression was remarkably similar to the one you made when you took that first lungful of cigar smoke."

Ugh.

"But we should be prepared regardless," he continued. "I have a map of the train station you can review on the drive."

"Is there time for me to get a drink from the poolside bar before we take off to Maricopa?" I asked as I unlocked my door.

"Probably."

I started to grin.

"But I don't want to chance it," he finished implacably. "Tino won't wait around if we're late."

Sighing, I strode over to my backpack and started shoving my belongings into it.

Just as I was unplugging my laptop cord to stow it away, Darius's phone rang. He slid the device from his pocket and glanced at it.

"It's Tino." He tapped the screen. "This is Darius."

"Darry, where are you?" the voice on the other end asked, the phone speaker amplifying his frantic whisper.

I raised an eyebrow. Darry?

"Florence," Darius answered, ignoring my look. "I'm about to head to Maricopa. Is everything okay?"

"It was—I mean, so far. Maybe." Chaotic rustling cut through the end of his disjointed reply. "But I think… shit."

"What's going on, Tino?"

"I don't—damn it! I think someone's following me!"

Darius's eyes narrowed. "How certain are you?"

"Eighty-five percent—no, ninety percent. There are two men and… and a woman. Scary types." Tino's hushed tone was pitching up toward full-blown panic. "What should I do?"

"Consilium?" I mouthed soundlessly. We couldn't be sure, but considering that those assholes had murdered Georgia Johannsen and Anson Goodman—two of Darius's other old-school allies—it was the logical assumption.

Darius nodded. "Where are you right now?"

"We just left Tucson. I was in the dining car when they boarded. I noticed them staring at me, so I went back to my cabin. They followed me, and now they're waiting in the corridor."

"Lock the door," Darius instructed him. "Do you have the package with you?"

"Yes, yes. In my hands."

"Are either of the men bald?" I chimed in. "Big shoulders? Evil glare?"

"Who the hell is that?" Tino squawked.

"An ally," Darius assured him. "Is there a bald man?"

"Uh, let me check." There was a short pause before the archivist said, "No, they both have hair. One blond, one brown."

Whoever this trio of Consilium goons was, Kade wasn't among them. That was a small relief.

"Are you armed?" Darius asked.

"Come on, Darry, you know I never leave home without my pistol. But I don't know how much good it'll do me. They're camped outside my door. I doubt they'll just let me walk off the train in an hour."

That'd be generous; they probably wouldn't wait for the train to stop. Tino's time was ticking.

"Stay in your compartment, Tino," Darius said calmly. "We'll intercept them before they make a move."

We would? Unless I'd fundamentally misunderstood some pretty basic concepts like "on a moving train" and "speeding across the desert like a jet-powered cartoon roadrunner with the added inertia of a few thousand tons," I wasn't grasping how we would intercept anything.

Pondering this conundrum, I missed the last of Darius's assurances for Tino and only tuned back in when the GM pocketed his phone.

"Uh, so…" I squinted at him. "You have a plan, right?"

"I do."

"And it doesn't involve boarding a moving train, does it?"

Darius arched an eyebrow. "First time, Agent Morris?"

I swore under my breath. I would never believe another "it should be very straightforward" statement from this man. Ex-assassins really sucked at risk assessment.