The stool didn’t do hardly a thing except make him drop his knife. Cecily Bob turned around and kicked me so hard in the chest I went flying, the wind knocked clean out of me. I lay on the floor, helpless as could be.

I watched as Drusilla Fey’s left-hand fingernails went clicking all over Marina’s arm, and her right fingernails went to work on Boss Authority’s arm. The markings began to disappear on Marina’s arm, to fade and blur and vanish, and reappear just the same on Boss Authority’s arm. He was stealing her magic, he was. Drusilla Fey was leeching it out of Marina and straight onto his skin. Soon the tattoos were gone, Marina’s arm blank of symbols and scratchings, not a lick of ink on them.

“My mom gave me those tattoos,” said Marina, crouched in a huddle on the ground. “It was the last thing I had of her.”

I saw Mr. Hugo fling Tally off his bleeding back, saw her scuttle to a corner. I saw my daddy strung up by Cecily Bob, all his lucky blood soon to be drained out. I saw Harlen limp toward Marina, the two of them huddled together in pain and anger on the floor. I saw Lawrence sprawled out on his back, Johnson helping him up to his chair. I saw the durn cowardly pianist inching toward the rear door, and me right there next to him. Everybody else had fled from Marina’s Place.

We had lost, all of us. The last safe place in the Swamplands had fallen. Pop was captured. Tally was still spider-folk. And no one, not a single person in this room, was paying one lick of attention to me one way or the other.

I was about durn sick of that.

I looked around the room, at all the folks I knew and loved, at the ones who I figured were against Boss Authority and on my side. Every single one of them was a hustler. That was just a fact. Every one of those folks had their own game running, in one way or another. They all had an angle, they were all smart and brave, I knew they all had their own plan running quick in the back of their minds. I just needed to give them a little room to operate, that was all. What did Pop say that first night I came to visit him, when he pulled that card trick on me? He said the problem was I was watching him the whole time, didn’t he? That I would understand later. Well maybe I got it now. Maybe magic is what happens when everyone’s looking somewhere else. That was a true hustler’s trick it was, just like Tally did when she was fake-begging, what the priest did when he smuggled us across the waters. I just needed to give Boss and his folks something else to look at, distract them enough to give my people room to work.