Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
Kit
You know those incredible desert scenes in movies? Sweeping aerial motion-picture photography that captures a ruggedly handsome star with aesthetically sunbaked skin trudging across sand dunes the size of skyscrapers?
Yeah, I was totally doing that.
Well, with a few key differences.
For starters, there was surprisingly little sand. It was mostly rocks and the odd desert plant—some succulents and some bushes. Also, my skin was in good shape—praise be to SPF 60—and no Hollywood director hovered in a helicopter, aiming a Super Panavision 70 camera at me.
Finally, and most importantly, I was not a ruggedly handsome star of the cinematic arts. I was former MPD agent Kit Morris.
To be clear, I still am Kit Morris. The “former” designation only applies to my role as a badge-wearing magic cop.
At least, that was my assumption. Considering the mind-boggling bounty of twenty million smackeroos on my head, I felt awfully secure in my hypothesis that I was no longer on MagiPol’s payroll.
What absolutely rang true in that aforementioned Oscar-worthy scene was the trudging—uphill trudging, to be exact.
I was engaged in a nearly vertical, muscle-burning trek toward the top of a hill made of loose rock and patches of sand that were difficult to make out in the darkness—and I wasn’t alone.
Unlike the solitary movie stars, I had some unfriendly company on my tail.
Squinting, I pushed out my psychic senses, trying to pick up on the five—wait, make that six brains pursuing me.
Then I narrowed my focus to a specific psychic channel.
Kind of like that Hollywood director in the helicopter choosing a camera lens to determine the image’s tone and field of view.
This particular lens had some serious zoom power, allowing me to pinpoint the verbal communication center of my target’s brain.
Or maybe it was more like a spy microphone with a parabolic dish than a telephoto camera lens. Whatever. The point is this trick—known among mythics as clairaudience—lets me eavesdrop on my pursuers’ convo from a safe distance, their words permeating the language center of my own gray matter.
Whispered chatter filled my head, all in Arabic. I should have seen that coming. Oh well. What I’d really wanted was a head count of my hunters.
“This’ll do,” I said under my breath as I reached the top of the hill. A dusty breeze cooled the sweat on my face as I positioned myself in front of a spiky aloe vera plant.
The faint crunch of my pursuers’ footsteps reached my physical ear holes, so I targeted the closest mythic and switched to a new camera lens—my telepathic close-up lens.
As the men’s shadowy silhouettes grew visible in the nighttime gloom, I bounced from skull to skull, snooping on their current cognitions for less language-based thoughts.
I found a fragmented mess of images: the big, shiny twenty million dollars from my bounty page; my face a la my most recent MPD photo; and oddly, more than one guy was thinking about the same pendant artifact.
The moment I realized what those artifacts must be, four of the six brains I was skimming across went dark, shielded from my telepathic poking.
Anti-Psychica artifacts. Great. I really preferred the good ol’ days when the entire mythic world didn’t know I was a psycho warper.
The six bounty hunters crested the rocky hill and formed an evenly spaced semi-circle in front of me. Very organized, very coordinated. This wasn’t their first rodeo.
Scratch that. It wasn’t the first time for five of them, but in the second position from my left stood a kid no older than sixteen. His combat gear—gloves, vest, boots—was fresh and clean, and I didn’t need psychic powers to detect his nervous energy.
Welcome to the big leagues, rookie.
As their leader stepped forward, I pulled another lens from my psychic camera bag.
Honing my sense of their minds, I was relieved to discover that their artifacts weren’t thwarting my clairsentience.
I couldn’t get into their heads, but I could pick up the psychic vibes their brains were transmitting.
I was able to identify two mages in the crew: some kind of psychic—telekinetic, I was pretty sure—and two Arcana mythics, maybe three.
With a quick glance through my empath lens, I sensed the group’s emotions as a messy blend of adrenaline-induced aggression and wariness, plus a sharp note of uncertainty from the rookie.
“We only get paid if we take you in alive.”
The declaration came from the oldest of the three Arcana mythics.
He was a lean, athletic dude in his late fifties, with a red-and-white massar tied snugly around his head and an absolute masterpiece of a graying beard.
Given that the combat gloves he wore had metal wrapped around the knuckles, and there was a high probability runes were engraved in that metal, I’d guess he was a sorcerer.
