The sun was setting when I finished with the last customer and locked up. I used to spend most of my days like this, but over the last couple of years the amount of time I’ve spent running my shop has been going steadily down. Officially the Arcana Emporium’s supposed to be open six days a week, and okay, I don’t think I’ve ever consistently kept to that, but I used to average about four and a half. Nowadays it’s more like three. Either there’s a job, or a problem, or I’m training Luna, or researching . . . and when push comes to shove, running my shop is one of my few responsibilities where if I skip out, then nothing immediately bad is going to happen. Over the last few months I’d actually got into the habit of having Luna run the place every Tuesday, just so there’d be one day the place would consistently be open.

If things kept going the way they had been, though, then before long the average number of days I was putting in at the shop per week was going to hit zero, and that bothered me a little. Weird as it sounds, my shop’s one of the only public faces for magic in this country; for people like Lucian who have some sort of magic-related problem but aren’t plugged into mage society, this is one of the few places they can go. Maybe I needed to start taking steps so that the shop could survive without me . . . I shook it off and checked my e-mail. There was a message from Carol, one of the Keeper admins; they’d received the report I’d sent about yesterday and had sent a form-letter acknowledgement back, which for some reason left me vaguely disappointed. I’d been half-expecting to get chewed out, but it didn’t sound as though they’d even particularly noticed.

Luna had sent me Chalice’s address. I sent her an e-mail agreeing to meet, then spent a couple of hours trying to dig up information. She was a Dark chance mage, but beyond that her affiliation was unknown. No apprentices or dependents that anyone knew about. Trained (and presumably born) outside the U.K., so there wasn’t as much information as there would have been if she’d grown up here. No obvious red flags, and no connection to Morden or Richard that I could find, but I was still uneasy. Dark mages always have an agenda. What was hers?

I was so lost in thought that I didn’t even see it coming when the phone rang. I picked up absently. “Lensman.”

“Hello, Verus.” Lensman is a mage with a voice that sounds like he should be on the BBC. He’s in the same business as me, more or less—while I sell items to adepts and apprentices, Lensman sells to mages. It’s higher profit but a lot more dangerous. I get some of my items from him, and over the years we’ve become friends of a sort, though we rarely meet in person. “Just to let you know, that focus you delivered looks excellent. I’ve already got a buyer lined up.”