Chapter 1
“This is my nightmare,” Lienna gasped.
Swirls of orange light danced across her dilated pupils, her brown eyes wide and her glossy raven hair reflecting the flashing neon radiance coming from all directions. Her left hand closed convulsively around the strap of her satchel, knuckles white with tension.
I frowned. “It’s … a carnival.”
She flinched as a heavyset man bumped her on his way past, two squealing kindergarteners in tow. “It’s sticky and loud and it smells like—”
“Like deep-fried gym socks?”
Her throat bobbed as she swallowed her stomach down. “That’s putting it nicely.”
She wasn’t wrong. Even for a traveling carnival, the odor was unusually pungent. Some genius had decided to bring this corn dog festival to Vancouver in late January, the drizzliest season imaginable, so the whole thing—rides, games, cotton candy, and all—was housed inside an old warehouse in Burnaby. Hence the immersive “aroma.”
My partner’s eyes scanned the crowd. “At least there aren’t any”—a finger tapped her shoulder, and she turned with a squeaky gasp—“clowns.”
The finger belonged to a tall Pennywise lookalike, with thick white face paint and dead eyes. The clown loomed over her, his jaws opening inhumanly wide to reveal double rows of shark-like incisors. A wet gurgle bubbled out of his gaping throat.
I’d seen Agent Lienna Shen frightened before. We’d been through some dicey situations, from springing a deadly booby trap in my former boss’s secret lair, to fighting off demons and electrifying assassins, to surviving a sinking ship full of ultra-nasty baddies in open ocean.
But I’d never seen anything close to the unvarnished terror that splashed across her face when faced with Bozo the Belligerent, viscous saliva hanging from his teeth.
She reeled back and shoved her hand into her satchel for a weapon. Before she could ram a stun marble down the clown’s throat, he disintegrated into gray dust that blew away in a nonexistent breeze.
Lienna froze, then looked around wildly as though the clown might’ve teleported behind her.
“So, it’s true,” I mused.
Her gaze snapped to me. “What?”
“You’re afraid of clowns.”
“That was you?”
The fact that my involvement was only now occurring to her—and not, say, when the clown’s jaw had dislocated like the bug-spewing mummy from the classic Brendan Fraser adventure flick—was stronger confirmation.
“I’ve suspected it ever since I noticed you avoid the old Ronald statue outside the local McD’s,” I confessed. “Now I know for sure.”
Releasing her satchel with jerky movements, she shot me a fiery glare. “Remind me to strangle you as soon as we’re back at the precinct.”
She pushed into the bustling crowd, leaving me to rush after her.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “You can do better than that.”
“Do better than what?”
“Strangle me? That’s a boring, human-style threat.”
She spun to face me so suddenly that a harried mom with a toddler in one hand and an extra-large popcorn in the other had to do some nifty sashaying to avoid her. “How about I cut off your fingers, fashion them into an artifact to suppress your dumbass warps, and make you wear your own desiccated digits as a tiara?”
I grinned. “Much better! I was worried I’d rattled you with Chuckles.”
She resumed her trek toward the games area, where blaring whistles and shrieking bells added to the din. “I’m not rattled. Although your warps are getting better.”
Letting the compliment pass unacknowledged, I homed in on the more important issue at hand. “I assume there’s a traumatizing clown experience in your past. What was it? A birthday party gone wrong?”
“No.”
“Did somebody make you watch the original It miniseries as a child?”
“No.” Stopping, she nodded toward a booth squished between a closed pretzel stand and another throwing game. “There he is.”
The booth was narrow and deep, with a wall of multi-colored balloons at the far end. The man running it—a greaseball with mutton chops and an ill-fitting vest—handed three darts to his victim, a teenage boy trying to impress his date. Unsurprisingly, the boy failed in his trio of attempts at popping a balloon.
Yeah, Mutton Chops was the guy we were looking for.
Lienna nudged in close as passersby flowed around us. “Did you see how the darts moved?”
“I was too focused on those disgusting chops. He looks like Peter Stormare dressed up as Wolverine.”
She kept her focus on our target, skipping the eye roll she no doubt wanted to toss my way. “I don't think he has claws, but he is a telekinetic. The complaint claims he’s cheating his customers. No one ever wins at his booth.”
“In other words, he’s saving entire dollars on balloon costs.”
