Okay, so I wasn’t hating the Mini.

That said, it was still no Wizard-Mobile.

The Wizard-Mobile had personality. Weight. Presence. It rattled like a haunted toolbox and handled like a stubborn ox, but it was mine. Ozzy’s Mini, by contrast, felt unnervingly eager. Tight steering. Fast response. The kind of car that seemed to encourage bad decisions simply by proving it could survive them.

Which was unfortunate, because I was currently full of bad decisions.

I hate Toronto gridlock. I have said this before, I will say it again, and if I ever die in this city there is a good chance my ghost will continue complaining about traffic as a matter of principle.

But tonight it had an upside.

It was screwing over Nadali just as much as everyone else.

The bronze coin hanging from Ozzy’s keychain tugged in my fingers with a steady, needling insistence, warm with sympathetic magic. Every few seconds I fed it a little pulse of will and felt the direction sharpen—forward, then slightly east, then forward again, dragging me through the clogged arteries of the city after a man who probably thought he was making a clean getaway.

He wasn’t.

He was just stuck in traffic with the rest of us.

I gripped the wheel one-handed, the coin in the other, and threaded the Mini through gaps the Wizard-Mobile would have regarded as theoretical. Between an SUV and a delivery van. Around a pickup that had decided turn signals were for the weak. Past a rideshare driver who was half out the window yelling something I chose, for my own peace of mind, not to interpret.

The Mini slipped where the van would have wedged.

That tiny size was criminally useful.

Also, I suspected, technically criminal.

I shot past a line of idling cars, tires humming against the lane marker as I straddled the edge of legality and physics. Horns erupted behind me in a chorus of outrage.

“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered. “I’m also having a stressful evening.”

A man in a grey sedan rolled down his window long enough to inform me exactly what he thought of my driving and, by implication, my ancestry.

“Noted!” I shouted back, not looking at him. “Counterpoint—evil wizard!”

He did not appear persuaded.

The coin tugged harder.

Nadali was still ahead.

Close enough now that the magic had stopped feeling abstract and started feeling urgent. Not hot, exactly. More like a thread pulled taut between two points, vibrating whenever I drifted off the cleanest line. He was moving, but not fast. Couldn’t be. Not here. Not with Toronto doing what Toronto did best and turning every road after dark into a negotiation with despair.

I ducked down a side lane to avoid a red wall of brake lights, cut across a nearly empty turning pocket, then slid back into the main street before a bus could convert my borrowed Mini into modern sculpture.

The engine whined, high and determined.

“Alright,” I said to the dashboard, “you are proving surprisingly game.”

The car answered by taking a corner so neatly I almost forgave it for not being muraled.

Almost.

Streetlights strobed across the windshield. Neon reflected off wet patches on the road. Somewhere a siren wailed in the distance, close enough to make me reconsider several of my recent choices and then, just as quickly, decide I was committed now.

If a cop had seen me weaving through traffic like this, I’d have been arrested, fined, or at minimum given a lecture I did not have time to receive.

But no police cruisers appeared.

Just cars.

Endless, frustrated cars.

And one very irritated wizard in a borrowed Mini chasing a magical racketeer through the city with an enchanted coin and an increasingly personal sense of grievance.

The tug shifted.

Left now.

Then sharply right.

I swore under my breath and yanked the wheel, slipping around a cab and cutting down a narrower street lined with convenience stores, shuttered shopfronts, and the kind of tired fluorescent lighting that makes every block look one argument away from becoming a crime scene.

“He changed route,” I muttered.

Or traffic changed it for him.

Didn’t matter.

I stayed on him.

The coin pulled again, stronger this time, the sympathetic link humming in my hand like a nervous pulse. Somewhere ahead, Nadali was close enough that the magic between the two coins had stopped acting like divination and started acting like a leash.

Good.

That meant I was gaining.

Bad.

That also meant I was getting close enough for him to notice if he was the sort of wizard who paid attention to the little hairs rising on the back of his neck when fate turned inconvenient.

