“Focus, hon,” Jane said. She reached inside my knee-length leather coat and pulled back the left flap of it, revealing the holster at my side. She pulled out the foot-long metal cylinder and handed it to me. “Here, this should help.”

The weight of my retractable bat felt good in my hand. I clicked the safety off it by hitting Jane’s initials on its keypad—JCF for Jane Clayton-Forrester—and it sprung to its full lethal length. There was power in holding it.

We continued creeping along as quietly as we could. The navigation was hard going but it became easier to see as a faint glow rose beyond a long bank of armoires up ahead. Jane stopped in her tracks as she rounded the corner, using one of her hands to steady herself against the closet. “Whoa,” she said, her eyes widening.

I hurried ahead through a clutch of tables to join her and looked for myself. The store opened up into an empty circle in the middle of the cavernous space with an old-fashioned barber’s chair at the center of it. The black leather of its seat had intricate waves of color, the type of flame details you usually saw on a hot rod, not a chair. That wasn’t what had Jane’s attention or mine now. Floating unsupported at least fifteen feet above it was a swirling mass of intricately arranged lamps. The bulk of the structure was made up mostly of Tiffany-style lamps of every shape and size, their bulbs burning softly.

“Take notes,” I whispered. “For instance. . . lamps should not float in the air like that.”

“Ya think?” Jane asked. “No offense, but I think that floating lamps fall more into my job expertise in Greater and Lesser Arcana Division.”