This time, she fired off that eye roll. “The problem is he might expose magic to the general public.”
I gazed around the noisy, odorous Festival of Fried Food. Maybe once I retired from the MPD, I could open up my own carnival booth. Psycho warping on the cheap. I’d be like a one-man holodeck from Star Trek, at least until I got busted for threatening the secrecy of magic, not unlike our dart-dealing target.
Lienna interrupted my daydream by tugging on my jacket sleeve. “We need to get closer to confirm he’s using magic.”
“And without him noticing us.” I surveyed the area again, then looped my arm around her waist and drew her against my side. “Ready?”
Her eyes widened. “Ready for what?”
“We can’t just stand there and stare at him, can we?” Grinning, I pulled her with me. “But we can stand there while I teach my beautiful girlfriend how to throw.”
“Girlfriend?”
I marched her toward the telekinetic’s neighboring game, that classic throwing challenge where you have to knock six stacked milk bottles off a table with a baseball. We got in line behind a couple a few years younger than us. The scrawny guy made a big show of winding up before throwing. The baseball soared right past the milk bottles without touching a single one.
“Kit,” Lienna growled under her breath, trying to surreptitiously tug my hand off her waist.
I leaned down, bringing my mouth to her ear. “Mr. Mutton Chops won’t look twice at a couple on a date. How else can we observe him at close range without tipping him off? Think of it as an undercover operation.”
She considered that, then one side of her mouth curled into a smile. “Fine. But I already know how to throw.”
“You think you do, but—”
“If you say I throw like a girl, I’ll start on that finger tiara right here and now.”
“I was going to say, even though you fire off those evil little marbles like a friggin’ howitzer, you’ve got the accuracy of a drunken mosquito in a hurricane.”
She scowled. “I am not that bad.”
I handed a couple of bills to the booth operator, a lady sporting a green pantsuit from the eighties and a perm from the seventies. She handed me three baseballs.
I tossed one to Lienna. “Prove it.”
Lips pressed thin, she took the ball and lined herself up in front of a stack of milk bottles. She took a deep breath, cocked her arm back, and launched the ball like a missile. It hooked left, clipped a milk bottle, and veered at the pantsuited carnie, who ducked to avoid a concussion.
“Watch it,” the woman squawked. “You don’t win anything by knocking me over!”
Lienna muttered an apology, then gave me a narrow-eyed glower like this was all my fault. “Let me try again.”
“Be my guest,” I replied, handing her another baseball.
She wound up once more and the projectile cut left a second time, missing the milk bottles by an inch and smacking harmlessly into the tarp behind them.
Glower deepening, she folded her arms. “You can do better?”
I stepped in beside her, positioned my feet, and hurled the ball. It crashed into the bottles, sending five of them off the table. One stubborn son-of-a-dairy-container remained standing.
“Since when do you have such a good arm?” Lienna asked grouchily.
“I did some sportsing as a kid. I even helped coach a church baseball camp for a couple summers as a teenager.”
A snort escaped her. “I’m sorry, what? They let you in a church?”
“It was Gillian’s idea.”
“Oh? Who is Gillian?”
“She was …” I trailed off, not wanting to delve into my bittersweet memories of Gillian at an overpriced carnival game in the middle of a warehouse that smelled like the inside of Ghost Rider’s unwashed jockstrap. “Just someone I knew back in the day.”
Lienna prodded my shoulder. “C’mon. I wanna hear about your ex-girlfriend.”
“She wasn’t a girlfriend.” I handed Captain Pantsuit another bill in exchange for three more baseballs. “Why don’t you tell me about your clownophobia? Did little Lienna stay up too late reading about John Wayne Gacy?”
“It’s called ‘coulrophobia’ and no.”
“I thought for sure that was it.” I tossed her a ball. “We need to fix your hips.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Excuse me?”
“When you throw, your body naturally rotates, so if you stand like this when you throw”—I faced the table of milk bottles square on, imitating Lienna’s stance—“you’ll hook it to the left.”
I placed my hands on her hips, slowly twisting them to the right until her body was perpendicular to her target. Then I moved my left hand down her lead leg. “Point your toe at your target.”
She didn’t move, her stare oddly vacant and her lips parted slightly.
“Lienna?”
“Hmm?” Her eyelids fluttered, focus returning to her gaze. A faint flush tinged her cheeks. “Huh?”
“Point your toe.”
