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does heat and electricity. But beware. It’s also used by bad people to channel hoaxes. That’s why it’s being stolen hand over fist these days. Because falsehoods rule. The dark spirit of hatefulness and lies dominates the planet right now.”
    â€œYou’ve been watching too much Lou Dobbs.”
    â€œI love that man! Truth is your armor, my darling.” She dips into a pocket of her long skirt, pulls out a small leather pouch, places it in Win’s hand. “And this is your sword.”
    He unties the drawstrings. Inside are a shiny new penny and a small crystal.
    â€œKeep them with you at all times,” she says. “When put together, they form a crystal wand.”
    â€œGreat,” he says. “Maybe I can turn Lamont into a frog.”
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    Not long after he leaves, Nana carries a box of kosher salt upstairs to her bathroom, where octagonal mirrors hanging in the corners direct negativity back to the sender.
    Evil this way bent
Return whence it’s sent!
    She never goes to bed unclean, lest the unpleasantness of the day continue in her dreams. Unsettledness. She feels the presence of the nonhuman. A childish one filled with mischief and meanness, resentment and pride. She pours salt on the shower floor, turns on the water, and chants another spell.
    Rising moon and setting sun,
My sacred work is never done.
Breath and light for me are one.
Warrior of justice, come!
    The salt beneath her feet draws bad energy from her and washes it down the drain, and she ends her shower with an herbal brew of parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme that she boiled in an iron pot this morning. She pours the fragrant water over her head to cleanse her aura, because her work brings her into contact with many personalities, not all of them good, especially this one. The nonhuman. A young one who is ranging about. It is close now and wants something of Nana’s, something very dear to her.
    â€œMy most powerful instrument of magic is my very being,” she says out loud. “I will pinch you between my two fingers!” she warns it.
    In her bedroom, she opens a drawer and retrieves a small red-silk bag filled with iron nails, tucks it into the left pocket of her clean, white robe. She sits next to Miss Dog on the bed, writes in her journal by the light of white candles. Writes her usual musings about Magick and Spells and the Work of the Mage. The journal is thick, bound in Italian leather, and she has filled its pages, the pages of many journals for many years, writing in her large, looping script. Then a heavy fatigue, and candles out, and she has one foot into the land of sleep when she sits up with a start in the dark. She grabs the bag of nails out of her robe pocket and jangles them loudly.
    Miss Dog, deaf and snoring, doesn’t stir. Footsteps downstairs along the wooden hallway between the kitchen and the living room.
    Nana jumps out of bed, jangles the nails again as she flies out the bedroom door.
    â€œI will punish you by the rule of three times three!” she yells.
    Footsteps moving fast. Stomp-stomp-stomp-stomp-stomp. The kitchen door slams shut. Nana looks out her window, sees a shadow running, carrying something. She hurries down the stairs and out of the house, and wanders about her overgrown property as wind chimes clatter and clang, agitated and angry. She feels the emptiness of what was just there. Then the sound of a car, and far down the street, taillights are the bright red eyes of the devil.

THREE
    Inside the FRONT’s mobile crime lab, Stump examines the note from the day’s bank robbery, looking for something, anything, foiled again.
    Raising latent fingerprints on paper isn’t the sure thing depicted on all those cop shows, and in the real world, this bank robber has yet to leave a useful clue. She stops what she’s doing as she hears a car pull up. Then her cell phone rings.
    â€œIt’s me.” Win’s compelling