'That looks green,' he said, somehow playing dumb and wheedling at the same time.
'You know what I mean,' I snapped. 'What do you know about this tat, other than what he told you?'
Spleen looked at me helplessly.
'What about Wulf? Other than the obvious?' Nothing. 'Who recommended him to you?'
'I, uh…'
'So he found you, is that it?' I kneaded my brow. 'So you know zip-'
'He seemed genuine,' Spleen repeated. 'And he paid a lot of money-'
'How much?' I held up my hand. 'How much is my cut?'
'I… dunno?' Spleen said. 'I mean, how much would you charge-'
'Stop being a dick,' I said. 'And don't lie. I'll have him under my needle for…' I squinted at the screen '… three or four hours. I guarantee you, he'll spill the details.'
'Seventy-five hundred,' Spleen said.
A thousand for the needles, five hundred for the ink and powders. Another five hundred for graphomancy and license fees on a 'new' design. Take out the Rogue's twenty percent cut… and I could stand to land close to forty- five hundred dollars-putting me halfway to a new Vectrix electric motorbike to replace my old Vespa.
'I'll d-' I began, and stopped. Before the money made me stupid.
I have rules. I don't do black ink. I don't do religious marks. And I sure don't do bad charms. And I knew zip about this tat. For all I knew it was originally an evil Norse mark designed to curse a werewolf with terrible pain every full moon, but after the Nazis fiddled with it… the tat might be just as likely to set him on fire. 'I'll… consider it. My statement to Wulf stands-I need to get this flash vetted by a witch before I ink it.'
'Do we reeeally need to deal with that?' Spleen said. 'I mean, the fees-'
'When's the last time you changed the oil on your car?'
'You last changed the oil on that car,' Spleen said. 'I save the money-'
'Spleen!' I said-then stopped and kneaded my brow. 'Look, I know you don't think your engine's going to catch on fire, so why spend the money-'
'Exactly,' Spleen said with triumph. 'Ex-ZACTLY-'
'-but if this sets him on fire in my chair, we won't get any money. He won't pay up.'
'He's got the money, he's got it,' Spleen said, waving me off. 'I got a retainer, yes I did, five thousand when he came to town, so don't josh old Spleen… ' But then he saw my face. 'Wait, you're. .. serious? Set him on fire? Tattoos can do that?'
I squeezed one hand tight, letting power flow into the yin-yang in my palm, then thrust it under his face, letting the mana out explosively into a tiny ball of lightning. Spleen leapt back and yelped, eyes wide in terror, and I blew him a big kiss, sending the little crackling ball of light towards him. It bounced around him like a kitten, and he stumbled back, batting frantically at it with a folder until it disappeared into a cloud of sparks and color.
'Jeez, jeez, JEE%us,' Spleen said. 'Don't do that-'
'This is a fifty-year-old Nazi tattoo, Spleen,' I said, taking the folder from him. 'For all we know it was designed to make a werewolf explode on contact with moonlight as a kind of living magic bomb. So no, I'm not going to ink it until someone can vet it.'
'Well, tell that someone,' Spleen said, shuddering, ''Hello, spooky-eyes.' For me. '
'Spleen!' I said. 'Be nice. What if Jinx heard you?'
'You call her that,' he protested.
'I've known her forever,' I replied. 'Now shoo. I have to make some calls.'
And I needed to make them quickly. If Wulf s problem was as bad as it sounded, and the tat was as good as he claimed, we needed to move right away. First I called Jinx, who agreed to meet me on my break that afternoon. Then I buzzed our receptionist and asked her to pull the licensing paperwork for some new magical flash.
'Sure,' Annesthesia said, sounding irritated. 'Spleen left like fifteen minutes ago-why aren't you ready yet?'
'Ready for… what?'
'Don't you check your emails? You have two clients waiting for a consult-'
'I've been with a client,' I snapped, 'and I don't check emails until-'
'Hell freezes over,' Annesthesia replied. 'I'm sending them back now-'
'Wait,' I said, but the line clicked dead. Really. The waiting room was thirty feet away. She could have knocked or something. But Annesthesia is pretty, coquettish, and beautifully tattooed. Other than me, she's our best advertisement-no, honestly, for straight guys, she is our best ad, since I can scare the little dears-so I put up with her.
I opened the door to the hall, hoping to intercept the visitors and draw them off to our 'conference' room before they could see the mess which was my office, but stepped back in shock at the sight of a small but wiry old man with a flaring beard and hair. He was standing so close to the door it seemed like he'd materialized. Behind him, a dark-suited young man with blond hair smiled down at him, eyes lighting when he looked up and saw me. The kindly old man stepped forward, and my jaw dropped in more shock.
'Hello,' he said with a wicked, cheerful grin, devilish black eyebrows serving only to accent his twinkling blue eyes. 'I'm Chris Valentine and
Chris Valentine, and this is my colleague, Alex Nicholson-'
'Christopher Valentine,' I breathed. 'The Mysterious Mirabilus!'
7. The Valentine Challenge
The Mysterious Mirabilus smiled, and gave a slight bow. 'The one and only.'
Christopher Valentine, AKA 'The Mysterious Mirabilus,' was the world's most famous magician-and debunker. Technically he was what real practitioners called an illusionist-someone who simulated magic through nonmagical means-but this Einstein- haired 'illusionist' could do without magic things that most experienced sorcerers couldn't do with magic. I mean, showy, big league stuff like walking on water, parting a small lake, and, most famously, appearing in two places at once, a trick he'd demonstrated on TV's famous talk show way back when, The Night Shift with Jack Carterson.
I'd caught that one live. As a child, before I was old enough to know stage magic from real Magick, the Mysterious Mirabilus had been my hero, and I'd stayed up countless nights to catch his appearances performing his latest trick. By the time I grew older and had turned to real magic, the Miraculus Mirabilus had come out as Christopher Heywood Valentine, stage magician, and had turned his considerable talents to debunking what he considered 'the flim- flammery of our age.' He traveled the country, issuing the Valentine Challenge to all magicians: to do a magic trick he couldn't replicate under controlled conditions.
I know, I know, you're thinking, charmingly nai've-no real practitioner would advertise themselves, and the rest are all charlatans, so why did I still idolize this guy? But like many other Edgeworlders, I find myself sifting through endless tomes of New
Age fuffery looking for something real. Valentine's probing books and debunking tours helped me winnow through the crap to get to the occasional nugget of gold.
And so-'I have all your books,' I blurted. Like a schoolgirl. How embarrassing.
But the Mysterious Mirabilus looked at me with sharp new interest. 'How interesting,' he said, sitting in the client's chair opposite me as I sat down at my desk. 'That strikes me as very unusual. Given your profession.'
I grinned. 'And why can't a tattoo artist read Christopher Valentine?'
'I meant, as a professed magician,' Valentine said, all serious, dark pointy eyebrows beetling into a serious look of concern. He was much more interesting in person: on camera he looked all pale and WASPy, but with him sitting in my client's chair I could see a slight Middle Eastern slant to his features and a subtle, swarthy tint to his skin that would have made it a wonderful canvas to ink on. 'After all, I have spent the last few years of my life-'
'-exposing all the junk in the so-called 'magickal' world,' I replied, 'freeing the rest of us practitioners to focus on the good stuff?'
Valentine and Nicholson looked at each other.