I exhaled slowly and eased off the gas just enough to stop looking like an immediate public menace.

No point catching him if I rear-ended him into a streetlamp.

No point catching him if he looked up in a mirror and saw a wild-eyed shirt-ruining lunatic in a red Mini driving like vengeance had taken the wheel.

The coin tugged once more.

Forward.

Steady.

No more sudden turns.

I narrowed my eyes and peered through the river of red taillights ahead.

“Come on, Nadali,” I murmured. “Where exactly are you going?”

The Mini rolled up behind a cluster of stopped cars at another light, engine purring with the smug efficiency of something built this century, and the bronze coin in my hand grew warmer.

Not much.

Just enough.

Enough to tell me he wasn’t blocks away anymore.

He was close.

Very close.

Close enough that if I looked carefully through the traffic—

I might actually see him.

The tracking spell tugged hard at my senses, sharp enough now that it stopped feeling like intuition and started feeling like a fishhook lodged somewhere behind my ribs.

I followed the pull to a car that looked profoundly unsuited to Canada.

Low. Sleek. Expensive. Italian, probably. The sort of machine built for vanity, speed, and climates where road salt wasn’t treated like a seasonal sacrament. I couldn’t have named the make if you’d put a gun to my head, but I knew the type on sight: too much money, too little clearance, and an engine that probably purred in a language more refined than mine.

Nadali was pulling onto a side road.

That was a problem.

Because if he got open pavement and enough room to breathe, there was no chance in hell I was keeping up with that thing in a borrowed Mini. Ozzy’s car had pep, but pep only gets you so far when the other guy is driving a missile with leather seats.

I sighed.

Because I had exactly one immediate solution, and it was the kind of solution that gets you fined, arrested, or featured in a very confusing eyewitness statement.

I try not to use magic too openly around mundane people. Most spellcasters don’t. History has taught us caution. Caution about attention, about explanations, about police reports that become court dates. There’s a long tradition in the magical community of asking one very important question before you cast in public:

Can I get away with this?

Sometimes, though, experience teaches a second rule.

Sometimes you have to say to hell with the rules and do something dangerous and stupid because it is the right thing to do.

I did a quick risk assessment.

Traffic around me: thin.

Pedestrians: distant.

Witness angle: poor.

Potential for clear recollection: minimal.

Acceptable levels of bad idea: exceeded, but survivable.

Good enough.

I rolled down the window, jammed my knee against the steering wheel to keep the Mini pointed mostly straight, and leaned out with the lightning rod braced in both hands.

I aimed at Nadali’s rear tires.

And, as one might say, let her rip.

The rod answered like it had been waiting all night.

A harsh blue-white crackle crawled up the copper coils, sparked at the iron tip, then snapped forward in a tight, ugly lance of electricity. Not a cinematic thunderbolt from the heavens. Something smaller. Meaner. Focused. The kind of lightning that doesn’t care about drama because it knows exactly how dangerous it is.

It ripped through the air with a sound like the world tearing canvas.

And hit.

The bolt struck the rear of Nadali’s fancy little midlife crisis with a violent spray of sparks, arcing across the chassis and into the tires. Rubber popped. Electronics screamed. For half a second the whole car lit up underneath in a bright stuttering halo of angry current, like some saint of poor decisions had laid hands on it and judged it wanting.

The rear end fishtailed.

Hard.

The car lurched sideways, one tire shredding as the other tried to decide whether traction was a principle or merely a suggestion.

I grinned despite myself and hauled back inside the Mini before I lost an eye to a lamppost.

This is why lightning is cool.

Not just because it’s flashy, though it absolutely is. Not just because every wizarding child with sense sees their first thunderstorm and thinks yes, I want that in my hands someday. It’s cool because lightning is fast, decisive, and deeply disrespectful to things that rely on orderly function.

You know what a fireball does? It burns.

You know what lightning does?

It ruins systems.

