“That’s not going to work,” Chu says. “The folder’s merely a projection. The real one is in a safe place.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because you’re the perfect bait,” Chu says. “She clearly wants to make your life miserable and she can’t keep killing people and expect that no one’s going to figure it out eventually. I don’t know if she’s hoping you’ll be dead by then, or if she has something else in mind. But if we want to keep people safe, we have to draw her out.”

“I’m wondering how you’re gonna spin this into campaign rhetoric. You do know that most of L.A. isn’t made up of mages, right?”

“Is it wrong of me to want to save my city?” he says.

“No. But that’s not what you’re doing,” I say. “You want to hang me out to dry and use this to get a feather in your cap among the mage families. Even if you lose the mayoral election because the normals don’t vote for you, you’re going to get more respect from them. And they’ve got a lot more power at their disposal.”

“Eric, if there are any personal benefits, they’re all incidental. We’re trying to save lives.”

“Then where’s everybody else?”

“Excuse me?” Chu says.

“There are only three of you. If you saw this as a citywide problem, you’d be calling in the big guns. And why you three? What the hell got you together? I can see you and the lawyer connecting, but what’s with Letitia?”

“We met at—” Letitia starts.

“That’s not what I mean.”

“There are only three of us because we’re just getting started,” Chu says. “We’re looking for similarly minded individuals in the mage community that have different areas of expertise. As I’m sure you’re aware, getting mages to do anything is like training a toddler to poop on command. So, we’re taking things slow. But if we had a group of people in various positions of respect among both normals and mages, imagine what we could do. We could unite—Is there something funny about this?”

I can hardly breathe I’m laughing so hard. “Oh my god, you’re trying to make a Mage Council.”

“What we’re doing is important,” Peter says, his pale cheeks going red with anger.

“You know why there’s no high organization of mages?” I say. “Because they always fuck it up. The last time they tried that shit out here was in the 80s. Some of the most powerful mages in the city. Best of intentions.”

“What happened to them?” Letitia says.

“They disbanded,” Chu says, waving it off.