I glanced around, doing my best to push down rising anxiety, wondering how much time we had before someone busted one of Lon’s windows to perform a little hot-wire surgery.

He patted the dash in answer to my worries. “Fort Knox.”

“What about Telly? What if he’s hanging out with some other Earthbounds who have amped-up knacks? We could be walking into a hornet’s nest.”

“Good thing you’ve got an early detection system.” Yeah, I did feel safer knowing he could sense sudden changes in emotion. He reached across my lap and stuck his hand between my knees.

“Hey!” I said, but it came out a little too hopeful to be a proper protest.

“You wish. Move.” His hand dove beneath my seat and surfaced with the sawed-off vintage Lupara.

“I distinctly remember telling you not to bring that thing,” I complained.

“Felt like you were daring me.” The thin lines around the outer corners of his squinty eyes tightened as his mouth quivered.

“Better than your full-sized shotgun, I suppose. At least you can hide this one.”

“You’re welcome. Come on.”

We trekked down a sidewalk webbed with cracks, my jeans brushing brittle, dead grass. The bridge running parallel had seen better days. Its concrete was marred and crumbling, girders rusted. The underbelly arching over the dry creek bed was hidden in shadow. If someone was down there, we couldn’t see them . . . but they couldn’t see us, either.

Lon stopped me where the sidewalk ended and the dusty slopes of the creek bed began. After a few moments, he glanced around and removed the Lupara from the inside of his jacket. He held up two fingers and nodded toward the shadow under the bridge. Okay, two against two. Hopefully it wasn’t two gigantic lunkheads with Merrimoth’s amped-up temperature knack. But as we took quiet, careful steps down the steep grade, following a well-worn path through dry grass, we didn’t see muscle-bound fire-breathers, or monsterific trolls waiting to collect a toll. Just three tattered camping tents lining the creek bed, a few lawn chairs, and two boys, shooting the shit and laughing.

One was dark-headed, but his back was facing us. The other was maybe sixteen, seventeen. Hard to tell. I could only see his profile. But he was husky and animated and begging the dark-haired one for something.

“Come on, let me just see it.”

The thought crossed my mind that we were about to break up some seedy yet kinda hot street punk blowjob exchange. In that case, maybe we should, you know, just wait until it was over. No sense in ruining a good show. Lon looked askance at me. I shrugged. Guess I was the only filthy-minded person, because the boy wasn’t trying to get in the other guy’s pants, he was tugging on a bag.

“You can’t have any. Forget it.”

“One drop.”

“You got three hundred bucks buried under the tent? I don’t think so. But if you wanna be my wingman, you can earn it.”

While the boy hesitated, the other one, the boy in charge, shifted the bag out of reach. It could’ve been any old backpack. And it was hard to tell if his hair was merely short or if he had a buzz cut, but he did have a blue halo. I homed in on his voice as Lon and I crept closer.

“You want me to help you sell it?”

“My supplies are running lower than I’d like, so I need to replenish. I want you to help me get a little more cash.”

“I thought you took it. Why don’t you just steal some more?”

“There are only two places I can get this, and the person I ganked it from . . . I just can’t go back there. Besides, he only had a little more, and I’m not interested in small-time stuff. I want to go straight to the source this time, and this guy’s got major security. So I’m gonna need money for some new equipment to get around it. I’m talking James Bond shit—plasma cutters, C-4 plastic, hacking software. All that costs. So I want you to help me clean out a few safes and registers.”

“I thought you and Noel were done with that.”

Mother trucker.

“Noel was a pussy. You want to help me, or not?” He reached inside his backpack and retrieved something. After peeling off a cuff of bubble wrap, he held it up for the other kid’s inspection. It was a small, clear bottle with a cork stopper, filled with bright red liquid. It looked exactly like some of my medicinal jars.

“Whoa,” the boy cooed, practically salivating. “How much is that worth?”

He wound the bubble wrap around the bottle and stuck it back in the backpack. “Five grand. Twenty-five doses of bionic juice,” he said proudly as he zipped the bag closed and set it on the ground behind his chair. As if he wanted to put just a little more distance between it and the chubby boy with the greedy eyes. “Enough to amp up twenty-five ordinary knacks.”

Bionic juice.

I glanced at Lon. It was a fucking medicinal. An elixir. Had to be. The old-fashioned bottle screamed I-was-brewed-by-an-occult-magician! My blood was boiling. I was done being stealthy.

A cloud of dust rose around my feet as I charged down the embankment, not giving a shit whether they heard me or not. There wasn’t much of anything with enough heft to be worth tossing our way—tents, cardboard, lawn chairs? No cars in the immediate vicinity. My blood practically sang with the urge to draw a shit-ton of current and zap him in the balls.

The boys looked up, startled, when I came barreling toward them. Both leapt from their chairs. Lon’s Lupara clicked beside me.

“Where’s my money, you little prick?” I shouted.