Emperor agreed to attend. But Deanie blew up his own plan when he got drunk and confronted the mysterious magician before Roman had a chance to perform.

In front of the entire attending circuit, Deanie asked Roman to reveal his secrets. Emperor refused.

Deanie called him a cheater. Emperor denied it.

Deanie demanded Roman prove his tricks were clean. Emperor kept quiet.

Deanie punched Roman in the nose.

Emperor simply waved a hand across his face and the blood disappeared.

The room went silent.

Maggie, who had been standing in the shadows of the curtain, took Roman by the arm and quietly led him out of the building. Outside, she whispered, “The pettiness of mediocrity. Do you miss it?”

“No,” Roman answered.

But he did.

14

Roman spent as much time sending corpses to the sky as he did practicing magic with Maggie.

He was the best now and he knew it. But recognition of that would have to come from the audience and not his peers. There was no proof of Roman having dabbled in “that other magic” and so the industry magazines kept mostly quiet. But the magicians talked. And anytime Emperor’s name came up, a morbid mood spread through the clubs and bars. No matter what Roman did from that point forward, he would always have an asterisk next to his name.

*Probably cheated.

And yet the circuit was so small that the disdain of his peers was somewhat irrelevant. None of the magicians would ever fill a thousand-seat theater. There simply wasn’t a fan base that big to tap. Most tickets sold were to people looking for something different to do. People who had never heard of Finn the Fantastic or Magic Monthly Magazine. There was hardly any publicity other than the trades and even these only reached a handful of people nationwide. It was a slim industry. And the crowds Emperor enjoyed following the Kerry Theatre fiasco were no different from those he had before it.

And it wasn’t perception that was getting to Roman anyway.

He’d been spending all his evenings in the cemeteries of the cities he played. Ducking the local police. Checking the groundskeepers’ houses. Watching for grieving visitors. Drunk teens. Sick men. He was used to working through the night, but this was a different kind of show. Often he cringed at what he did: removing the dead from their boxes, sending them into the sky, only to fill those boxes again.

With locals.

And yet, terrible as it sounded, often he felt comfortable out there, in the night, in the cold, with Maggie by his side. As if this particular trick was the one he’d been working toward since meeting that man in rags in the sand.

The bodies! Roman couldn’t begin to count the number of lifeless mounds he’d removed to make room for fresh meat. And Maggie encouraged it. She was never as relaxed as she was in the graveyards. To Roman, it was there that she made the most sense. No longer seemingly odd or mysterious, Maggie looked as commonplace as the tombstones. As comfortable as the moss that grew upon them.