Engines. Nerves. Circuits. Muscles. Judgment. Anything with pathways, pressure, conductivity, or the audacity to think it was operating smoothly a second ago. Lightning is not subtle, but it is honest. It reaches out, finds the weak points, and introduces them to consequences at the speed of bad news.

I have fanboyed over that since I was a kid.

Still do.

Ahead of me, Nadali’s car slewed halfway across the side road with a shriek of tortured rubber and offended engineering.

“Oh, that is deeply satisfying,” I muttered, tightening my grip on the wheel as I swung after him. “Probably expensive, too.”

The little red Mini dove into the turn behind him, engine whining with determination, while the bronze tracker coin in my palm all but sang.

Got you now, you smug bastard.

Nadali’s car came to a stop the hard way.

Not a graceful deceleration.

Not even a controlled skid.

No—he plowed through a line of parking meters like they’d personally offended him, clipped a steel lamp post hard enough to ring it like a bell, and finally ground to a halt in a twisted, expensive heap that would make any insurance adjuster weep.

I winced.

“…Yeah, that’s totaled.”

If I was lucky, the crash had knocked him out.

If I was real lucky, it had broken something important.

But as I pulled the Mini into a tire-screeching stop behind him, I already knew better.

Wards.

Guys like Nadali didn’t just wear jewelry for fashion. That much gold wasn’t decoration—it was layered protection, reactive enchantments, impact dispersal, probably a few contingency triggers tucked in for good measure.

Which meant—

He was already moving.

His door flew open just as mine did.

We stepped out at the same time.

He looked rough, I’ll give him that. His nose was bloodied, a thin line of red trailing down over his lip, but considering his face had just tried to make friends with a lamp post at speed, it was… honestly impressive that was all he had to show for it.

Ward cushioning.

Definitely.

I should have attacked him right there.

Closed the distance.

Ended it before he got his bearings.

Instead—

Because I am, apparently, physically incapable of letting a moment like this pass—

I pointed at his wrecked car and said:

“Looks like you’ve got a little ding in your front end.”

I tilted my head.

“I bet that’ll buff right out.”

There was a beat.

Just long enough for the joke to land.

Just long enough for me to realize—

Yeah.

That was a mistake.

I’m not sure furious is a strong enough word for the look in Nadali’s eyes.

Honestly, I’d need a thesaurus, a pot of coffee, and a few solid hours of uninterrupted research to gather enough adjectives to do that expression justice.

His jaw locked.

Then he snarled, “You will pay for this, hedge wizard.”

My smart ass was already committed, so I shot back, “Hedge wizard who just totaled your expensive overcompensation-mobile!”

He clenched his fists, and I felt the stir of power.

His fingers flexed—subtle, practiced—and the rings I’d suspected were binding foci glimmered. I hoped, deeply, that he couldn’t just re-summon the elementals on demand. At least not immediately. But even if the elementals themselves were out of play, that didn’t mean the rings were harmless.

Bound objects like that develop strong attunement.

And strongly attuned objects make excellent magical focuses.

So I wasn’t entirely shocked when one of the rings flared red and a spiraling lance of flame came screaming at me.

In the split second before I became a cautionary tale, I was very happy I’d put in all those hours of prep.

Also very happy I’d correctly pegged Nadali as an elementalist and binder rather than, say, a necromancer.

Or just a guy with a gun.

I was especially grateful he’d opened with fire.

Fire is one of the most common offensive elements in magic. That means two things: first, everyone uses it. Second, everyone who survives long enough learns how to defend against it.

I turned sharply and threw my coat wide.

The flame struck—

—and split.

It washed over the warding inside the coat and sheared away from me in a bright, violent flare, scoring a sizzling line across the asphalt that smoked and bubbled where it hit. Heat rolled over me, close enough to sting, but it didn’t catch.

Didn’t burn.

Didn’t cook me alive where I stood.

I let myself smile.

Just a little.

Inside the lining of my coat I had stitched a small wooden plaque etched with several Brandbriefe—protective fire-symbols borrowed from Pennsylvania Dutch hexcraft. One of my favorite anti-fire wards, simple and ugly in the way all the best practical magic tends to be.

