It’s easy to pick up magic items when you run a magic shop. I’ve been doing it for years and the size of my collection would surprise most mages . . . if I’d ever show it to them, which I wouldn’t. Although the safe room was dark, I could feel the dozens of overlapping auras from the items, holding steady in an uneasy equilibrium. The contents of the room would have looked bizarre to anyone able to see them. There was a sword hanging on the wall, oddly curved and with a hilt sculpted into the shape of a crocodile. A pale green egg rested on a shelf, point up in apparent defiance of gravity. Three darts were clamped tightly into a metal holder with a lock on it, and a white-and-blue tube of lacquered wood carved with flowers sat on its own in the middle of the table, far away from everything else. Odd items with odd purposes, most of them useless except for the person or situation for which they were designed. But just a few were very useful indeed, and my mist cloak was one of them.

My mist cloak is an imbued item and actually alive, though not in a way most people would understand. It’s weak by imbued-item standards, which makes it vastly more powerful than the one-shots I usually carry, and it does two things. The first is a type of adaptive camouflage, its colour changing to match its surroundings. It’s not invisibility—you can be seen if you move, and in broad daylight you just look very unfashionably dressed—but in cover or shadows, it makes you pretty hard to find.

The second ability is more specialised and from my point of view much more valuable. A mist cloak hides its wearer from magical senses, turning them into a kind of black hole against magical detection. Very few other mages know that I have access to that particular trick and I work hard to keep it that way—I’ve done a few things which the Council would have nailed me to the wall for if I hadn’t been wearing my mist cloak at the time. Now I was counting on it yet again.

Looking into the future, there was good news and bad news. The good news was that the mist cloak was definitely doing something—the lines of my futures and the Nightstalkers’ didn’t automatically converge into combat anymore. The bad news was that combat was still possible, it just wasn’t certain. I looked to see what would happen if I left the room and went back the way I came, and saw that the Nightstalkers were already here and heading in my direction. There were only three this time: Lee, Dhruv, and Captain America. I held my position and waited. After only a couple of minutes I heard footsteps through the wall, trying to be quiet.