Houdini had been an important influence in his life. When he first started performing, in his teens, Malerick used as a performing name "Young Houdini."

The "erick" portion of his present name was both a remnant of his former life—his life before the fire—and an homage to Houdini himself, who'd been born Ehrich Weisz. As for the prefix "Mal" a magician might suspect that it was taken from another world-famous performer, Max Breit, who performed under the name Malini. But in fact, Malerick had picked the three letters because they came from the Latin root for "evil," which reflected the dark nature of his brand of illusion.

He now studied the tape, measuring angles, noting windows and the location of possible witnesses, blocking out his positions as all good performers do. And as he watched, the cards in his fingers riffled together in lightning-fast shuffles that hissed like snakes. The kings and jacks and queens and jokers and all the rest of the cards slithered onto the black velvet and then seemed to defy gravity as they leaped back into his strong hands, where they vanished from sight. Watching this impromptu performance, an audience would shake their heads, half-convinced that reality had given way to delusion, that a human being couldn't possibly do what they were observing.

But the truth was the opposite: the card tricks Malerick was now performing absently on the plush black cloth were not miraculous at all; they were merely carefully rehearsed exercises in dexterity and perception, governed by mundane rules of physics.

Oh, yes, Revered Audience, what you've seen and what you're about to see are very real.

As real as fire burning flesh.

As real as a rope knotted around a young girl's white neck.

As real as the circuit of the clock hands moving slowly toward the horror that our next performer is about to experience.

———«»———«»———«»———

"Hey, there."

The young woman sat down beside the bed where her mother lay. Out the window in the manicured courtyard she saw a tall oak tree on the trunk of which grew a tentacle of ivy in a shape that she'd had interpreted a number of ways over the past months. Today the anemic vine wasn't a dragon or a flock of birds or a soldier. It was simply a city plant struggling to survive.

"So. How you feeling, Mum?" Kara asked.

The appellation grew out of one of the family's many vacations—this one to England. Kara had given them all nicknames: "His Kingness" and the "Queenly Mum" for her parents. She herself had been the "Royal Kid."

"Just fine, darling. And how's life treating you?"

"Better than some, not as good as others. Hey, you like?" Kara held up her hand to show off her short, evenly filed fingernails, which were black as a grand piano's finish.

"Lovely, darling. I was getting a bit tired of the pink. You see it everywhere nowadays. Awfully conventional."

Kara stood and adjusted the down pillow under her mother's head. Then sat again and sipped from the large Starbucks container; coffee was her sole drug but the addiction was intense, not to mention expensive, and this was her third cup of the morning.