“No.” The tone and the glance was commanding.
Max removed Serena’s arm from its entwined position on his.
“Yes.”
“It’s imperative you stay.” Sparks stood as well.
“Come to the window,” Serena cajoled, entwining him again, like a velvet boa constrictor. Max was very glad he’d decided to drop the nickname Carmen for her. She was acting completely out of character for the Carmen he knew.
He made her work to draw him toward the tinted rectangle on one-way glass that framed the dark upper pyramid of Neon Nightmare.
“I really have better things to do…” But he let the sentence trail off.
Everyone was watching him, like rats at a cheese tray.
He stared out over the empty darkness, glancing at his watch without seeming to. The Phantom Mage was scheduled to start a set just about now… .
Everyone behind him had tensed, as had Serena, so close and yet so far.
Max kept his own tension bottled, his limbs as loose as linguini. He could see Serena frown as she detected this.
Don’t worry, lady, he thought, I can produce the requisite tension when needed… . Which was not now, when everyone expected one and only one outcome for this charade: Max would fail because the Phantom Mage would fail to appear.
He knew they suspected that Max and the Phantom might be one and the same person. The Phantom’s performing gear, mask, and cloak certainly made his identity doubtful.
Beyond the glass, music was ratcheting up to introduce the night’s featured act: the Phantom Mage, aka Max.
Inside the glass, someone smiled pleasantly at the Czarina.
Max.
Breaths were held. Not his.
The space beyond the window remained mere space.
Then! A caped form swooped past the window, caroming off the dark sides of the narrowing apex of the pyramid-shaped building, strewing light wands and iridescent glitter.
He came plunging directly toward the one-way glass window. He saw it as only another of the Lucite mirrors positioned to reflect the neon fireworks. He touched toe to the surface and rappelled off like a mountaineer in Batman guise.
For a moment, the vision was face-to-face with Max. Or mask-to-face, rather.
Breaths released audibly behind him.
“The bastard!” Max exploded, tense now, so tense that Serena released him and reflexively jumped back. His muscles were knots of indignation. “He’s ripped off my old act’s finale. No wonder you wanted me to see this so-called act. The bloody bastard. Punchinello on a stick! This is a travesty.”
“Exactly so, lad,” Sparks said. “This is why the Synth exists. The true artists remain, uncorrupted. This is why we have to make a statement.”
“Damn right.” He turned to regard them with burning eyes. “Consider the Czar’s scepter your joystick.” They stood as one, and applauded.
“But I expect fifty percent of the proceeds for setting up my comeback act.”
The applause never died.
Max bowed and melted into the black and featureless passage.
He wiped the infinitesimal mustache of sweat from his upper lip and headed up into the pyramid’s apex, by ways even the Synth hadn’t found yet.
Gandolph awaited him up top, sweating as he retracted the flexible dummy in Phantom Mage guise.
“Did we reel in our fish?” he asked.
“The entire school.”
Gandolph collapsed against the wall, so close in these close quarters. “I’m too old for such shenanigans. This thing weighs a ton.”
Max pulled the dummy onto the narrow catwalk and peeled off the costume.
“They were suspicious. It was crucial to give this fellow a chance to swing.”
“I’ve been called a ‘puppet master’ in my counterterrorism years, but never so literally, my boy. So you’re in like Flynn.”
“No, I’m in like Max Kinsella, cat burglar.”
“Cat burglary is always an elegant sideline for a magician. I’m pleased to see you expanding your repertoire.”
Max quickly donned the dummy’s costume: the half-mask, the tool belt, the swirling cape.
“Can you do what they want?” Gandolph asked, stuffing the dummy into a large dark garbage bag like a dead body.
“Without getting caught?” Max, accoutered as the Phantom Mage, poised on the brink of plunging into the darkness below on a bungee cord. “Not easily. Why else set up the challenge? I’ll have to do it, though, if we want to embed me deeper in the real heart of the Synth.”
He swung out over the abyss, half Batman, half Spider-Man, all magician.
Gandolph would leave by the secret tunnels honeycombing the building, which he’d found even before Max had first come here, sniffing around.
For Max, there was no way out of the Synth’s challenge but to mount a one-man raid on a major casino museum. Get caught and he’d satisfy Molina’s deepest wet dreams, for sure.
Get caught and he’d betray and wound Temple past any patience and passion she still held for him. No matter what he did to lay his undercover past to rest for good, he only augered in deeper. And Temple paid as much in the present as he had. He was neglecting her, dangerously, risking their relationship in the hope of breaking free to enjoy it forever. Again.
If he didn’t get caught he’d be an actual thief on a global scale, but he’d have won the trust of the darkest levels of the Synth. He’d be well on the way to finding out who really backed this cadre of disgruntled magicians, and what they hoped to achieve.
He’d worry about the difficulties of the museum job later. Right now he had more important worries: how to”disappear” for the time required to set up the job without seeming to abandon Temple. Playing relationship Russian roulette with the woman he loved. Again. How many times could he risk that, and not lose?
His booted feet hit the opposite wall and he caromed off it like a cue ball cleaning up the table. He was flying, like Peter Pan, and it was fun. Thrilling actually. A Never-NeverLand of adrenaline and adventure.
But he sure didn’t want to leave Wendy behind, alone in the family bedroom.
Chapter 4
Male Call
Temple stood on her tiny triangular balcony, one of the perks of living in a round building and having what passed for a “corner” unit.
She was marking a sure sign of spring: her upstairs neighbor, Matt Devine, doing laps in the pool.
She watched him cut a swath through the becalmed aquamarine water. She was also regarding a crime scene through the foggy lenses of time. Electra, their landlady, had only recently told Temple of witnessing Matt’s first encounter with their joint Me-noir-to-be, Kathleen O’Connor, at that very poolside months ago.
Temple could picture that scene right now. Kathleen O’Connor made a very vivid, deceptively attractive ghost: maybe five-foot-five, in pumps, wearing an Irish-green silk pantsuit, and looking like a girl from a ballad. The fall sunlight would have glistened off her black, black hair, her ruby lips, her skin as white as snow. Snow Black.
As Temple retro-daydreamed, Matt finished whatever number of laps he’d set himself, and pulled himself onto the wooden decking that surrounded the pool.
Now only Matt remained of the word picture Electra had recently painted, and he was the same: lightly tanned, muscled enough to be fit without making a fetish of it, white swim trunks and teeth, blond hair glinting pure platinum in the sunlight.
Okay … yum. Good enough to eat alive. Kitty O’Connor had thought so too. Only literally. Luckily, she’d left. Permanently.
Temple watched him snatch a towel from a lounge chair. White. Both the towel and the vinyl straps of the lounge chair. Temple, single, female, and thirty, ducked out of sight.
This lurking was pathetic! You’d think she didn’t have a perfectly good beau of her own, also out of sight, unfortunately.
A long merow drew her back to the living room sofa and was interrupted by an even longer yawn. Midnight Louie was stretching until his toes reached the armrest, where he riffed off a few earnest rips with his front claws.