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glared at him.
    He watched the elevator buttons and sighed. “Aye, lass. It is complicated.”
    The elevator doors dinged open and he led me to his car, a dusty, black Impala with a spotless leather interior.
    I barely had time to buckle my seatbelt before we peeled out of the parking lot. I prayed to any wayward goddess that would listen as he barreled through red lights and sped around blind corners. We arrived, at a screeching halt, on the upper level of Pike Place Market.
    Stall-keepers were closing up shop in the early evening gloom. Hmong farmers carried bushels of wilted flowers and threw them in the dumpster alongside fish-heads and squid-guts. I walked with long strides past them, half-running, as they called out hellos to me.
    When I unlocked the door to Morgan’s Ephemera and turned on the lights, I thought I’d been robbed. Then I remembered it was still a mess from the trolls. Never mind. Everything I needed, anything of true value, lay in the back room.
    I walked across the room and stood before the shabby door tucked into the back corner of my shop. I uttered the words that would open the three spells that guarded the door as I touched certain spots on the door’s handle. It creaked open, and I entered the small, tidy white room.
    Each wall lay covered in shelves crammed with spells from floor to ceiling. Some spells were housed in priceless emeralds and rubies, others were housed in a dented cup or a branch of salted drift wood. How many months and years of my life had I spent making these spells as I guarded myself against whatever vagaries the future might bring? I hadn’t used any of them in over fifty years, yet still I knew the precise spell that lay in each of them. I grabbed an oversized black purse that sat in one corner of the room, and threw in a rose-quartz orb bristling with lightning. I added a silence-spelled amethyst, a heavy oak branch for protection, three crippling marbles, and a red cloche hat that would reveal all magic to me when I wore it. Last, I pulled on my blackest gloves, with a different dark spell woven into each finger and thumb. As I left the room, I noticed there was a puddle of water on the ground. There must be some kind of leak in the ceiling.
    I ran out of my store, barely stopping to close and lock the doors. I wanted to be at the Seattle Center already, finding and freeing Lila. My Lila. When I took her on at the store, I had only meant to help her. The echoes of too many people I had loved, long-gone and dead, moved through me. So many of them had been killed for their association with me. But not tonight. Not Lila, I vowed.
    I raced up the concrete stairs of the market and rushed back to the cobble-stoned street where Kestrel’s car sat idling in the middle of the road. He sat there ignoring the long line of cars honking behind him. I jumped in. He drove like all the hounds of Hell were chasing us.

 
     
     
     
     
    9
    The Crossroads
    Kestrel parked near the Opera House in a tow-away zone. He threw a small confusion spell over his Impala as we got out. “Where is this ritual taking place?” he asked.
    “The opera house? Or the theater?” I guessed.
    We walked side by side, matching our long, fast strides with each other’s. I put on my cloche hat and whispered “oleuo” so that any magic around us would be revealed.
    It was dark and damp out, and no magic shone brightly. A poor soul here and there lay out on park benches or under eaves, wrapped up in blankets. They looked like glowing embers with their intrinsic life-magic shining through their torsos. A couple of old oak trees lay full of crows, shining like small Christmas lights. Crows had a way of gathering around trouble.
    Then I spotted, past the fountain and the great green field, people moving in small groups, all in the same direction. They would have been invisible in the night’s gloom, but I could just make out their faint glow.
    “There,” I pointed.
    Kestrel squinted. “Mages?”
    I shook