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for ze demon?” she asked, giving Jim a bland look.
    Jim drooled on her foot.
    “It will have a club soda in a bowl and a hamburger with all the trimmings.”
    “No onions. I have Cecile to think of,” Jim corrected me.
    “So? How does it feel to be back?” Amelie asked once the waitress left, tipping her head to the side as she looked at me.
    I looked around again. Although the music pulsed, conversation ebbed and flowed around us, and people generally went about their evenings, I had a feeling that everyone in the room knew exactly where I was sitting. It was an uncanny, unnerving feeling, and it made me ex tremely uncomfortable. “It feels . .. kind of odd. The first time I stepped foot in here, I had no idea of what this world was made of. I guess what’s bothering me most is that the club hasn’t changed—I have.”
    “But changed for the better, no? Now you see all the possibilities.”
    I smiled. Amelie was the first one who’d told me to look beyond the obvious into something she called the “possibilities”—which I’d gathered meant that anything that could be, might be. It was all very quantum physics, and I did my best to try not to think too hard about it, just accept that there were things existing that I had never thought possible.
    “Oh, look. There, do you see? The man at the end of the bar, next to the troll.”
    I squinted through the smoke and tried to pinpoint the figures Amelie was indicating. “There’s a troll here? The kind with green hair and stumpy legs and a big pot belly?”
    She gave me a look like I had suddenly sprouted antlers. “What are you speaking? No, of course a troll does not have green hair and a pot belly. The woman in the Birkenstocks and patterned capri pants. That is the troll—her name is Trade. She comes from Bavaria. But that is not who I want you to see—it is the man next to her. That is Peter Burke.”
    “And Peter Burke is . . . ?”
    “He is said to be a most powerful mage. And one of the ... what is the word? Contenders? For the position of Venediger, hein?
    “Ah.” I looked at the man she indicated. He turned at that moment and looked directly at me. I smiled. He frowned and looked away again. “He doesn’t look like a powerful mage. He looks like ... well, kind of Alan Alda- ish. Placid, almost.”
    “You are not seeing the possibilities within him,” Amelie said dryly.
    I admitted that was so and, clearing my mind, swung open the door to my powers and released them in order to really look at the mage.
    As it always did, everything seen through my super- Guardian vision looked so much brighter, so much sharper, as if the everyday world was slightly grayed out and blurred. I moved my eyes along the people in G&T, noting that a woman who sat apparently alone with two men actually had a spirit shape hovering protectively behind her. The woman Amelie named as the troll had a faint sparkle of something all over her skin—it reminded me of mushroom spores. My gaze shifted to the man next to her, and I jerked as his head turned once again to me. For the space between seconds a black tendril of power seemed to snake off him, but it was gone so quickly that I wondered if I had imagined it.
    “Huh. Interesting. I’ve never seen that before, but I don’t see anything that screams mage. Then again, I’ve never met one. Maybe there’s something about them I don’t know to look for.”
    “He is not a popular man,” she said quietly.
    “Really? If there’s such a powerful mage all ready to step into the Venediger’s shoes, why on earth would any one want me to fight for the job?”
    “We do not know who he is. No one knows for certain.” Amelie leaned close so I could hear. “But it is rumored his power comes from a dark source.”
    Something bothered me about Peter Burke, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. Perhaps Amelie’s forebodings were getting to me. “Hmm. I can see why people wouldn’t want someone with one foot in