“O—kay, then,” Alex said. She gravitated to the trash can despite all Sylvie’s warnings, and Wright was the one who took her by the arm and urged her away.

“Trust me,” he said. “I don’t even know what’s in it, but it’s not anything good.”

Alex recoiled from his touch, then flushed red with embarrassment and shame. Guess Alex wasn’t ready for up and close with a confirmed ghost. Wright’s mouth tightened, his jaw tensed, but he said nothing.

“Where’d you get it?” Alex asked, rubbing her arm absently where Wright had touched her. “What’s it for? We’re disposing of it, right? Not using it . . .”

“Alex,” Sylvie snapped. “You think I would?”

Alex said, “If you thought it was necessary? Yeah. I do.”

“Nice,” Sylvie said, but there wasn’t much bite in it. For one thing, Alex was right. Sylvie did all sorts of things she would prefer not to do if it was needed. Wright was looking all manner of appalled and doing a crap job of hiding it.

“Zoe swing by for her toys yet?” A stupid question, but it distracted Wright, and Sylvie needed to voice her fear. Zoe had slipped out after hours last night, and teenagers could patch up broken relationships so easily. Bonding over burglary and black magic? Until she saw Zoe in her office, unharmed and untouched by the Magicus Mundi, Sylvie wasn’t going to be happy.

Sylvie tried to think back, to attach shapes to those barely glimpsed figures from last night. Had Zoe been among them?

Alex shook her head. “She’s still MIA.”

“Was Zoe the jailbait masquerading as a fashion plate?” Wright asked.

“Is Zoe my baby sister, you mean?” Sylvie said. Her tone warned him off the topic.

He took a step back, held his hands up. “No offense meant.”

Hands landed on her shoulders, and Alex banged her head gently against her back, her gel-spiked hair stiff against Sylvie’s nape. “Sylvie . . . curb the instincts. Take a breath. Tell me about the trash can. Your sister’s an alley cat. Deal with it. She’ll come back after she’s gotten bored with her new boyfriend.”

Sylvie sighed. If they’d been alone, she might have told Alex everything; Bella, the burglaries, the Hand, her fears for Zoe, and Demalion’s return. But Wright was listening. Typical, she thought. When she hadn’t wanted to talk, she and Alex had been alone, and now that the words burned to be loosed, she had to swallow them.

“I need to find Zoe, and soon,” she said. Stripping Zoe of her cell phone may have been good as punishment, but not practical. No. Reach out and smack someone held an undeniable appeal right now. What the hell was Zoe thinking?

“Give me a list of names, and I’ll canvass her friends.”

Sylvie said, “Start with Ariel Goldbach.”

Wright slouched into the kitchenette, peered into the cupboards, beat-up sneakers squeaking on the terrazzo. “I don’t see the deal here. She’s what? Sixteen? Seventeen? She a druggie? That why you’re so hot to find her?”

“She’s my responsibility,” Sylvie said, flatly. “Like you.”

He frowned; his fidgety body went still as his mind went active. Calculating, putting random pieces together in a way that shouldn’t mean anything. “Don’t suppose she’s a rich kid?” He glanced back at the trash can.

Goddamn cops with goddamned intuitive leaps.

“No,” she said. It was the truth, in a narrow, tunnel-vision manner. Clients had the privilege of lying to her; if she lied to them, it was bad for business. “Anything going on here, Alex?”

“Conrad wants to hear your progress.”

Sylvie rolled her eyes. “Client discretion?”

Alex sighed. “You don’t like her anyway.”

“Not the point,” Sylvie said.

“You could give her the burglar’s name,” Wright said. “She might like that.”

“You found out already?” Alex grinned, wide and white, flashing as brightly as her diamante nose stud. “See, I told you it was a cake case.”

“It’s not that simple,” Sylvie said.

Wright said, “It could be.”

“Doing things my way, remember?”

Wright sighed, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and said, “Yeah, yeah, you’re the boss. But I don’t see what you’re gonna do. You took their toy away. What else can you do to them? It’s time for us to do our thing. Arrest the bad guys.”

Sylvie said, “They won’t be able to keep them. And, no, I don’t have a plan yet. But I’ll think of something.”

The bell rang on and on in the silence that fell between them, Wright struggling hard to not confront, not contradict. Finally, he just shook his head, and said, “There should be some type of law. Someone who knows and can do something about it. Someone with government backing.”

“There’s the ISI,” Alex said.

“Then why aren’t—”

“Because they’re dicks,” Sylvie said. “Short answer. If all else fails, I’ll drop them a note.”

She yanked off her Windbreaker, dropped it over the alarm bell, still shivering in its marble bowl; she wished she could move it to the closet for the time being, but it had been bonded to the desk. Some spells seemed to be more math than magic. Val Cassavetes, her witchy friend, had spent hours figuring the angles to make sure the warning bell covered the office door to door, floor to ceiling, then she’d pragmatically laid down a tube’s worth of super glue once she had it to her specifics.

The front door opened; Wright yielded the way to Lisse Conrad. With her came one of the people Sylvie wanted to see least. Detective Adelio Suarez. Sylvie bit back a frustrated sigh. Plans, so easy to make, so easy to disrupt. She should have locked the door, flipped the sign to CLOSED, but generally her office wasn’t client central.

“I saw you come in,” Conrad said. “Your truck is . . . noticeable.” A faint sneer on her lips. Sylvie wondered if the expression would grow more dismissive or less if the woman knew what had caused the rents in the metal.

“Easy to find at the airport,” Sylvie agreed. She veiled her aggravation behind a toothy smile and watched Conrad turn away.

The woman swept past her on a wave of floral perfume, and Adelio Suarez followed as if he were a hound on scent. He paused to say, “Did you enjoy your joke? Sending us to harass nice families about a burglary charge?”

“’Cause nice families never have secrets,” Sylvie said. “The list was legit.”

Zoe might be part of that list, she thought with a sudden pang, and didn’t so much backtrack as sidle around the point. “But there’s a lot of information that goes nowhere in this biz. You know that.”

Suarez studied her, and said, “Someday, we’re going to have a talk, Shadows, about exactly what your biz consists of. Someday soon.”

“I love to talk, though I’m picky who I do it with.” She swept her gaze around the office; it hadn’t reached crowded, but it was getting there. Lisse Conrad perched on the arm of the couch, attempting to avoid dog fur. Wright was playing least in sight, standing in the shadow of the kitchenette, watching them all with speculative eyes. Suarez was . . . way too close into her personal space. She took a giant step back, nearly tripped over Alex, and rebounded off the edge of the desk.

This was ridiculous. For a moment, she wished she were in Chicago again, hunting an impossible-to-find foe, with nothing and no one to distract her.

No one but Demalion.

She blindly reached across the desk, collected a thick handful of small bills from the cash box, and said, “Wright! You wanted breakfast? How ’bout lunch. There’s a shrimp stand down the way—follow the gulls. Get three orders to go.”

Inelegant and obvious, but it worked. Wright took the money, even if he did so only to come close enough to whisper, “You should tell them.” His breath brushed her neck; his hand tightened about hers and the money. She flashed back to his lips on hers, on her throat, and jerked away.

“I’m not fond of shoulds,” she said. She didn’t bother to lower her voice. He backed away, hands up, the human form of showing the belly.