Nadali’s eyes narrowed.

Good.

Let him learn the hard way that I hadn’t shown up to this fight unprepared.

I adjusted my stance and gripped the lightning rod in one hand.

Rather than counterattack immediately, I chose to stay on the defensive.

Partly because I needed to. I’d already burned through a good chunk of my reserves fighting the elementals, and Nadali had come into this part of the evening a lot fresher than I had. Partly because I still wasn’t sure what my best next move was, and in a duel hesitation is survivable if you disguise it as patience.

I could have hurled another lightning bolt.

But any half-competent spellslinger will tell you: never just copy and repeat the same move in a magic duel.

The easiest way to explain it is boxing.

If a boxer only ever throws uppercuts, eventually even an idiot figures out how to deal with him. You drop your guard, shift your weight, bait the angle, and then punish the predictability. Magic works much the same way. The first firebolt surprises. The second confirms a pattern. By the third, your opponent isn’t fighting your spell anymore—they’re fighting you, because they know what you’re about to do before you do it.

And if your enemy starts reading your habits in a duel?

That’s when you die stupid.

So.

Defense first.

Let him spend power. Let him show me what he liked to do under pressure. Let him wear himself down before I committed to a bigger play.

Hopefully I wouldn’t die in the process.

Hopefully.

This time all of his rings flickered.

Not at random.

In sequence.

I caught the colors as they lit one after the other across his hands—red, green, blue, orange.

Fire.

Earth.

Water.

Air.

The full set.

That was bad.

Not just because he could channel them individually, but because it implied something worse: he was comfortable enough with elemental theory to start mixing forces on the fly.

That’s where elemental magic gets dangerous in a way most people don’t appreciate.

A straight blast of flame? Simple.

A whip of water? Obvious.

A gust of cutting wind, a wall of stone, a bolt of lightning? All dangerous, all understandable.

Admixture is different.

Admixture is where elemental magic stops being a weapon and starts becoming a chemistry set wielded by a psychopath. It’s where you get creative. Weird. Unpleasant. It turns the duel into a grab bag where your opponent can pull out almost anything if they understand the interactions well enough.

Stone shards materialized in the air around him first—dark, jagged little wedges hanging weightless in a rough halo.

Then they began to glow.

Not red.

Not even orange.

A deep, hungry heat that softened their edges until the stone sagged into molten slag, hovering there in a cluster of floating liquid fire-rock.

Then the other elements moved in.

Air shaped the mass.

Water flash-cooled it.

Earth locked it.

Fire hardened the final temper.

I’ll admit it: the result was beautiful.

A hovering array of black obsidian spikes, glossy as oil, each one as long as my hand and wickedly elegant. If he’d done it purely to show off his control over elemental admixture, I would have had to tip my hat to the craftsmanship.

Unfortunately for me, he was doing it to turn me into a cautionary tale.

And what mattered more than the artistry was the fact that I needed cover now.

Why couldn’t he have just stuck to energy attacks?

I was prepared for fire, lightning, crude elemental blasts, maybe a wall of force or a summoned lash of water—not a floating execution rack of razor-black death he could aim with his will.

So I did what any sane man would do.

I ran.

The nearest cover was a city bench.

Not ideal.

Not even slightly ideal.

But it was metal, bolted down, and between me and imminent perforation, which in that moment qualified it as a fortress.

I bolted for it, hearing the air behind me hiss as the obsidian volley launched.

I hit the pavement hard, more of a dive than a graceful drop, and covered the vulnerable parts of myself as the black spikes came screaming in.

They struck the sidewalk behind me with sharp, brittle cracks, shattering in sprays of volcanic glass. That part I’d expected. Obsidian is terrifyingly sharp, but it’s still glass at heart.

Brittle.

Breakable.

Unfortunately, “breakable” does not mean “harmless.”

One of the spikes clipped my thigh on the way past.

I felt it instantly—a hot, clean line of pain as it sliced through my protections, through denim, and into flesh.

