She wore a cut-up version of a green-and-yellow Victorian dress, her chest testing the seams, her ivory skin smooth under the lights. The dress had been chopped into a skirt and her boots gave her tall frame a few extra inches. Shoulder-length blond hair half hid a face that came in and out of focus under the overheads.

She was feminine, Dick thought, absolutely. And yet…animal, too.

Theresa didn’t say a word about her. And Dick understood. The show was so good, so fast, that they didn’t have time to look at her legs. And besides, in his way, Emperor was just as striking. If not more so.

“Oh God,” Theresa said as the blonde received the ax back. “Here we go.”

The blonde had dipped her hands into the darkness of the audience, and the weapon she brought back under the lights looked every bit as real as the tools Dick had seen about Theresa’s father’s toolshed. The blonde took the opposite side of the stage from Emperor and raised her eyebrows, silently asking if he was ready.

Emperor nodded once. Dick saw a bead of sweat drip from the tip of his nose.

The woman hurled the ax at his head so fast that the audience screamed as one.

SWOOSH

Dick closed his eyes. He had to. And when he opened them, he saw the ax blade suspended less than an inch from the magician’s face.

The sound of the ax cutting the space between them remained strong in Dick’s mind; the blonde’s boot stomp upon the stage, too; the communal gasp of the audience when it seemed too late.

“Jesus Christ,” Theresa said. “I can’t take any more of this.”

The blonde held her arm out as if an invisible beam tied her to the suspended ax. Dick looked for the strings.

Or was it Emperor that employed the trick? With his eyes on the blade, the magician’s mouth formed a small circle, and he lifted his left hand. He made a subtle motion, as though wiping dust from the shoulder of his vest, a flick of the wrist, and the ax rose a few inches higher into the air.

Silence now. The blonde with her arm out, the magician staring down the high blade.

Then Emperor moved again and the ax began to spin. The audience gasped again as the ax dropped, fast, to the wood at the magician’s black boots.

CHOP

It split the log in two.

The stage rattled. The crowd held their breath before releasing it in nervous laughter and applause.

The lack of music, the lack of explanation, added to the grittiness and Dick slid his dress shoes subconsciously against the theater’s stone floor.

The blonde nodded and Emperor took a bow.

“How is it that the whole world doesn’t know about this guy?” Dick asked his wife. But Theresa just gripped his arm harder. Her heart, she said, could barely take it. She was sure that ax was going to split the man’s face and she’d have to relive that image forever. She knew all about how magicians had their secrets, secrets they don’t share, but there was something different about this show. Something terrible. Something scary.