“I absolutely should be here,” he countered, mimicking our whispers. “I’m the night guard. And badge or not, you two can’t just—”

“You need to leave,” Lienna ordered. “This situation is—”

“Faustus!” a voice bellowed from inside.

Eggert tried to step around me. “Who’s in there?”

“Found something!” the same goon shouted eagerly.

“Found what?” Eggert muttered. “What’s a faustus?”

Cursing under my breath, I elbowed him back and peeked inside again. Faustus and several of his men were clustered around the wide steel pillar that concealed the secret entrance to Rigel’s underground office. They’d found the rune that unlocked the hidden door.

I whipped back to face Eggert. “Listen, Eggsy. Shit’s about to get ugly. In there right now is a nasty guy with a whole bunch of other nasty guys trying to do nasty things.”

“Shouldn’t you stop them? And what’s a faust—”

“Just stay out of the way.” Unable to waste any more time on the human, I inched into the doorway. “Lienna, don’t react to anything you’re about to see. Things are gonna get weird.”

“What do you mean?” she asked nervously.

I couldn’t spare the brainpower to exclude her mind. Gathering my focus, I pictured what I wanted—then unleashed a halluci-bomb on everyone around me.

As Faustus eagerly examined the rune, the metal began to glow with nonexistent heat. I couldn’t add any sensation to go with the visual, but the men recoiled anyway. The pillar glowed more and more brightly, the air rippling with heat waves that had no heat, then the whole thing melted like candle wax.

The metal slumped in a goopy, molten puddle, and Faustus stumbled backward, hands raised as though tempted to try reforming its shape.

“What happened?” he barked.

A tug on my jacket almost distracted me—Lienna was clutching the fabric as she leaned over my shoulder to peer into the room.

“Kit,” she whispered faintly. “What …”

Keeping the pillar invisified—good thing I’d practiced that so much—and maintaining the vision of the molten metal, I focused on a burnt hole in the floor. Light shimmered over it, and a glowing staircase appeared, leading downward.

Faustus whirled toward the light. “There! That’s it!”

The nice thing about magic: when people know it exists, they’re way more prone to believing far-fetched nonsense.

As he and his men approached it, I reached back and grabbed Lienna’s arm. Drawing her with me, I crept through the doorway. Eggert, thankfully, didn’t try to follow us—probably too unnerved by the hallucinatory magic I was tossing around.

Faustus and his men murmured over the glowing stairway, then Creepazoid gestured imperiously. One of his cronies inched closer, peered at the imaginary staircase, then took a bold step down.

His foot passed right through the illusion and he shrieked as he fell into the unseen basement. He landed with a loud crunch.

Lienna and I darted through the shadows along the wall. As Faustus recoiled from the not-a-staircase, I made it dissolve into light, revealing a black pit in the floor. The edges crumbled inward and the hole spread into a yawning chasm of darkness.

The men scrambled backward, shouting in alarm.

“What is this?” Faustus screeched.

As Lienna and I scooted past, she reached down and flicked off a nearby lantern, deepening the shadows. I increased the speed at which the hole was crumbling, hoping the men would run for it. We reached the pillar, and Lienna blindly stretched her hands out, finding the cold metal she could no longer see.

Faustus and his men retreated, tripping and stumbling on the debris-strewn floor. Fear clung to them. They were about to break.

Then Chucky the orangutan pyromage tripped over one of his overlarge feet. He pitched backward, caught himself, and lurched forward. He staggered for balance—and stepped squarely on the dark emptiness.

And, of course, his foot landed on the non-chasm floor, because it was all a hallucination.

“What—?” Faustus gasped.

Lienna slid her hands frantically over the invisible pillar, searching for the rune. I racked my brain for a new distraction, but Faustus’s head came up. He whirled around.

Our eyes met from across the room, and I braced for that whole pile of “ugly” I’d warned Eggert was coming.

Chapter Twenty-Two

“Kit Morris.” Faustus smiled his three-point smile. “You are indeed a rare and fascinating mythic—and soon to be a dead one.” He waved at his goons. “Kill him!”

A dozen mythics of varying classes, power, viciousness, and greasiness turned on Lienna and me. They unleashed their magic.

I made myself disappear. As Lienna gasped in shock, I yanked her behind the pillar, which fizzled back into view as my concentration went in a different direction—the “not dying” direction.

A maelstrom of magic and flying weapons blasted past the spot where we’d been standing. Sorcery, magery, and who knew what else hit the wall and exploded in a rainbow of sparks and debris.

I dropped the invisibility hallucination. Lienna goggled at me.

“You didn’t explain your power very well last time, did you?” she growled, pressed against the pillar.

“I did explain.” I stuck my head around the steel barrier keeping us from being barbequed, and with a second’s concentration, made the debris-strewn floor turn into an amusement park’s best funhouse room—bold, foot-high ripples of shiny black plastic. The advancing horde of mythics stumbled, staggered, and fell as they either tripped over the invisible debris or tried to step on waves that weren’t there.

“I can make people see hallucinations,” I added, breathless with brain-numbing focus. “Not my fault you lack imagination and assumed changing paint color was all I could do.”

“Not ‘hallucinations.’ Warps.”

“Huh?”

“Your magic—it’s a rare ability called psycho warping.” She gave me an eye roll that didn’t seem appropriate considering Faustus’s death squad was headed our way. “I looked it up after you used your magic to escape.”

My jaw hung open. No way. My powers had a name?

Not flimsy hallucinations after all. I was warping minds, and that was a hundred times cooler. I wasn’t a freak or the weird foster kid or that KCQ intern who did some kind of illusion magic. I was a psycho warper—

“It’s all an illusion!” Faustus shouted. “Ignore it!”

—who’d forgotten what he was supposed to be doing.

Swearing, I peeked around the pillar. Faustus and his men had spread out on both sides of the room and were closing in on us. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. And I didn’t think my hallucinations—my warps—would distract them again.

I glanced at Lienna. I knew her at least as well as Vera. I could probably make her invisible—but it had taken hours for Vera to adjust to losing half her senses. No way could I do that to Lienna in the middle of a fight.

Warning pinged through my brain, and I realized the air had gone misty. Clouds formed at the ceiling. The air sizzled.