I stared, mind in denial for several precious seconds as, impossibly, Katashi’s senior summoner strode into a warehouse on the outskirts of a small town in south Louisiana. Tsuneo, the treacherous asshole who bore a tattoo of Jesral’s mark on his hip, and who had performed a hostile summoning of Gestamar several months back. Beside him loomed another man I recognized from my brief time as Katashi’s student: Tito, not a summoner, more of a thug type with a sensitivity to the arcane.

Anger flared. “You!” I shot to my feet and moved to get in front of Mzatal and the others. I drew my gun even as Tito pulled his to put us into a great little standoff.

Tsuneo’s gaze hardened at the sight of me, but in the next instant his face went slack with shock as he not only saw Mzatal but felt his aura.

What the hell was Tsuneo doing here? For that matter, what were Thatcher and a computer nerd doing here? Was everyone here for a frickin’ arcane flash mob?

Moreover, was Thatcher also a summoner? Was Paul? Even more vital for Thatcher to live through this so we can question the hell out of him, I thought grimly.

I heard a hiss-growl from behind me, and the hair on the back of my neck lifted as Mzatal’s aura flared, dark with fury. He stood and stepped forward with hands still dripping blood, radiating Bad Mojo like a sun about to go supernova as he faced the traitorous summoner. His left fist remained clenched at his side as his right opened in a stance I recognized all too well. Lowering his head, he moved toward the interlopers.

Shit! I kept my gun leveled on Tito and risked a quick glance back at Thatcher. He still breathed, but I knew he was far from stable.

As Mzatal advanced, Tsuneo took a stumbling step back and looked around wildly as if trying to come up with a miraculous defense. He apparently concluded there was none because his next move was to run like hell for the exit.

Mzatal lifted his right hand and called scintillating blue-white potency to it even as Tsuneo darted through the door and out. Tito frowned, apparently balanced upon a razor’s edge decision of whether to fire or run.

Mzatal rendered the decision moot. Face stone-hard and focused, he hurled the potency at Tito like a lightning strike. The man screamed and dropped the gun as the burst impacted his belly and spread over him in a rippling cascade of light. He jerked heavily for several seconds, then crumpled to lie twisted and utterly still.

The deadly potency flickered and died as Mzatal continued forward. Behind me I heard Thatcher’s struggle for breath, and Paul’s agonized entreaties for him to hold on, to stay.

“Boss!” I yelled, holstering my gun. “You’re losing Thatcher. Let Tsuneo go! We’ll track his ass down later.”

Mzatal took two more steps then stopped, his hands clenched at his sides, violently seething potency boiling off of him. Yet he still didn’t turn back toward me and the man dying on the floor. I knew he wanted to pursue Tsuneo, exact revenge for the injury to Gestamar and the insult of the summoner’s betrayal and allegiance to the Mraztur.

“Boss,” I urged. “Mzatal, please! We need Thatcher alive.” Behind me, the wounded man’s breath grew more labored.

Mzatal remained lord-still for several more agonizing seconds while I fought the urge to grab him and pull him back to finish the healing. Finally he turned, met my eyes for a powerful instant before striding back to Thatcher. I let out a ragged sigh of relief as he knelt and placed his hands back on the mess of the chest wound.

I quickly resumed balancing the pattern and the flows, then looked back at the crumpled body of Tito. No doubt he was dead.

Shit. This was a mess.

Welcome to Earth, Boss, I thought with a sigh.

I’d have downed more coffee if I’d known the day was going to descend into chaos so thoroughly. Now I had to figure out a way to clean up this clusterfuck.

“Zack.” I kept my voice low, but I knew he could hear me. “Maybe you should get hold of Ryan to help take care of—” I grimaced, lifted a chin toward the corpse. Under other circumstances Mzatal could have disposed of the body with a potency-fueled cremation. Yet I felt his reserves through our connection, and I knew he didn’t have the strength to do so and still have a chance of saving Thatcher.

Zack remained silent and still for several heartbeats, but finally gave a slight nod and pulled out his phone. He thumbed in a text message, sent it, then moved over to the dead man, crouched and laid a hand on his chest, face filled with a look of such unbearable sadness that I had to turn away. I heard him murmuring something over the body, but I was too far away to make out the words. The rhythm and lilt of it led me to believe it wasn’t English, though it didn’t sound like demon either.

Thatcher drew a steadier breath. Paul still clung to his friend’s hand, his eyes red and puffy in a face wracked with shock and desperation.

“What were you two doing here?” I asked.

It took a few seconds for Paul to realize I was talking to him, and another couple for him to focus on me. “It . . . it was my stupid idea,” he said, voice cracking. “This is all my fault.” His eyes dropped to Thatcher again. “I’m sorry, Bryce. Oh god, I’m so sorry.” His face twisted, and I reached out and seized his arm.

“Stop it,” I ordered. “He’s going to be all right.” I filled my voice with as much absolute certainty as possible. It helped that I truly did believe Mzatal would save the man’s life. “Why did you come here?” I pressed.

Paul’s eyes flicked up to Mzatal, and a whisper of hope crept into them. He swallowed, visibly struggled to be strong. “It was going to be at ten-seventeen a.m.,” he said and cast a worried look over to where his tablet lay where he’d dropped it. “There was going to be a wiggle in the feeds at ten-seventeen.” His lower lip quivered for an instant before he firmed his mouth and regained a bit of control. “I told him I wanted to come check it out. Made him bring me.”

I look at him in bafflement. “A what? A wiggle in the feeds? What the hell does that mean?”

“It’s, uh . . .” The grief on his face melted away as he focused on finding words to describe whatever it was. He opened his mouth to speak, then shook his head. “I do stuff with computers,” he explained, apparently giving up on providing details. “Lots of, er, deep level stuff. And I’d noted some, well, wiggles, shifts in the data patterns and streams. Always after the fact though. I figured out some of the parameters and extrapolated to predict one for today right here. I just wanted to be here to see what happened.”

I struggled to parse his explanation. Data patterns? Streams? “You do stuff with computers?” I echoed. “That’s it?”

A trace of insult crossed his face at the slight. “Yeah. That’s it.” His brow furrowed as he looked around, really looked around at us all for the first time. Zack and I probably looked normal enough, but Eilahn crouched shirtless near Thatcher’s feet, and there was no mistaking Mzatal for ordinary. And, of course, there was that pesky dead body not all that far away.

His attention returned to me. “Who are you people?”

“We’re . . . ” Shit. Now I was the one at a loss for how to explain things. “We’re the good guys, trust me,” I finally said lamely. “So, you don’t do any, er, arcane or ‘magic’ type stuff?” I even did the quotey marks with my fingers, which didn’t at all help how silly I felt asking him if he did magic.

Paul turned wide eyes to Mzatal again, and it was clear he knew something “magical” was happening to save his friend. He shook his head slowly, voice dropping to a rough whisper. “No.”

“What about him?” I asked, jerking my head toward Thatcher. “What’s he do? Does he do anything arcane?”