“Ah, dammit—”

There went my second-favorite pair of jeans.

The obsidian hammered into the steel bench in front of me with a series of brutal metallic pings and snapping cracks. Fragments burst outward. I tucked my head, covered my face, and felt tiny needles of pain across my forearms as shattered slivers of volcanic glass scored skin wherever my sleeves didn’t fully protect me.

My eyes, thankfully, were safe.

My face too.

Small mercies.

Then a sharper pain drove through my left arm—deep enough to make my breath hitch.

I didn’t look at it right away.

No point admiring the damage while he still had momentum.

I waited until the barrage stopped, until the last fragments finished skittering across pavement and clinking harmlessly off the bench frame.

Then I risked a glance.

Yeah.

That was bad enough.

A blade of black volcanic glass was buried in my left forearm, jutting out at an angle that made my stomach clench in immediate professional disapproval.

I looked up through the mess of broken obsidian, blood, and bent posture.

Nadali was still standing where he’d been, immaculate except for the nose I’d helped improve earlier, rings glowing faintly, expression composed in that infuriating way men only manage when they think they’re in complete control.

I bared my teeth at him.

“Okay,” I muttered through the pain, gripping the rod tighter in my right hand.

“Now I’m starting to take this personally.”

“Hedge wizard!” he snarled, stepping forward through the wreckage with the kind of offended dignity only a rich occultist can manage after totaling an Italian sports car.

“You should have stayed out of my business. And now you are going to die for what? For some personal moral victory? Because I picked on one of your little hedge-witch friends?”

I grunted, one hand still braced against the bench as my arm throbbed around the chunk of obsidian embedded in it.

And in that moment I remembered—again—how much I hate evil wizards.

Hand to God, no one—and I mean no one—does pretentious, self-justifying asshole quite like a sorcerer on a power trip. Give an ordinary thug money and he’ll break your knees. Give a bad wizard power and he’ll lecture you while doing it, like cruelty is a philosophy and he’s just doing guest faculty work.

I spat blood to the side and pushed myself up a little straighter.

“Yeah,” I said, breath rough but steady. “That’s about the size of it.”

His lip curled.

“You would throw your life away for shopkeepers and hedge practitioners? For small people with small magic?”

There it was.

Not greed.

Contempt.

The kind of contempt that turns a man into a racket. The belief that because someone’s power is humble, domestic, practical, or unglamorous, it doesn’t count unless men like him monetize it first.

I adjusted my grip on the lightning rod and let my eyes stay on him, not the rings.

“Funny thing about small magic,” I said. “It tends to belong to people.”

He spread his hands slightly, as if indulging me.

“And?”

“And people,” I said, “tend to get real fucking angry when you threaten their friends.”

The smile that answered me was all teeth and superiority.

“No,” Nadali said softly. “They get afraid. That is the point.”

I wanted to hit him.

Spiritually, morally, physically—dealer’s choice.

Instead I stayed where I was, buying time, letting him talk. Letting him feel big. Evil men love hearing their own rationale echo back off city concrete. It makes them sloppy. Makes them certain. Makes them think the bleeding guy with volcanic glass in his arm is already halfway dead.

And maybe I was.

But halfway dead still leaves room for a counterspell.

He smirked.

You know the kind.

The kind worn by someone who genuinely enjoys hurting people and mistakes the rush that comes with power for proof of superiority.

He raised both hands.

Two rings flashed.

Air and fire.

And my brain, being deeply unhelpful, immediately started listing possibilities.

Superheated wind.

A pressure-fed gout of flame.

A cutting blast of plasma-adjacent elemental nonsense that would either reduce me to charcoal or turn the ground around me into a puddle of glowing slag while I stood there appreciating my tactical mistakes.

None of the outcomes were ideal.

Thankfully, the cave man part of my brain came through with a solution elegant in its simplicity:

Throw something at him.

Yes, yes, I know. It sounds stupid.

But if it’s stupid and it works, then from a wizard’s perspective it becomes “improvised applied theory.”

