“No,” he said, relaxing from his cautious tension. He lay back, watched the crystal sparkle between her fingers. “It’s only a focus. I’m clairvoyant. I see the images inside my head. It’s not like real vision. It’s color-reversed, or black and white. Sometimes it’s blurry.”

“Like satellite TV for the brain,” she said. She dropped the crystal onto his stomach, rested her weight on his thighs. The crystal rolled with his breathing, and she put her fingers on it, pushing it along his rib cage, then chasing it down his belly and catching it in his navel. She pushed up his shirt to admire the gloss of glass against his warm skin, the way his flesh goose-bumped and shivered at her touch. “The talent’s innate in you, and it never occurred to you to wonder why?”

“We have psychics on staff. They’re human.” There was unease in his voice. He rolled his head to the side, avoiding her gaze.

“Maybe they just think they are,” she said. At the quick wash of pain that crossed his face, she regretted saying it. After all, as far as her honed senses could tell, he read human. She opened her mouth to say so. “You really never wondered about your mother?”

He squirmed beneath her, and she answered for him. “You took her being human for granted. Like most of the normals out there who don’t recognize the Magicus Mundi until it waves hello up close and personal.” She rose and reseated herself beside him, braced comfortably between his hip and the low-fronted couch.

She poked the crystal into movement again. “Do you want to know what she is? What’s lurking in your genes?”

“I’ll ask her myself.”

Sylvie studied the reflection of her fingertips in the glass and slid it between two ribs, using his tie as a net when the orb slipped away from her. He sucked in a breath. “Sylvie, not that this isn’t . . . pleasant—what are you doing?”

“Do you think she’s looking at you right now? Or when you’re looking in the glass, does she look back? How do you manage to feel unwatched?”

“I try not to think about it,” he said, breath catching as she pushed his shirt farther up to chase the rib all the way to his sternum, letting the orb slip and slither over his nipple. “We’re talking about this now?” He licked his lips, laughed, but his eyes were wary. “I don’t think this is the time to talk about my mother.”

Sylvie said, “I don’t think anytime is that time. I really didn’t like her.”

“I’m sure it was mutual.”

“You say the sweetest things.” She let the crystal roll away like a bead of water. She wanted to taste his skin, see if the crystal, like water, had left a trail. “But you’re right. This is not the time.” The ache in her chest told her that, the weariness in her bones, the brittle edge to her mood. She felt lazy now, but the rage still simmered, waiting to be woken to life again.

He leaned up, leaned close, and said, “Answer a question?”

She shrugged. “Maybe.”

“What’s up with the clothes? How bad did you piss off Cassavetes?”

She blinked at him, flashing back to six months on the run, learning that all the monsters of her childhood nightmares were real, before realizing he meant Val, not her dead husband. “Did cracking that crystal crack your head? What about the clothes? Yeah, they’re kinda wrecked but—”

He tugged on the collar of Erinya’s jacket, pushed it back, touched the lumpy seam of the inside-out T-shirt. “That jacket belongs to one of Dunne’s bodyguards, the punk one. The T-shirt isn’t yours either, unless you have some tastes the ISI isn’t aware of, and is inside out, besides. The pants are cut for a man. Supernaturally speaking, you’re running under a stealth shield.”

“Like that would work,” she said, then paused. “Would it?”

“Traditionally,” he said. “I don’t believe we’ve ever tested it.”

“All talk,” she said. “Here I thought the ISI was going to be a good resource for a moment. But no, you were picking my brain.” She lifted herself off the floor just enough to slide herself onto the couch; the hard floor was beginning to create new aches. “Besides, maybe this is my T-shirt, and the ISI doesn’t know all about me. Not all of us can have a formal sense of style, you know.”

“Don’t dis the suits,” he said. “If you want fresh clothes, you’ll be wearing pieces of them tomorrow.”

Sylvie sighed. “This one’s too small, this one’s too large. I’m living in a Goldilocks world.”

She eased herself up from her not-so-comfortable slouch, finding her ribs bothered her more now that she wasn’t enjoying herself. “Aspirin?”

“Bathroom,” he said. “There’s Tylenol 4, Percocet, and Vicodin.” At her raised brow, he said, “The ISI believes in a fully stocked first-aid kit. Not so much in insurance benefits.”

“Figures,” she said. “Guess a bunch of people with unusual injuries all in the same insurance group might attract attention.”

“I think that’s their justification,” Demalion said. “But it bites when you’re getting stitched up by a student veterinarian in the backwoods who’s freaking out about putting needle to nonfurry flesh.”

“Life’s tough all over.” Sylvie wandered off to find the promised land of painkillers. Running her finger over the selection, she chose a handful of ibuprofen. Other painkillers might slow her down too much. She shucked the shirt, admired the bruises that had come up, stuck her tongue out at the dirt that had ground itself into her skin, and gave in. The world could wait while she showered. The hollow-eyed woman reflecting back at her agreed.

“Sylvie!” Demalion said. There was controlled panic in his voice, strong enough to bleed through a shut door.

Maybe not.

Sylvie pulled her shirt back on, and went out, gun in hand, though she doubted it was needed urgently. She might not trust Demalion all the way from heart to head, but he wouldn’t call her out to face a deadly foe with only that bare warning.

She found him standing in his kitchenette, bent over the counter as if he’d been injured, one hand compressing a Chinese take-out container, the other white-tensed against the laminate.

“Sylvie?” he said, turning, seeming oddly off balance, as if the world had shifted beneath his feet. As if he’d suddenly been deprived of a sense.

“Blind?” she asked. She didn’t need confirmation; the way he jerked and tracked her voice was enough.

“My crystal?”

“All right,” she said, and went to fetch it. “I thought this only happened when you spied on them.”

“At first I did, too. I mean, that’s what we were doing when it all blew up in our faces. Sylvie . . .”

“I’m hurrying,” she said.

“Lilith was there,” he said. “It must have been her. A dark, angry force, watching us, watching them. We knew there was something else, but we never saw it. Just felt it.”

“You’d know it again?” she asked, casting her gaze about the floor. Amazing how something so shiny-glossy could become invisible when you wanted it. She knelt, set her gun on the nearest cardboard box, and peered beneath the sofa. There it was. Sylvie forced her hand under the couch, stretching. “You said, at first? What’s blinding you now?”

“It’s nearness to something Dunne considers his. His lover, his house, his car. Took me a week to learn where Dunne parked and avoid passing by that garage.”

So was this Dunne on the move? Coming back to check in at long last? Sylvie doubted life would be that easy.

Sylvie closed her fingers over the glass, scraping her arm against the sofa frame, and wincing.

“Hurry, Sylvie,” Demalion said.

“What?” she said. She found herself in a crouch, waiting, gun in hand.

“It’s getting closer. It’s like pressure in my head.” He cocked his head, listening to something inside it, and she tensed.

“Demalion, incoming, twelve o’clock,” she said, and chucked the crystal at him. His hand closed on it as she bolted for the door. Even if it were Dunne, he and the ISI weren’t a good combination.