The door I’d listened through was standing open; so was the door inside that, that connected the front reception room to the beautiful dark-panelled office beyond it. An elf in a pink silk suit, her fine straight white hair cut to sweep her shoulders, stood in front of the rosewood desk. Her eyes were beautiful, and round with horror. She had a silver letter opener in her hand. Hawthorn lay on the rug at her feet with his throat cut, and a little above the hem of the pink skirt there was a thin arc of dark red.

The elf looked up as we came in, her face full of terrified appeal. “He—he tried to—I had to defend myself.”

I don’t think we stood frozen for more than a second. It seemed longer because I was busy. He couldn’t be dead, not so quick as that. It must be another illusion. But no, Hawthorn was Thataway, on the floor, which meant this was real, didn’t it? Could an illusion trick that sense, too? The elf’s voice was the one I’d listened to through the door, talking to Hawthorn, the one who had agreed, in that cold, steady way, that she wouldn’t want him to testify.

“The hell you did,” I heard myself saying, and I walked forward.

I thought, as I did, about the way any trick seems to work once in the Borderlands, and how so few of them work twice. But I closed my hand over Hawthorn’s still-warm, wrist, and had just enough time to realize that this was one of the second kind, before I went down into the dark under a large dose of his life and death.

I came to with my face in the carpet, and there was a bit of time when I couldn’t remember why. Then I groaned and rolled over, and interrupted, I’m told, a speech in which the elf assured Sunny that the trauma had probably killed me.

I suppose, if I’d taken the time to think about it, that I had trusted Sunny to know what I was doing, and to make it work. I hadn’t been wrong. By the time I was conscious and noticing my surroundings again. Sunny had explained to the elf how well my adventure with Bonnie Prince Charlie’s corpse turned out, and did she prefer to wait until tomorrow morning, or would she like to just confess now and save everyone a lot of trouble? All that at gunpoint, of course.

“This is nonsense,” said the elf woman. “Think what you’re doing, my dear. The word of one rather scruffy young human person against mine, and the influence of my house? Blessed Isle, everyone knows that kind of magic never lights on humans.”

“Well, it’s lit once before. Secretary, and in front of witnesses. Cut your losses, and maybe the judges will be nice to you.”