“Dan’s a real winner,” Vivian says. “I’d heard Kate had died in the fire, but I thought—hell, I’d hoped—Dan had gone up with her. If for no other reason than to get a menace off the street. I didn’t hear anything about him so I figured he was either dead or bailed. When I got here Gabriela told me where you’d been and what was happening. I assumed you had a run-in with Dan.”

“Let me guess,” I say. “His knack is poisons?”

“Poisons, drugs, whatever. Let’s call it creative chemistry,” Gabriela says.

Every mage has one particular area that they’re stupidly good at. Divination, protection wards, predicting the weather, whatever. I got dead things. Dan, apparently, can give Pablo Escobar a run for his money.

“A guy who can make his own ecstasy must get invited to a lot of parties.”

“Not anymore,” Vivian says, anger bleeding through her professionalism. “He’s a serial killer. He’s murdered at least thirty people, that I know of.”

“Normals?” I say.

“Of course,” Vivian says. “So of course nobody cared.” Nobody important, at least. That’s the thing with mages; we don’t have any laws per se. And let’s face it, when you can bend reality around your pinky, some of us don’t see normals as real people. You have to draw too much attention, piss off enough of the wrong people, whatever, before someone decides you need to get stomped on for messing with normals.

“Then he killed a mage last year,” Gabriela says.

“And then people cared? We kill each other all the time.”

“Yes, but we usually have a reason for it,” Gabriela says. “Even if it’s just ‘Hey, I want your stuff.’ He said he wanted to see what it would be like.”

“They blackballed him,” Vivian says. “That’s all. He’s murdered more than thirty people and people just kind of shrugged their shoulders.”

“‘Excitable boy, they all said,’” Gabriela says.

“Hang on. He’s what, nineteen now? Twenty? How long had this been going on?”

“I think since he was, what, twelve? Thirteen?” Vivian says. “Apparently it was an open secret among the sorts of people we don’t hang out with.”

She’s pissed off about it, and doesn’t like it any more than I do. Normal, mage, inhuman, people are people. A lot of us can’t see that. I’ve never been in the loop much, mostly because I hate people, other mages in particular. But this seems like something I’d have heard about.

“Don’t look at me,” Gabriela says. “I can’t kill every motherfucker in this town. I got shit to do.”

So do I, but if he comes for me again I will kill him. I’m really regretting not letting him die on the street back there.