Interestingly, his gear was nearly indistinguishable from that of the rookie and the third Arcana mythic on the rookie’s other side, who was either the younger brother or grown son of the leader—their beards were almost identical. The only difference was the amount of gray.
“Does that mean murder is off the menu?” I asked casually.
“We will hurt you if we must. Surrender and save yourself the pain.”
“You seem like a decent guy with a keen sense of facial fashion,” I observed.
“So I’m gonna let you in on a little secret: I’m not the stone-cold killer you think I am.
Maybe the seven of us could relax for a second, have a peaceful chat about why there’s such a ridiculously huge bounty on me, and then you can decide if you still want to—”
I broke off as I felt the veteran sorcerer’s intent to attack sharpen.
Before he could give a signal or utter an incantation, I halluci-bombed the group, ensnaring the two mythics without anti-Psychica artifacts—one of the mages and the telekinetic—and created a classic Split Kit who stormed straight at their leader.
In the instant before chaos broke out, I swallowed my disappointment that they hadn’t been willing to talk to me. None of the bounty hunters I’d encountered over the past three months had. Not a surprise considering how thoroughly the Consilium had demonized me to the unsuspecting mythic public.
Still, it sucked.
The pair of artifact-free bounty hunters reacted to the charging Split Kit with all the speed and decisiveness of seasoned combat mythics.
They unleashed their respective magic—electric magery and small, telekinetically hurled bronze projectiles—at my illusory doppelganger.
As the leader yelled at them to stop, I reached out with my telekinetic magic and yanked the anti-Psychica artifact off his neck, flinging it into the night sky.
My halluci-bomb hit his brain, and he recoiled at the sudden vision of Split Kit charging at him through a barrage of lightning.
It all went down in approximately three-point-five seconds, and before my nonexistent timer hit four, I was spinning on my heels and sprinting away from the combat team—straight for the edge of the cliff I’d deliberately positioned myself beside.
I leaped off the rocky bluff.
For a brief but lovely moment, I enjoyed the view of a thousand city lights spreading out as far as I could see. Then my feet met a flat stone roof, the impact softened with a touch of levitation.
That was the other big difference between me and the aforementioned ruggedly handsome, sunbaked star of the cinematic arts: the rocky hill I’d climbed wasn’t surrounded by a desolate wasteland; it rose above a quiet district on the edge of Muscat, the capital city of Oman and home to a million and a half people.
In the middle of the night, this neighborhood was visible only as a long, thin spindle of warm streetlights reflecting off the short white buildings that tapered to a single road leading into the surrounding hills.
In three long strides, I crossed the rooftop and jumped into the narrow alley below.
Boots thumped behind me as the bounty team performed a perfect rendition of “follow the leader.” I streaked down the alley as they dropped to ground level one after another, using my clairsentient lens to stay apprised of their approximate positions.
The veteran sorcerer was first in line, followed by mage one, mage two, the rookie, the third sorcerer, and—
With a satisfying blip, the telekinetic disappeared from my senses. I grinned. One down.
I took a left at a barber shop to avoid a sizzling blast from the bearded leader and darted down another even narrower alley.
The five bounty hunters split into two groups.
One sorcerer and two mages peeled off, while the veteran and the rookie stayed right on my heels.
I ducked behind a parked truck with gargantuan desert-trekking tires as the former unleashed another Arcana blast. The attack collided with the truck in a burst of periwinkle sparks, leaving its owner with a perplexing insurance claim.
I slipped through the door beside me and into a twenty-four-hour café that smelled so strongly of saffron and cardamom that I could taste it.
An older gentleman in a fashionably white dishdashah and ornately designed kuma gave me a welcoming smile, which I returned as I jogged straight through the otherwise empty establishment. My growling stomach was ready to trade my freedom for one delicious bite of mushaltat, but I pushed onward.
Leaving the cheese- and honey-stuffed flatbread to be eaten by some other hungry late-night patron, I zipped out into the dry, balmy air.
In the street outside the café, the other half of the bounty team skidded to a stop, their surprise at my sudden appearance coming into focus under the watch of my empath lens.
I took advantage of their momentary shock to snag the third sorcerer’s artifact necklace, whip it telekinetically free from its frazzled owner, and toss it onto a nearby rooftop.
Two artifacts left.