“Point,” Sylvie said. She nudged the briefcase closer to the door, waited to see if it would open again, spurred just by proximity to the Hands. Maybe they didn’t need to be lit to unlock; maybe the lighting of the Hands was geared toward putting witnesses out. The door latch stayed firm, even with a tug at the knob, and Sylvie groaned. Why didn’t bad things ever come with instruction manuals?

Alex said, “Stop playing with body parts and come have dinner.”

Sylvie could smell Ciro’s pizza warming in the oven, and she steeled herself in case the pizza was merely Alex leading up to wanting something new for the office. Like the ergonomic chair she’d been leaving strategic pictures of on her desk, the fridge, Sylvie’s office door.

“I figured you’d need it,” she said. “Tatya always takes it out of—” She looked over Sylvie’s shoulder and her gentle air of self-satisfaction faded. “What happened to you?”

“Got bit,” Wright said shortly, made a U-turn out of the kitchen, and disappeared into the bathroom. He shut the door with a solid thunk, and a moment later, the shower started up.

“You let him get bitten?” Alex followed in his path, like she meant to follow him directly into the bathroom and investigate the wound closer.

“Too close to the moon,” Sylvie said. “Their nerves were jangled. And they didn’t like that he had two souls.”

Alex flung herself onto Sylvie’s couch, propped her feet up on the arm, and said, “Tatya could tell? What’d she have to say? Did she recognize—”

“Tatya never met Demalion,” Sylvie said. “Though she said he smelled like cat.” She dragged the pizza out of the oven, the cardboard box crisp with heat, the scent of garlic and cheese overwhelming. She set it down on the edge of the coffee table and went back for napkins, pepper flakes, and powdered cheese.

Alex frowned. “But Demalion wasn’t—”

Sylvie nodded once, and Alex’s eyes got big. “You never said!”

“He was human,” Sylvie said. “At least . . . ninety percent human. His mother isn’t.” Sylvie shoved Alex’s feet off the armrest, sat there instead, propping her own feet on the coffee table. The new decoration, a bowl filled with a dozen crystal balls of varying sizes—courtesy of Alex’s overkill shopping—reflected a hundred tiny Sylvies back at her. Lures she didn’t think she’d need after all. The moment Wright relaxed, stopped clinging to his control, Demalion would surface.

“So you’re going to tell Wright now? I keep crap secrets. I’m scared I’ll slip.” Alex shot a glance at the closed door, the water still running, and lowered her voice anyway.

Sylvie passed Alex her untouched slice of pizza, and said, “Don’t bluff badly if you’re going to bluff. You keep secrets every day, or you wouldn’t work for me.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Alex said. She flipped the new slice of pizza on top of her first, eating them like pie, clear enough signs that Alex understood the answer would be some variant of “very soon, maybe even imminent.”

“As soon as I’ve talked to Demalion. That way I’ve got the full scoop to pass on to Wright.” It made her head hurt, the idea of taking words from Wright’s mouth and reciting them back for his ears.

The running water cut off; Alex’s pizza oozed a piece of cheese and tomato to her lap with a wet plop. Alex ignored it. “I should stick around. Watch your back. Demalion was kind of a bastard, no offense.”

“So am I. Go home and look for any robberies that broke the pattern we know. Look for Hand-aided thefts.”

The door to the bathroom opened; Wright slouched out, jeans-clad, bare-chested, all ribs and shadows, the curved white scar on his rib cage as clear as moonlight on white gravel.

“Pizza?” he said. There was hope in his voice, and relief, as if the world couldn’t be that bad, no matter that it held ghosts, werewolves, and black magic, not if there was still pizza.

Sylvie twitched her gaze away from his chest, from that little gap in the scar. She wanted to press her lips to it, taste that tiny space that had been a gap in Demalion’s soul. She peeled cheese from her crust and looked away. “It’s not Chicago deep-dish, but it’s tasty,” Sylvie said. “Come and get it.” Wright. She had to remember Wright in all of this. Her client. No matter whom he was housing within his skin.

He padded into the kitchenette, helped himself to an actual plate and a soda before he took a couple of slices, careful of his bandaged hand. He sat cross-legged on the floor beside the coffee table with the easy grace of a parent who had a young child. The enthusiasm on his face faded after a few bites, and Sylvie didn’t think it was the pizza not being up to his standard.

Alex, ignoring Sylvie’s earlier admonition to go home, mangled another slice of pizza in her constant quest to eat the cheese first, and said, “When I couldn’t find Zoe, I stopped looking for her and looked for her boyfriend.”

“Carter,” Sylvie said. She shot a glance at Wright, caught him looking away. It would have been high-school behavior except he was visibly uncomfortable, edgy in his skin, and cop enough to realize he’d been the subject of conversation. Again. No, Wright wasn’t a happy camper.

“Carson,” Alex said.

“Whatever,” Sylvie said, just to annoy Alex. To see if she could get Wright to relax, just a little bit. She was tense enough for all of them. She wanted, needed, to talk to Demalion, and Wright’s careful control barred the way.

“Whatever’s actually exactly it,” Alex said.

“What?” Wright said. “Does she make sense to you?”

“Sometimes,” Sylvie said. “Not at the moment.”

“There is no Carson. Not in her cell-phone history anyway, and I ask you: What high-school girl doesn’t call her boyfriend at least once a day?” Alex grinned.

“So either he doesn’t exist, or she’s calling him from another phone? I don’t like either of those options,” Sylvie said. Phones with a specific purpose were the purview of drug dealers, prostitutes, and stalker-type boyfriends. Or, maybe, a necromancer.

“I choose option A,” Alex said. “I talked to some of her school friends, emphasis on the school, less on the friends—seems Zoe’s been making herself unpopular of late—but no one’s ever met Carson or even heard what school he goes to. He’s an excuse, not a person. A reason for her to blow her friends off and go off on her own. Zoe’s up to something, and I don’t think she wants to share. Maybe your out-of-pattern robberies?”

“Shit,” Sylvie muttered, but it fitted with her loose conjectures about the money. A thought struck her. “You found her friends? I didn’t have any luck.”

“You’re an authority figure, Syl. They see you and scatter. I talked to as many of ’em as I could scrounge up.” Alex bent her head, flicked pepperoni to one side of her plate.

Sylvie said, “Something you’re not telling me?”

“Her friends are kinda . . . not.” Alex scowled. “I mean, I remember high school, but god, these kids are little shits. They were ready to blame her for anything as long as I didn’t get them in trouble. They said she—” Alex cut off all at once, went back to dissecting her pizza.

“Said what?” Sylvie asked.

“Just the usual teenage crap,” Alex said. “You know, she’s a bitch, and all that.”

Oh, there was more, Sylvie could tell. The question was, did she want to hear it? Alex sure didn’t want to tell it. She closed her eyes, felt a warm hand reach out to her, fingers twining with hers, offering silent support. “Anything that sounded Mundi-related? Freak, witch, crazy? Any of those thrown her way?”

Alex shook her head.

Sylvie was trying to figure out if that was good, bad, indifferent, when Wright’s fingers twitched in hers, and he jerked back, looking embarrassed. He opened his mouth, ready to proffer explanations, apologies, then looked perplexed. He went back to his pizza, his brow furrowed.