And now the cape had disappeared into the looking glass, and Charles’s disembodied head was floating inside the oval frame. The light shone all around the mirror, no feet, no physical man to make that image. His nose elongated in the carnival glass, turning to a snout, and his eyes widened to saucers. When he bared his teeth, they grew longer in the distortion of the mirror, turning into fangs as he mouthed a silent howl.

Two white hands appeared beside the floating monster head. He snapped his fingers, and the mirror revolved on its pivots, spinning end over end between the posts. When the oval frame stopped revolving and righted itself again, Charles was no longer trapped inside the glass. The mirror was empty and black.

A finger tapped Mallory’s shoulder, and she jumped, startled.

Charles stood behind her.

And that must be the scary part.

He was grinning, utterly pleased with himself. „What did you think of it?“

„Good trick.“ She glanced back at the platform. „So tell me if I’ve got this right. The cape was tied to a wire that fed through a hinged opening in the mirror. That’s why he used a carnival mirror, right? So the distortion would hide the imperfection?“

Charles nodded, not smiling anymore. He was turning on the lamps.

„The drapes are lined in black,“ said Mallory. „I know you can’t move the support posts. But the mirror frame is thick enough to reposition the glass inside it. When the lazy tongs spread the cape, you pushed the glass out of alignment and stepped behind the curtain. And then you were reflected in the mirror from a different angle.“

„Well, yes.“ He turned to her with a face full of disappointment. „But what about the effect? The illusion – “

„I got the mechanics right?“

Charles didn’t answer her. He walked back to the platform and climbed the steps, moving slowly, as if suddenly very tired. When he stood before the oval frame, he pressed on one side of the glass to reposition it. And now he found her face in the wavy distortion. Their eyes met, and he stared at her with his unhappy reflection. In this new angle, the carnival mirror shortened Charles’s nose and contracted his bulbous eyes to more normal proportions.

Mallory sipped in a breath and held it.

In the distortion of the mirror, Charles was reborn as an incarnation of his famous cousin. Mallory’s eyes were riveted to the beautiful man inside the glass – alive and a hundred times more compelling than any of the old photographs. The man in the mirror was touching her insides with chemistry and flooding her face with heat. It was a fight to remain still, to keep the fragile illusion in place. One move would destroy it, but she had the sense of levitating with a lightness of head and body, almost hollow now, rising slowly.

So beautiful.

This was what Louisa saw the day she met Max Candle. In that first second, Malakhai was doomed to lose his young wife. This man was so -

And then Max was gone, vanished in the moment when the mirror was lifted from the post slots. Charles turned to her with his more familiar face, his large nose and the eyes of a sad but charming frog, unaware that he had resurrected the dead.

„Magic is wasted on you,“ he said.

After Charles had left the basement, Mallory continued to prowl through the boxes until she found the missing leg irons for the Lost Illusion.

All four crossbows were fixed on their pedestals and angling up toward the target. She cocked the weapon nearest the staircase. Very smooth operation, no problems. No need to run the pedestal gears again. Every weapon had fired in good working order. Now she only needed to work out the rest of the mechanics.

With a cape slung over one shoulder, she climbed to the top of the platform and stood before the target. She had watched the crossbows work from every angle on the ground below. Now she planned to see the trick from Oliver Tree’s point of view on the stage.

She knelt on the floor and attached a leg iron to the ring at the base of each post. The shackles had no locks, only catches to keep them closed. In her mind, she was replaying the tape she had watched a hundred times. These irons were exactly like the ones Oliver had worn on his ankles when he hung spread-eagle across the face of the target.

Mallory reached down to unhook a pair of NYPD handcuffs from her belt. Oliver had used two pairs, but there had been only one key. She had blown up segments of his film performance and found the piece of the broken key extension falling against the gray backdrop of the band shell. There had been no sign of a second key when the fingers of his left hand splayed wide with sudden pain.

Out of habit, she pulled out her own cuff key. Of course, it would never work. When her hand was bound to the posts and stretched out, this one would be too short to undo the lock. She set her key ring down on the floor and reached into the back pocket of her jeans for the relic from Faustine’s Magic Theater. She unscrewed the bulb at the top of the extension rod and selected a post with teeth to match her own cuff key.

Mallory stood up and closed one of the bracelets around the iron ring on the right-hand post. The handcuff chain dangled the open bracelet within easy reach – easier for her than Oliver. His corpse was five inches short of her own height of five ten.

And now she was confronted with her first problem. This platform was made for Max Candle, a man seven inches taller than Oliver. Yet there was no difference in the post-ring positions. On Oliver’s replica, the iron loops appeared to be the same distance from the top of the posts.

Mallory shook the dust off the silk cape and draped it across her shoulders, then pulled the hood over her hair. The long hem trailed on the stage behind her. She looked down at the outline of the trapdoor. The foot pedal was in plain view, and when she stepped on it, a square of wood dropped open behind the heels of her running shoes.

The mechanical framework rose out of the floor, slowly coming up beneath the trailing material, silently spreading its metal bones to fill out the cape in the form of raised arms. A curved metal dish imitated the top of a human skull beneath the hood. She stepped away from the cape, and spread her legs to attach the floor shackles to her ankles. Reaching up, she slipped her right wrist into the handcuff dangling from the iron ring. It took a bit of fiddling to close the bracelet with one hand while holding on to the skeleton key. Oliver Tree had done this much faster with two sets of handcuffs.

It was the first tick of the pedestal that made her drop the key.

Her mouth went dry as she watched the piece of metal clatter to the floorboards, landing beside her own discarded key ring.

The spread cape blocked her view of the crossbows. Mallory stretched one foot the length of the leg-iron chain, but she could not reach the floor pedal to drop the cape and give her a clear view of the weapons. How had Oliver Tree done this?

Bound by both legs and one hand, she listened to the ticking, the gears grinding. The noise was coming from her left side. She imagined the peg rising, moving closer to the crossbow trigger.

What is the crossbow aiming at?

She had seen Oliver die so many times, and she knew each trajectory by heart. The test firing of Max’s crossbows had agreed with the tapes of the park death.

The pedestal was ticking, ticking.

Think! Where is the arrow going to strike?

She saw Oliver clearly now. The left-hand bows fired arrows into his thighs. There was only time to frame this thought, to shift one leg. The ticking stopped. The arrow ripped through the spread silk and pinned her to the target.

No pain.

Mallory looked down at the arrow that had torn through the blue jeans and missed her skin by a hair’s breadth. Her breathing was slow and shallow, the better to listen for the movements of company in the basement, sounds of a would-be assassin. She had so little faith in accidents these days.