Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

When she glanced down, she realized she had moved upward to become one of those self-elevating mysterious figures often glimpsed on the fringes of the Neon Nightmare. Neon lights flashed across her fuchsia jacket and red hair, making her part of the artificial night sky. Making her into an object, not a person.

She continued edging upward, trying not to look down and get dizzy.

A spiderweb brushed her ankle.

What was she? An animated broom?

Oh. Another brush. Another spiderweb.

Her ankle almost turned as she suddenly stepped onto horizontal ground.

One of those “perches” Rafi had mentioned.

Temple shut her eyes and felt the flashing lights on her eyelids, the cold heat of their constant stabs on her body.

If one was the Phantom Mage … If one were Max … If one were one and the same, she might have stood here, on this narrow horizontal ledge, waiting to skydive into the dark below. She would never have done such a thing in her right mind. It was insanely dangerous.

So she took a step backward. Into the spiderweb. And felt the wall behind her swing inward. Her step backward became a stutter of steps as her weight sucked her inside. The purse at her side swung. Only her hand on the top edge steadied it. Steadied her.

Her back was against a wall again, but she was facing sideways to her previous position. The light and noise had vanished, as if she’d … passed through a giant cat door in the wall.

Now the airy tickle at her ankles felt familiar. Not a draft, but a wafting, supple furred tail.

Louie? There was nothing wafting and supple, or subtle, about him. He’d have used a claw tip to the anklebone to snag her attention.

Whatever. Whoever. She was inside the Neon Nightmare walls, where Rafi Nadir had never dreamed she could go. Had Max done this before her? Did cats see in the dark?

Did they? Because she could use a guide.

Temple edged along the smooth and dark but dimly lit inner corridor, watching the faint reflection of herself opposite. A vague glow of light lit this pathway. She wasn’t surprised when the wall behind her again gave way with a tiny click at the same time as a plumy fan wave brushed her knee.

With no fuss and some fear, she turned to face a softly lit room, like the intimate bar in an exclusive—and weren’t they all, with today’s prices?—Manhattan private club.

This was Vegas, though, and Temple knew she was standing there in the Synth’s inner sanctum, at the heart of the mysteries of unsolved murders and Ophiuchus—and Max’s disappearance.

Not that anybody other than a pussycat noticed.

Guns and Gravy

“We know,” Liam said when all the glasses were a fifth empty, “that you know about the Synth.”

Max couldn’t help smiling. Until last night, he hadn’t remembered.

“Stop yer eternal smirkin’,” Finn ordered in this thick brogue. “You’ve worked as a magician all over the Western world, accident or no accident. Whoever pushed you off that Alp wasn’t the only one willin’ to kill you. They evidently wanted to shut you up.”

“We want the reverse,” Liam said, interrupting his cohort. “Tell us what information you want first, and we’ll decide then whether we have the patience to tease what we want out of you two or should just beat your brains out for it.”

“Our bloody brain tissue,” Gandolph said, “would not be noted for coherence, but I see no reason we can’t trade fairly here. What you want to know means little to us, and I suspect the doings of Kathleen O’Connor all these years later are of scant interest to you, now that she’s dead and buried.”

“You know that for sure, old man?”

“Max bore her no good will and has vivid memories of witnessing her crash on a motorcyle. He checked himself that she was dead. The authorities who arrived after his anonymous call concurred, and they buried her.”

Max was glad Gandolph could speak for him. He didn’t know whether it was strategy or pride on his part that he didn’t want these political thugs to know his mind had been more damaged than his legs recently.

“Word is,” Liam told Max, with a relishing smirk of his own, “that you bore the lass plenty of love when you first met her all those years ago. Off wi’ her in the woodlands of Sir Thomas and Lady Dixon Park, communin’ with nature, weren’t you, when O’Toole’s Pub was becoming beer-soaked toothpicks with a blood chaser?”

Max could wince convincingly at Liam’s deliberately harsh words. He didn’t remember Kathleen or details of their physical encounter, thank God, but he knew he’d been the virgin in that transaction, and probably unaware of that at the time. The idea of being intimate with such a damaged young woman struck him with double guilt now, though he suspected she’d lured him into it. He knew, from that “Great Unknown Encyclopedia of General Knowledge” still allowing him access, that abused children can become manipulative and even hypersexual, convinced that the entire world is a lie and everyone in it a hypocrite and out to prove that to themselves and everyone else.