I gritted my teeth, ignored the pain in my arm, and pushed power into my hand.

Because earth—my best element—isn’t just rock and stone. Not if you actually study it. Earth, from an academic arcane perspective, is mass. Weight. Attraction. Magnetic alignment. Gravitational influence. The conversation between objects and the planet that insists they stay where they are until something with enough will says otherwise.

We Blackwells are very good at that kind of thing.

Academic arcana.

Occult engineering.

Magical math.

The kind of work that makes other spellcasters roll their eyes until it caves their sternum in.

So yes, on one level this was caveman logic.

Throw stick.

But the rapid equations running through my head as I poured magic into the lightning rod—calculating spin, rotational stability, momentum transfer, return vector, localized gravity distortion—were, in my completely unbiased opinion, pure nerd art.

I hurled it.

The iron-and-copper rod left my hand with a hard, vicious snap of motion, spinning as it crossed the space between us. Not just thrown—accelerated. I fed it a tight little knot of manipulated gravity and magnetic sympathy, enough to make the thing cut through the air like the universe had briefly agreed it was heavier, faster, and more offended than physics normally allowed.

It spun faster.

And faster.

A blur of copper coils and iron gleam.

Not a boomerang.

A guided argument.

Nadali saw it coming—but too late.

He was mid-cast, hands shaping the admixture, power gathered and unstable between them. The rings were already lit, his spellwork halfway born, and that was the moment when a caster is most vulnerable—when intent has left the mind but not yet settled into reality.

The rod hit him square in the torso.

The sound—

God.

The sound was almost cathartic.

A thick, ugly whump of metal meeting expensive wizard ribs with conviction.

Nadali doubled over, the spell collapsing in a spray of broken sparks and dissipating heat as his focus shattered. The air-fire construct guttered out before it could become whatever horrifying thing he’d intended.

Even better, the impact sent him stumbling back against the crumpled front of his own car, blood already on his mouth and fresh pain all over his very tailored evening.

And because I am, in fact, allowed to show off too—

The rod rebounded.

Not wildly. Not by luck.

It spun back along the return path I’d built into the working, rotational momentum bleeding just enough to keep it catchable as it came screaming back through the air.

I lifted my right hand.

Caught it clean.

The weight slammed back into my palm, familiar and solid, and I rolled with the impact like I’d meant to do that all along.

Then I looked at him.

And smirked right back.

“What was that about me being a hedge wizard again” 

I didn’t know how much of Nadali’s protections I’d just smashed through.

But the blood on his mouth was a promising sign.

The way he sucked in a breath—sharp, involuntary, offended—and then coughed, shoulders hitching as one hand went instinctively to his ribs? That told me more than any divinatory tool could have. I’d gotten through something. Maybe cracked a rib. Maybe bruised a lung. Maybe just hurt him badly enough that his wards had failed to turn impact into abstraction.

Good.

Fair trade, all things considered.

He’d put an obsidian blade through my left forearm. Opened a neat line in my thigh. Pepper-sliced my arms with enough shattered black glass that I was going to be finding little cuts for the next week every time I showered or made the mistake of touching lemon juice.

So if he was suddenly learning that internal organs are delicate and ribs are more suggestion than certainty under enough force?

I could live with that.

Pain was trying very hard to reintroduce itself to me in full.

The arm throbbed.

The thigh burned.

My side still ached from the earlier knife wound and the potion knitting it back together with all the bedside manner of barbed wire and whiskey.

I forced myself to step forward anyway.

That was something my father had taught me early, and not gently: you usually can’t say no to pain. Pain is honest. It is the body filing a complaint in the loudest possible terms. It tells you what is broken, what is failing, what needs to stop.

But you can change your relationship with it.

You can make it background instead of foreground.

You can let it become information instead of command.

You can learn to carry it without obeying it.

That’s the difference between surviving a fight and folding under one.

So I stepped forward.

Not because it didn’t hurt.

Because it did.

Because every limping, bleeding step told him I was still in this.

