“So, what do I do with you?” I say. “I’d normally stick you in my trunk and drop you off at a phone booth in the desert, but seeing as I don’t have a trunk anymore, that’s not much of an option.”

I look back at the wreckage of the Cadillac. Okay, the front half of the Cadillac. The other half is littering the street in a block-long trail behind it. Dammit. I liked that car.

“You kill me and you’re going to have so much shit rain down on you,” she says.

Right. Like it’s going to get worse than all the mages of Los Angeles hunting me down now. “Lady, I’m not gonna ki—”

Her head explodes.

It takes a second for me to realize what’s just happened. Somebody’s shot her. Either they were going for her—which bravo, nice shot—or they’ve got really shitty aim.

Her buddy next to her screams through his sealed lips and tries to crawl away. He doesn’t get very far before the shooter pops his noggin like a ripe melon at a Gallagher show.

I finally pull my head out of my ass and duck, scanning the area for the shooter. I see a shadow duck behind cars across the street, the shape of a rifle in their hand. I start to follow, but don’t get very far, because that’s when the reinforcements arrive.

Three cars pull up, one of them driving over the chain-link onto the blacktop. Fuck me. I run for the Cadillac—I’ll drink a toast to you later, buddy—and take some half-assed cover behind its smoking ruin.

This time I do pull in power from the pool. So do the people in the cars. I feel eight, no, nine, all drawing a lot of power, fast. Something tells me they’re not the newbies I just ran into. Wonderful.

I hear car doors open, people step out. There’s no gunfire or spellwork, yet. I’m not sure why and I expect I probably won’t like it when I find out.

“Mister Carter,” yells a voice. Older, educated. “My name is Attila Werther. I don’t know if you know who I am, but I knew your parents. I was very sad to hear what happened to them.” Werther, Werther, who the hell is— Oh. Werther. Yeah, I remember him. He’s one of those mages.

As a general rule, we don’t organize well. Get half a dozen equally powerful mages into a room and it’s a pretty good bet they’ll kill each other inside of an hour.