“Right.” She pivoted her heel to point her foot at the milk bottles. “Now what?”
“Now throw.”
She reeled her arm back and let the ball fly. Her throw was more or less straight, hitting the bottom bottles and toppling half the stack.
“Hell yeah!” She tossed her arms in the air in celebration and spun around to face me—not realizing how close I was standing. We collided and I grabbed her upper arms before she could fall backward, pulling her into me.
Our eyes met, faces inches apart—then she hastily stepped back. I released her arms.
Clearing her throat, she faced the milk bottles again, made a show of lining up her foot the way I’d instructed, then flicked a pointed look at the balloon booth, which we’d so far been completely ignoring.
Right. Our job.
Our jobs were important. In fact, Lienna’s career was so important to her that she wouldn’t risk it on any “unprofessional” behavior, such as having a romantic fling with her partner.
It was her choice, and I wasn’t holding it against her. My crush was my own problem. All I could do was pretend real hard that I didn’t think about her naked more often than was strictly professional.
While Lienna practiced with her remaining baseballs, I struck up a casual conversation with the pantsuited carnie, my attention drifting toward the neighboring booth. Mutton Chops smiled greasily at a fresh trio of teenagers as they handed over their hard-earned part-timer pay for a handful of darts.
I watched as every throw veered into the balloon-less spots on the board, even when it involved physics-defying flight paths.
As I refocused on my “date,” Lienna hurled her final ball. It crashed through the bottom row of bottles, shattering the centermost one and sending the rest toppling. My eyebrows quirked. The only way that bottom bottle could have broken was if its base was glued to the table.
Lucky for Ms. Pantsuit-and-Perm, we only investigated mythic frauds.
“Congratulations,” the carnie said with a false smile. “Which prize would you like?”
She gestured at the stuffed animals hanging from the top of the stall. My hand jumped into the air, finger pointing at the only possible choice: a hot pink unicorn the size of a chubby corgi with squat little legs and a sparkly, rainbow-colored horn.
“No thanks,” Lienna said, pushing my arm down. “We can’t carry it.”
“You won so you get a prize.” The woman tugged the unicorn down and held it out insistently.
I scooped Sir Sparkles the Joy Bomb out of the woman’s hands and hugged him tightly to my chest. His beady eyes bulged and Lienna’s brown eyes rolled.
“We have a job to do, remember?” she muttered out of the corner of her mouth.
“And we can go ahead and do it now,” I replied with a chipper grin. “Mutton Chops manipulated every throw for his last three customers. He’s one hundred percent guilty.”
Nodding, she marched to the next booth, taking the place of the dejected teenagers who’d walked away empty-handed. The milk-bottle lady was busy sweeping up broken glass, and no other customers were within earshot of the balloon booth.
Mutton Chops opened his mouth to start his welcome spiel, then choked when my partner flashed her badge.
“Agent Shen,” she said. “This is my partner, Agent Morris.”
I sidled up beside her, still hugging my new best friend. “You can call me Kit.”
“Agent Morris and I received a tip that you’re using magic in front of humans. That’s a violation of—”
“I ain’t using magic,” Mutton Chops interrupted aggressively. “You can’t prove nothing.”
Ugh. Even his voice was greasy.
“We don’t need to prove anything,” I said, smoothing Sir Sparkles’s mohawk-like mane. “We witnessed it with our own two peepers, so we can testify against you. Great, huh?”
He smiled meanly, twirling a pair of darts in his hand.
“As I was saying,” Lienna said, reaching into her satchel, “you’re under arrest for violations of—”
Mutton Chops opened his hand, and the two darts launched at her as though fired from an invisible slingshot.
I swung Sir Sparkles into their path, and the darts sank harmlessly into his thick, huggable tummy.
The greasy telekinetic grabbed a fresh handful of darts and hurled them at us the old-fashioned way, while simultaneously diving toward the back of his booth. Sir Sparkles took another one for the team, then Lienna and I vaulted over the counter.
Our target had vanished behind the tarp that formed the booth’s rear wall, and we shoved through it to find him escaping down the narrow gap between booths in a weird sideways shuffle. His natural grease must’ve been helping him slip through.
We gave chase. At the end of the cramped corridor, he whirled around and flung a shiny dagger at us with the full force of his telekinesis.
Lienna and I dove for the floor. The dagger flew over our heads as I landed on Sir Sparkles.