And I think that shook him more than the throw had.

I’m fairly certain I looked like hell—shirt bloodstained, jeans cut open, one arm leaking around a shard of volcanic glass, coat singed, face drawn with exhaustion and bad intent. Not exactly the picture of triumphant wizardly authority.

But I was still moving toward him.

He was the one trying to recover.

That mattered.

“Everyone in this city,” I said, dragging the words out between breaths as I advanced, “is going to learn what you’ve been doing.”

Nadali tried to straighten, but I saw the hesitation in it now. The caution. The dawning awareness that this wasn’t the clean little intimidation exercise he’d budgeted for.

“Between me,” I continued, voice rough and low, “Bailey and Ozzy…”

I tightened my grip on the rod.

“…you’re about to learn what it feels like when you fuck around and find out.”

I kept walking.

And for the first time since this whole mess started—

He looked like he was considering the possibility that I might actually mean it.

I closed the distance and came down on Nadali hard.

Rod in my right hand, I stepped in and drove a right hook across his jaw—no flourish, no spell, just weight and timing and the kind of intent that doesn’t need translation. The rod turned my fist into something denser, more honest—like wrapping your knuckles in iron and letting gravity do the arguing.

Contact.

Clean.

A sharp, satisfying crack that traveled up my arm and into my shoulder, the kind of impact that tells you you’ve connected exactly where you meant to. His head snapped to the side, body following a fraction too late, balance gone in that helpless, human way no amount of gold jewelry can fix.

For a split second—just a heartbeat—I appreciated it.

Force applied.

Momentum transferred.

Structure compromised.

There is a kind of beauty to physics when it works in your favor.

Then he spun out and hit the pavement.

Hard.

I stepped in over him before he could recover, looming as he groaned and tried to draw breath that wouldn’t quite come right. I planted my boot on his sternum and leaned down, pinning him in place with enough pressure to remind him that breathing was now a privilege I controlled.

His hand came up reflexively.

Bad move.

I caught it, slammed it flat to the pavement, and stripped the rings off his fingers one by one, not gently. Each one resisted just enough to be annoying, then slid free with a faint tug of displaced magic.

Into my pocket.

Next hand.

Same treatment.

Pinned. Forced flat. Rings removed.

His pain wasn’t my concern.

Disarming him was.

By the time I got to the last one—a gold pinky ring with a gaudy little ruby that practically screamed compensation—his resistance had dropped off into pained, unfocused movement.

Good.

I pulled it free—

—and something small and wet caught my eye as it skittered across the pavement.

I paused.

Ran my tongue along my teeth.

Counted.

“…Huh.”

Then I kicked him.

Not dramatically.

Just hard enough in the ribs to knock the air back out of him and keep him down while I bent and picked up the object between my fingers.

A tooth.

Bloody.

Recently vacated.

I held it up for a moment, turning it slightly in the light.

Then I looked back at him.

I gave him a few seconds.

Let the pain settle in.

Let the reality of the situation catch up.

Then I spoke.

Slow.

Clear.

Measured.

“How about I make you a deal.”

His eyes flicked up to me, dazed but listening.

“You leave Toronto,” I said, “and you don’t come back.”

I held the tooth up just enough for him to see it.

“And I don’t give this to the covens after I tell them you tried to extort Bailey.”

I let that hang.

Let him do the math.

Then, because I wanted to make absolutely sure he understood the stakes, I tilted my head slightly and added:

“Because once this beauty finds its way into a poppet…”

I rolled the tooth between my fingers.

“…and that poppet finds its way into a jar of graveyard dirt and rusted nails…”

I met his eyes.

“…you’re going to learn exactly why no one pisses off witches.”

Silence.

Just his breathing.

My heartbeat.

And the quiet, ticking moment where he decided what kind of night this was going to be for him.

He looked at me.

Then at the tooth in my hand.

And I could see the implications sinking in.

