“Good. I doubt Garrick will spend a bullet on her when we are the ones breaking his bones with furniture.”

The broken bone did not hurt Garrick as much as it would a normal person. The quantum magician instructed his nerve endings to hush their messages to the brain, which took a little of the white-hot pain from his injury. He was perfectly aware of the damage done to his limb. His internals were clearer to him than the calcium tungstate photographs those Frost brothers had used to see inside mice. He was suffering from a compound fracture of the tibia inflicted by his own boy. He tried to heal himself, but the process was infuriatingly slow, and he could feel it draining his energies.

Garrick felt the injustice like rising nausea.

“Riley!” he called. “Riley.”

Riley ducked low behind the sofa as if the word could harm him.

“We need to be leaving,” he whispered to Chevie. “You’re the expert in these matters, being some form of agent. Lead on, I says.”

Chevie did not feel like much of an expert.

I am only seventeen, she wanted to say. I shouldn’t even be here. I am not even a legitimate FBI agent, and my program was canceled. But she didn’t voice these thoughts. Agent Chevron Savano considered herself a teenage professional, and Riley was depending on her.

She wiggled past him, making sure to keep her head down.

“We need to help Victoria.”

“Draw Garrick away and that will save her life—he don’t care a fig for her. It’s us and that Timekey he wants. Garrick will follow his target every time.”

Riley was right.

“Okay. We go out the back way.”

There had to be a yard, or a doorway. If she could make it to a phone, then Garrick was dead and buried, no matter how many faces he had.

Then I am going to home to California, where the sun shines and there are no death-dealing magicians from the past.

Garrick took a few more shots, but he was firing blind, just trying to corral them to the kitchen.

Chevie squatted on her hunkers, pulling Riley’s face close to hers.

“Here’s the plan. We run to those back stairs and see where they go.”

“Is that a plan?” asked Riley. “Strikes me more as a notion, or a smidge of an idea. Plans have stages and steps. Jinky twists and the likes.”

“Zip it, chatterbox. You ready for the plan?”

Riley nodded.

“Right. After three. Run like the devil himself is on your tail.”

Which in a way he was.

Chevie counted to three, then hurled a handy vase toward the wall, where she thought it would smash and distract Garrick.

She thought wrong.

Garrick shot the vase out of the air as it twirled, being a practiced marksman from his years in Her Majesty’s army.