What? Of course I hadn’t abandoned him.
We leaped up again, but Mutton Chops had already disappeared. Racing out of the corridor, we burst into the bustle of the carnival. Innocent entertainment-seekers swarmed in every direction, and I rose onto my tiptoes, trying to spot the armed and stabby psychic scam artist. I couldn’t see him, but he could only have gone left or right.
Lienna and I exchanged swift glances, then she sprinted right and I sprinted left.
My route carried me toward the warehouse entrance. If Mutton Chops was trying to make like Harrison Ford and play fugitive, the exit seemed like an obvious choice. I bobbed and weaved through the throng of exiting people, searching for a glimpse of Mutton Chops. There were many greasy heads for my eyeballs to sift through—but only one with those fugly face whiskers.
They were like an eyesore beacon, calling my gaze to them as he shoved past a young couple and charged outside.
I picked up speed, using Sir Sparkles to punch through the double doors and into the gloomy January weather. Rain had dampened everything outside, the wet haze shrouding the city.
Mutton Chops raced for the back of the parking lot, where a chain-link fence separated it from a railroad. The pavement was slick, but I managed to close the gap by the time he reached the fence.
“Hey, dickhead!” I called as I skidded around the bumper of a silver Prius and held the unicorn’s pincushioned belly aloft. “You left a few darts in my new friend, and I thought you might want them back.”
Mutton Chops turned around with a slimy sneer and retrieved another nasty-looking dagger from his vest. This scammy, side-burned slug bucket was going to try to stab me—or Sir Sparkles—again.
It was time to end this shit.
I focused on his puny brain and created my trusty Split-Kit warp, hot pink unicorn included. Real me slipped to the side, invisible to his mind, while the phony me stared the rogue runaway down.
Mutton Chops hurled the knife at my chest. The actual blade passed through thin air and punctured the Prius’s rear tire, but as far as the telekinetic was concerned, it had hit me square in the sternum.
Blood oozed down fake-Kit’s blue t-shirt. “Is that all you got? You think one little knife can stop me?”
Fake-Kit added extra grit to his stance by dropping a fake Sir Sparkles to the ground and stepping on his plushy head.
From his vest, a wide-eyed Mutton Chops grabbed a trio of darts and fired them off in unison at my warp. They hit their mark: one in my stomach, one in my left leg, and one in my cheek. The real darts landed—you guessed it—in the side paneling of that poor Prius.
Fake-Kit laughed darkly. “Bull’s-eye!”
“What the hell are you?” the scam artist gasped, rifling through the inner pockets of his vest for another weapon—but he was fresh out.
“I am he who can’t be killed,” my warped self crowed. It was a little dramatic, but, hey, I was having fun.
Although my fun was beginning to paint me into a corner. Fake-Kit’s Jason Voorhees impression had Mutton Chops pressing himself against the chain-link fence in pants-wetting fear, but the warp couldn’t do much else. Meanwhile, I was too busy maintaining the warp—which was extra complex with the flying knives I had to incorporate—and keeping an eye out for carnival goers to get close enough to take him down with my flesh-and-blood fists.
“Lie facedown on the pavement with your hands behind your back, you sniveling dung heap,” fake-Kit snarled.
Unfortunately, Mutton Chops was either too scared or not scared enough, because he whipped around and scrambled up the wet, slippery fence.
Keeping fake-Kit alive and well—with his sinister sneer fully intact—and my real self invisible, I dashed after the escaping telekinetic. He swung one leg awkwardly over the top of the fence.
And that’s when a small marble pinged off the post three inches to the left of Mutton Chops.
Ah, Agent Shen was here.
Behind me, she was simultaneously cursing her aim, pulling another stun marble from her satchel, and sprinting closer. As she wound up again, I ducked out of the way.
Her second throw caught him in the left shoulder. The greasy carnie seized up and keeled over, slamming heavily onto the pavement. I pounced on his prostrate body, rolled him onto his front, and pulled his arms behind his back. Not that he was offering any resistance, but better safe than sorry.
Lienna slowed to a stop, standing over us. She pointed at the dart-peppered unicorn plushie tucked under my arm. “Really, Kit? You should’ve left that thing behind.”
“And you should’ve pointed your toe.”
She rolled her eyes and passed me her handcuffs for Mutton Chops’s wrists. We made such a good team.
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