Mrs. Mason’s front lawn looked like a tornado had torn through it—but only one half of it. Her flower garden was in pristine condition. Roses, petunias, carnations, and a dozen other varieties were organized into neat, color-sorted rows.

Her vegetable garden was another matter altogether. It was just…gone. Like it had been lifted out of the ground, leaving nothing but raw earth behind. Not a single leaf, root, or vine remained. In fact, there wasn’t any evidence that there ever had been any vegetables there.

And Mrs. Mason’s vegetables weren’t the only victims in the quiet town of Pacific Sunrise, California. Dozens of edible plants had gone missing overnight.

“Your vegetables were still here last night, Mrs. Mason?” I asked.

She stood before the black patch of earth that had once been her vegetable patch, holding a garden rake in her hands. Her face was hard, like she was ready to wage war. Wearing a pink sweater vest over a short-sleeved white shirt, khaki capris, and white cloth sneakers, she didn’t look like your typical warrior—but I’d learned that warriors came in all shapes and sizes. There was fire in her hazel eyes.

“Yes,” she said. “I watered them just before bed last night. They were there. It was all there.”

She adjusted her pink cloth headband. It was a perfect match to her sweater vest—and to her lipstick. The headband popped nicely against her hair. Sun-kissed blonde and cropped short to her chin, her hair glowed almost as much as her fake tan did. I’d seen a lot of weird things on a lot of worlds, but tanning salons still baffled me. There was one called Breath of Sunshine just down the street. How bizarre. Why humans would choose to bombard their skin with radiation was beyond me.

“Someone has sabotaged me,” Mrs. Mason continued. “Sandy Wilkins from across the road.”

“Sandy Wilkins?” I asked.

Mrs. Mason’s daughter nodded rigorously. She looked like a perfect carbon copy of her mother—just thirty years younger.

“She’s jealous that I won the annual neighborhood beautiful lawn competition,” Mrs. Mason said.

“For the third year running,” added the younger Mason.

The two of them turned their battlefield glares toward the house across the street, where a woman in a sunflower-print summer dress was pretending to trim her roses as she watched us from behind the thorny bushes. Her garden was perfect. There wasn’t a leaf out of place. But she didn’t have any vegetables or fruit—just flowers.

“Did you get enough for your newspaper report, dear?” Mrs. Mason asked me.

When I’d started questioning the residents of this town about their missing fruits and vegetables, they’d made the assumption that I was reporting for my local high school paper. I didn’t see any reason to rob them of that notion. It was a good cover story. Confessing that I was a magic-wielding visitor from another world just might have shattered their comfortable misconception that the Earth was the center of the universe.

Even if I’d wanted to spill the beans—even if I weren’t worried about the metaphorical torches and pitchforks—it was forbidden. Earth was a virgin world, a world without magic. For supernaturals like me, there were strict rules about hiding what we were. So I had to play detective under the guise of a teenage high school girl.

“Thank you, Mrs. Mason,” I said.

Mrs. Mason’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “You’re not taking any notes.”

I smiled. “I have an excellent memory.”

“Good, good.” She nodded, apparently appeased. “Make sure you don’t forget the part where Sandy Wilkins is the culprit. The people of Pacific Sunrise will want to know.” She set her hand on my arm. “Do you need a picture of her for your article? I have pictures of everyone in town.”

Interesting hobby. And kind of creepy, actually.

I just kept smiling. “That won’t be necessary.”

I’d already interviewed twenty-three people this morning. Every victim of the Garden Robber—their moniker, not mine—had been quick to name and shame the culprit. Each person in this quaint little town blamed someone else, someone who coincidentally was their own personal mortal enemy.

They were all wrong. The Garden Robber was not a resident of Pacific Sunrise. He wasn’t even a resident of Earth. He was a mage, like me. He was also a brilliant-but-completely-mad renegade scientist who had fled to Earth to hide from the authorities. Being a hunted man obviously hadn’t put a damper on his extracurricular activities. He was ransacking the local residents’ gardens to steal ingredients for his illegal magical experiments.

So I knew who the Garden Robber was. I even knew why he was raiding the local vegetable patches. I just didn’t know where he was. I had to find him soon, before his actions exposed us all.

Earth was sacred soil. It was one of the few known worlds whose inhabitants had no knowledge of magic. They didn’t even know there were other people living on other worlds, that we were all connected by a magic portal system. And the Galactic Assembly, the hard hand of law and order in the galaxy, forbade us from telling them.

“Who’s that?” Mrs. Mason asked.

I followed her gaze past her house and three more, to where Jason stood. Like me, he was a mage. His world and mine had been close allies for centuries—and we’d been friends our whole lives.

“That’s my best friend,” I declared.

His eyes, as black as obsidian, met mine. In that moment, even though he was halfway down the street, I felt as though he were right in front of me.

It was the eyes. Jason’s eyes were famous throughout the galaxy, but certainly not in an admiring sort of way; no one had any desire to gaze upon them. So overpowering were his eyes, so petrifying, that no one ever noticed anything else about him—not even his hair, an unusual mix of three shades. It was the color of butterscotch, interwoven with strands of deep caramel and pale gold.

Mages—Elitions, as we called ourselves—were endowed with hair and eyes of uncommon, sensational shades, just beyond the ordinary. The humans of Earth, always quick to dismiss anything they could not explain, thought we dyed our hair and wore color contact lenses, that we sprinkled makeup over our skin to make it shine. You could say we stood out in a crowd.

But here on Earth, we were supposed to blend in. Jason and I had very different ideas of what that meant.

