"What do you think?"I had done a new series of paintings and my friend Sommer had come over to see them before we did some spellwork together.

"They're the most beautiful things I've ever seen,"Kai, Sommer's middle son, stared up at my artwork as if he were viewing the Mona Lisa.

His mother stood behind him with a slightly different expression.

"They're a little dark."Sommer looked over the first in the series; studying the pile of corpses laid out before the Aztec temple. ...