Most truth spells are more like polygraphs than actual compulsions to tell the truth. Those exist, but they’re less like unlocking a door than they are taking the door down with a ten-pound sledge. The after-effects aren’t pretty.

What truth spells do really well is tell if someone believes they’re telling the truth. And right now, I need to believe like a Pentecostal snake-handler in a pit full of rattlesnakes with his dick hanging out his pants.

The trick is to get just high enough that it can fuck with the magic without taking you so over the top that nobody needs magic to tell you’re bullshitting them in the first place.

It’s like any drug that way. Get just enough of a buzz and you’re golden. Go too far, and you’re sitting naked on your ex-girlfriend’s lawn crying and screaming at her to take you back until the police come to tase you.

I drive up to the mansion’s gate, roll down the window, and stick my head out until I’m sure the camera on the post has a nice, clear view.

“Hi. I’m the guy whose head you want to cut off and stuff into a bowling bag,” I say. “I was thinking maybe we should talk.”

Chapter 28

Nothing happens for a good thirty seconds, and I’m starting to think that the offer of talking is not being received well, and men with guns and dangerous spells will be appearing from the bushes to kill me. But then the gates open up and I drive on into the compound.

Mansions in Beverly Hills never show any imagination. Oh, the people who live there might think they have imagination, that they’re decorating geniuses. The houses might look a little different, but it’s all the same standard bullshit. There’s a pool, indoor hot tub, tennis court, movie theater, the usual. It’s all the same posh shit everybody else on the block owns.

Mage houses, on the other hand, when they give no fucks about hiding who they are from other mages, really give no fucks. As soon as I’m across the threshold of the gate and around a bend of the private road leading to the house, everything changes. The sky goes from day to night and is ringed by a brilliant display that would put the northern lights to shame.

If I hadn’t just walked through the inside of a hotel’s ghost to get to a room on another planet filled with things that would make Cronenberg shit himself, I’d probably be impressed.