I was wearing a blue tank top that brought out my eyes, and a little skirt. I could tell Mrs. Mason was itching to measure it with her ruler and declare it too short. In other words, I looked like a typical human eighteen-year-old.

Jason did not. Sure, the black t-shirt and black leather pants he wore were human enough, but he didn’t blend in. Not really. Even in his Earth clothes, he was clearly not of this world. There was just something about him. Something otherworldly. He moved like a predator in the night, a shadow-stalker, a warrior. With every move that he made, every breath that he took, he exuded menace. Like he was always ready to fight. That was his Phantom magic at work.

It was the perfect look for his job, though. His father was the king of Pegasus, one of sixteen mage worlds, and Jason was his enforcer. He hunted down and retrieved renegade Pegasus mages. And the Garden Robber was one of them.

Mrs. Mason looked at Jason and frowned. “He looks like trouble.”

“Oh, yes. Trouble,” the younger Mason agreed, licking her lips.

“You aren’t wrong,” I told them.

“Is he a member of a biker gang?” Mrs. Mason asked. She was obviously picking up on his black leather.

“No. He prefers his thrills to be a little more natural than gasoline and motor oil.” More like steel and magic. I smiled at them. “Good day, ladies.”

Then I backed away from their perfect picket fence, moving into step beside Jason.

“How is your mission going?” I asked quietly.

Every eye on the whole street was on us. Humans might not have known about magic, but they did sense there was something different about us—at least some part of them did. It was the part that knew ghosts and aliens were real, the part that believed in miracles and magic. They kept it buried deep down inside of them.

“I haven’t been able to track him by his scent or magic resonance,” Jason told me. “Vib is hiding himself well.”

Indeed. Jason was a Phantom, a type of mage whose heightened senses and ability to track magic—coupled with their speed and strength—made them the perfect paranormal hunters. Telekinesis and accelerated healing rounded out the Phantom package.

“I should have brought along my tracking cap,” he said.

All mages used accessories: things like gloves, headbands, necklaces, or hats. Each accessory augmented a specific innate ability in us. It was called Augmented Magic. Without these accessories, our magic was unfocused. We either couldn’t use any magic—or, worse yet, we couldn’t control it. I fell into the distinguished latter category.

Jason and I weren’t wearing our full complement of accessories right now. Some of them were too conspicuous.

“You’re not exactly blending in here. Your tracking cap would have drawn even more attention to you,” I told him. His tracking cap wasn’t a cap in the human sense of the word. It was more like a crown mixed with a partial battle helmet—and it was far from subtle.

“I don’t care if people stare at my head,” he said. “My father wants Vib captured now, before he exposes us all.”

Until a few days ago, Vib had been a scientist in the employment of Jason’s father. That was, until the true nature of Vib’s research came to light: he’d been experimenting on living mages. He’d fled to Earth, knowing it would be harder for us to capture him here. A big, explosive battle of magic might just tip off the humans about our existence. And if this situation blew up, the galaxy’s hard hand of justice would come down on us all. We needed to get Vib off the Earth before the Galactic Assembly found out he was here.

“Have you had any luck finding him?” Jason asked me.

“Actually, I have,” I told him. Jason might have been a supernaturally-skilled hunter, but I had a few skills of my own. “I’ve mapped the houses hit by the Garden Robber, and I think I have Vib’s probable location.” I pulled out a map of the town, where I’d marked the missing gardens with green dots. “There.” I pointed at a red dot inside a sea of green. “The robberies are all centered around that spot.”

Jason looked at my map. “It’s too simple. Vib is too smart to raid the town’s gardens in a systematic pattern like that.”

“Actually, that’s why he would do exactly that. Because he’s smart. He had only one night to raid Pacific Sunrise’s gardens while the town’s residents were sleeping. So, scientist that he is, he came up with the most efficient way to do that. He’s a scientific genius, Jason, not a criminal mastermind.”

Jason looked reflective, like he was mulling that over. And by reflective, I meant his left eyebrow shifted a millimeter. Jason was an expressive guy like that.

“You brought me along for my crime-solving skills,” I reminded him.

“I thought you tagged along because you were craving an apple muffin from the Pacific Sunrise Bakery.”

“That too,” I said. “But you have to admit that I’ve helped save the day on loads of missions.”

“You are very clever. For a girl with pigtails,” he added.

“One braid. Not pigtails.” I flipped my long, golden-pink braid over my shoulder.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll try it your way.”

I grinned at him. “That’s the spirit.”

We’d reached the red dot on my map. I looked up at the oldest, dingiest building in town. If this wasn’t Vib’s secret lair, I didn’t know what was. We squeezed through a partially-boarded door to enter the house.

The inside shocked me. Despite its crumbling brick facade, the interior was in pristine condition. Brightly lit, clean, and downright posh, it looked more like a spa than a condemned building. We moved past the shiny entrance hall, taking the main corridor. A sweet scent permeated the air. Lavender? Yes, lavender. I drew in a deep breath. Lavender and peppermint. And there was some subtle scent beneath that pleasant perfume—the smell of slowly-rotting wood.

Something brushed across my senses like a silent whisper on the wind. There was someone in here. No, make that multiple someones. I stole a glance at Jason. His eyes were hard, focused. He must have sensed them too.

“That’s far enough.”

A woman in a long overcoat had appeared at the end of the hallway. She stood inside a wide doorway. Her violent, ruby-red hair was swept up into a large cone-shaped bun. She was holding a Serenity sword, about eighty centimeters in length. She hadn’t been standing there a moment ago.

“Vib has been expecting you,” she declared, then turned and stepped into the room.

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