Teeth are excellent for hex work. Hair is useful. Blood is better. Blood is always good if you can get it fresh. But teeth? Teeth are durable. Personal. Intimate in a way that makes most people’s skin crawl. They don’t rot quickly, don’t evaporate, and they hold onto the shape of a person in ways sympathetic magic finds very easy to love.

That’s part of why tooth faeries exist.

Once upon a time, some long-dead parent somewhere realized that leaving bits of your child lying around was a horrible idea in a world with witches, goblins, and the occasional magical lunatic. Deals were struck. Coins and little toys exchanged hands. Teeth disappeared into whatever strange disposal system the fae maintain, and as far as I know none of my baby teeth were ever used to curse me, summon me, or melt my organs from a distance.

So I assume their process is either ethical disposal—

Or something weird and faerie-adjacent.

Honestly, with them, both options may be true at once.

Anyway.

I let the tooth catch the light between my fingers and crouched a little so Nadali couldn’t mistake the sincerity in my face for bluff.

“So,” I said, voice calm now, almost conversational, “how about it, Nadali?”

He glared up at me, one hand pressed to his ribs, blood bright on his mouth and chin.

“You and I part ways. You fuck off. You become some other wizard’s headache.”

I held the tooth up a little higher.

“And we don’t get to find out just how inventive and vindictive a coven can be when somebody decides to bully their favorite kitchen witch.”

I let that sit there.

Not as a threat exactly.

More as a public service announcement.

Because witches take many things in stride.

Exploding kettles. Poltergeists. Bad breakups. Seasonal curses. The collapse of civilization as a concept.

But if you hurt one of their own? If you lean on one of the quiet, nourishing, community-minded ones who makes people feel safe?

That tends to get personal very fast.

Nadali spat a mouthful of blood to the side and wheezed through cracked teeth and injured pride.

“Fine,” he rasped. “Deal.”

His eyes burned with hatred sharp enough to cut.

“But this isn’t over between you and me, hedge wizard.”

I nodded slowly.

That part didn’t bother me much.

He could hate me.

He could obsess over me.

He could nurse his bruised ego and dream up increasingly elaborate ways to curse, hex, or murder me.

That was acceptable.

So long as he kept it focused on me.

So long as he stopped dragging shopkeepers and small practitioners and good people into his little empire-building tantrum.

And, if I was honest, I had the sinking feeling I had just become the center of his attention for a very long time.

Still.

Better me than Bailey.

Better me than Ozzy.

Better me than the next independent merchant who didn’t know how to defend themselves against a man like this.

I leaned in just slightly, enough to make sure he heard every word.

“I burn the tooth,” I said, “after I know you’ve left this city and left the people in it well enough alone.”

I held his gaze.

“Understood?”

He nodded.

So did I.

Then I stepped back.

Because the police were almost certainly on their way.

More specifically, the RCMP and probably the Special Containment Unit. Whatever locals had called in, it would have sounded weird enough to justify the SCU taking interest, and neither Nadali nor I had any desire to spend the evening explaining ourselves to a bureaucratic branch of the government whose entire job was dealing with superpowered messes after they’d already become everyone’s problem.

I walked away first.

Not hurried.

Not slow.

Just with the kind of deliberate calm that says this conversation is over.

Then I reached the Mini, laid a hand on the roof, and pushed a little of my remaining magic into it.

Not much.

Just enough.

A glamour blurred the plates, softening the numbers into something cameras and tired human eyes would struggle to hold onto. Then I laid a second, smaller working over the paint—just a tiny transmutative nudge to shift the red into a slick electric blue.

I kept the racing stripe.

Because I have taste.

The glamour settled over the little car like fresh polish, subtle but effective. Not enough to fool anyone for hours under close inspection, but plenty to get me out of the immediate area before official headaches arrived.

Behind me, Nadali was still on the pavement, hurt, humiliated, and no doubt mentally composing several future attempts on my life.

Good.

Let him.

I slid into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and took one last look at him through the side mirror.

“You know,” I said, mostly to myself, “by standards, I’m having a pretty good night.”

Then I pulled away, just as distant sirens started to thread their way into the evening air.