“That’s enough out of you, there, McKenzie, you hoser,” I shot back, in a parody of the same accent. “Give me a break here, eh?”

I got a bigger laugh than the heckler. Which is how you make sure the heckler doesn’t steal the show from you.

“Pipe down,” I said, and waited for them to settle. “Thank you. Your second step is always analysis. Even when you know what you’re dealing with, you’ve got to know why it’s happening. If you’ve got an angry ghost, it’s generally angry for a reason. If a new pack of ghouls has moved in down the block, they’ve generally picked their spot for a reason.”

Ilyana raised her hand again and I pointed at her.

“What does it matter?” she asked. “Ghost or ghoul is causing problem, still we are dealing with them, yes?” She pointed her finger like a gun and dropped her thumb like the weapon’s hammer on the word “dealing.”

“If you’re stupid, yeah,” I said.

She didn’t look pleased at my response.

“I used to have a similar attitude,” I said. I held up my left hand. It was a mass of old scars, and not the pretty kind. It had been burned, and badly, several years before. Wizards heal up better than regular folks, over the long term. I could move it again, and I had feeling back in parts of all the fingers. But it still wasn’t a pretty picture. “An hour or two of work would have told me enough about the situation I was walking into to let me avoid this,” I told them. It was the truth. Pretty much. “Learn everything you possibly can.”

Ilyana frowned at me.

McKenzie raised his hand, frowning soberly, and I nodded at him.

“Learn more. Okay. How?”

I spread my hands. “Never let yourself think you know all the ways to learn,” I said. “Expand your own knowledge base. Read. Talk to other wizards. Hell, you might even go to school.”