Turns out that was an annoying thing to do, and it earned me a solid punch to the shoulder.

Giving up, I chewed through a piece of beef and half listened to her threatening to toss me into the ocean if I invisified her food ever again. Not very creative, as far as threats went. What about shaving off my flesh? Transforming my eyeballs into pizza toppings? Sending my bones to another universe?

Damn, Lienna’s threats had been fun. Scary, but fun.

An unpleasant twinge ran through my gut as my thoughts wandered to the MPD agent. Where was she now? Still searching for me, or had she focused on my far more dangerous empath ex-friend? Had Blythe taken her off the case after my escape? Would the captain cripple Lienna’s career out of spiteful vengeance?

Sounded like something Blythe would do.

I speared a crispy broccoli tree with my fork. Maggie’s information about Blue Smoke circled in my brain. Their plans to steal from Cerberus. The secret vault Maggie had helped them create to seal away their prize, once they got it. Quentin wanted that prize, no doubt about it. He was picking up the pieces Rigel had abandoned in death, and the empath was more than capable of making a run at Cerberus on his own—especially now that he’d empathically charmed Maggie into helping him.

Maybe I should tip off Lienna. If I could get word to her …

Wait. What was I thinking? I wasn’t risking recapture for anything, especially not an MPD agent. Even if that agent was Lienna.

I forced my attention back to Vera, my dumbass brain making dumbass comparisons between the two women who’d knocked my life off course in very different ways. One tall and blond, the other dark-haired and slimly built, with personalities even more disparate than their physical appearances.

And as I thought about how each woman was far more than she appeared, it hit me.

Eyes widening, I really looked at Vera. This time, I didn’t concentrate on making the tall blond sitting across from me invisible. I focused on Vera—her whole presence. Her personality, her essence, her considerable violence. Her colorful animal tattoos, the gruff way she spoke, the rough athleticism of her movements.

And instead of erasing a physical body, I erased her very essence from the room.

She disappeared from her chair. I whooped in excitement—and she answered with a high-pitched scream. The hallucination snapped and she reappeared, face white, eyes bulging, and chest heaving. She’d held on to her fork, but a glob of salmon was lying on the table.

“You—what—that—” She gulped repeatedly. “A little warning, asshole!”

Yeah, maybe warning her would’ve been good. I could simultaneously see my hallucinations and see through them, so even when I invisified myself, my body was still present to all my senses. What would it be like to lose all sense of yourself? To not be able to see your own body or hear your own voice or breathing or footsteps?

I let her finish eating, then excitedly resumed my experimentation. Fun for me, not for her. Even worse than losing sight of herself, her sense of touch was substantially subdued while she was invisified—a side effect I hadn’t anticipated. And it turns out that when you can’t see, hear, or feel your own limbs, you get really clumsy.

We spent the rest of the evening and the next day working on it—me building up my stamina for this new psychic skill, and Vera building up her tolerance toward the erased-self syndrome I was inflicting upon her. She had to get used to moving while invisible, touching without feeling, and talking while deaf to her own voice.

That evening, we did a test run at the local supermarket. I halluci-bombed the entire shopping area and put Vera into her unsettling state of nonexistence, then we walked around the store together, picking up more snack food.

She lifted a frozen entrée of ginger beef and asked in a strangely labored voice, “What do you want?”

“Dr. Pepper and All Dressed chips. Oh! And some cheese!”

“What are you, like, thirteen years old?”

“Make it fancy cheese, then.”

She fulfilled my request with stunted movements, and we walked out of the store with an armful of deliciousness, completely undetected. A block away, I dropped the halluci-bomb. Vera reappeared. Heaving a sigh of relief, she passed me a Dr. Pepper.

I cracked the can open and took a swig. “Are we ready?”

She shrugged. “As ready as we’ll ever be.”

A glowing endorsement if I’d ever heard one.

Chapter Seventeen

Heist day. Who was excited? Vera definitely was. Me … not so much. But this was the price for a handcuff-free trip out of the country.

With the morning sun peeking through a thin layer of clouds that would thicken into gloomy overcast by midafternoon, I climbed onto Vera’s motorcycle behind her and we made the trek across the bay and back into the city. Faustus’s sale was scheduled for that night, and we aimed to be at his restaurant by noon.

Why not sneak in during the sale and use a few good hallucinations to hide our greedy mitts snatching up Vera’s artifacts? Because there’d be way too many people, way too much chance for error, and way too much extra security for the very purpose of foiling thieves.

So, being oh so clever, we’d steal her artifacts back before the sale. No way could that go wrong.

I was chewing the inside of my cheek as the bike rolled to a stop at a red light on the Eastside. On the corner across the intersection was a cube-shaped brick building with an unwelcoming front door tucked into a shadowy nook. I squinted at it.

“Hey, I think I’ve seen that place before,” I shouted over the rumble of the bike’s motor. “It’s a bar, right?”

Vera shook her head. “You don’t wanna go there.”

“Isn’t that where they filmed Deadpool?”

“That’s a guild—the Crow and Hammer.”

A ping of dread struck me. Okay, not a cool film location. The Crow and Hammer was the guild that had toasted KCQ into blackened debris, then ground what remained—including my not-so-bad life—into dust under their fancy-pants combat boots. KCQ might have picked that fight, but the Crow and Hammer had sure as hell finished it.

I didn’t know much about the guild, but I did know I didn’t want to hang around and find out if they might recognize a KCQ escapee. With a casual glance around, I dropped a quick halluci-bomb on every vehicle in sight and turned all the traffic lights red.

Tires squealed as half a dozen shocked drivers slammed the brakes.

“Go,” I called to Vera.

“The light—”

“Just do it!”

She hit the gas. With a rubbery screech, we were across the empty intersection, and I dropped the hallucination. Horns honked angrily as we accelerated away from the Crow and Hammer—and toward Faustus Trivium. It felt like an “out of the frying pan and into the fire” situation.

I briefly questioned the judiciousness of my life choices, then swatted the notion away. Now was not the time for wisdom. Now was the time for charging headfirst into the lair of a dangerous criminal!

We stashed the bike between a dumpster and a compost bin a couple blocks away from Corky’s and walked the rest of the way. Before we were within eyesight of the restaurant, we paused in a sheltered nook behind a dumpster.

Step One: The Anti-Vera Halluci-Bomb.