I know, I know, you're thinking, charmingly nai've-no real practitioner would advertise themselves, and the rest are all charlatans, so why did I still idolize this guy? But like many other Edgeworlders, I find myself sifting through endless tomes of New

Age fuffery looking for something real. Valentine's probing books and debunking tours helped me winnow through the crap to get to the occasional nugget of gold.

And so-"I have all your books," I blurted. Like a schoolgirl. How embarrassing.

But the Mysterious Mirabilus looked at me with sharp new interest. "How interesting," he said, sitting in the client's chair opposite me as I sat down at my desk. "That strikes me as very unusual. Given your profession."

I grinned. "And why can't a tattoo artist read Christopher Valentine?"

"I meant, as a professed magician," Valentine said, all serious, dark pointy eyebrows beetling into a serious look of concern. He was much more interesting in person: on camera he looked all pale and WASPy, but with him sitting in my client's chair I could see a slight Middle Eastern slant to his features and a subtle, swarthy tint to his skin that would have made it a wonderful canvas to ink on. "After all, I have spent the last few years of my life-"

"-exposing all the junk in the so-called 'magickal' world," I replied, "freeing the rest of us practitioners to focus on the good stuff?"

Valentine and Nicholson looked at each other.

At this point I really noticed his colleague, Alex Nicholson: young, not too tall, tanned, with firm angular features that hinted at little or no body fat beneath his trim suit and turtleneck. Subtle, colored streaks wove through his wavy blond hair and the trimmed tuft on his chin. A single blue captive-bead ring hung in one ear. Like a slightly edgy Ken doll. Yummy.