“You want me to do what?”

In all my years as the only breathing employee at the Underworld Detection Agency, I’ve been asked to do a lot of things—hobgoblin slobbery, life-or-death, blood-and-flesh kind of things. But this? This took the cake.

Pete Sampson leaned back in his leather chair, and though I usually beamed with pride when he did that—as I had been instrumental in getting him back into head of the UDA position—this time, I couldn’t. My stomach was a firm, black knot and heat surged through every inch of my body as he looked up at me expectantly.

“I really thought you would be excited to visit your old stomping grounds.”

My knees went Jell-O wobbly then and I thumped back into Sampson’s visitor’s chair. I yanked a strand of hair out of my already-messy ponytail and wrapped it around my finger until the tip turned white.

“Excited? To return to the source of my deepest angst, my inner-turmoil—to the brick walls that can only be described as a fiery, brimstony hell?”

Sampson cocked an eyebrow. “It’s just high school, Sophie.”

“Exactly.”

Most people would say that high school is the most traumatic time in their lives—myself included. And since in the last few years I’d been shot at, stabbed, hung by my ankles, almost eaten, and sexually harassed by an odoriferous troll, most traumatic took on a whole new significance.

“Isn’t there anything else we can do? Anything I can do? And I’m talking human sacrifice, demon sacrifice, total surrender of my Baskin Robbins punch card.”

“Sophie,” Sampson started.

“Wait.” I held up a hand. “Are we sure we have to go in at all? And why me, specifically? I mean”—I rifled through my purse and pulled out a wrinkled business card—“it’s been a while since you’ve been back at the Agency, Sampson. See?” I slid the card across the desk to him. “It says right there: Sophie Lawson, Fallen Angels Division.” I stabbed at my name on the card as though that would somehow give my title more emphasis. “Does this case have anything to do with fallen angels? Because if not, I’m sure there are other UDA employees who would be excellent in this investigation. And then I would be able to really focus on my current position.”

Granted, my position more often than not found me pinning a big baddie to a corkboard or locked in a public restroom san clothes, but still.

Sampson stacked my business card on top of a manila file folder and pressed the whole package toward me.

“You should go in because you know the high school.”

“I’ll draw you a map.” I narrowed my eyes, challenging.

“And because everyone else around here—” Sampson gestured to the open office, and I refused to look, knowing that I would be staring into the cold, flat eyes of the undead—and the occasional unhelpful centaur. “Well, everyone else would have trouble passing. Besides, it’s not like you’re going in alone.”

“I’m not worried about that. And hey, I’m flattered, but there really is no way I’m going to pass as a student.”

Though I’m only five-five (if I fudge it, stand on a phone book, and stretch), often wear my fire-engine red hair in two sloppy braids, and have, much to my best friend’s chagrin, been known to wear SpongeBob SquarePants pajama bottoms out to walk the dog, it had been a long time since anyone had mistaken me for anything more than a fashionably misguided adult.

“You’re not going in as a student. You’re going in as a teacher. A substitute.”

I felt as though all the blood in my body had drained out onto the brand-new industrial-grade carpet. Because the only thing worse than being a high school student is being a high school substitute teacher.

My left eye started to twitch. “A substitute teacher?”

My mind flooded with thumbtacks on desk chairs and Saran Wrap over the toilets in the teacher’s lounge. Suddenly, I longed for my cozy Underworld Detection Agency job, where no one touched my wedged-between-two-blood-bags bologna sandwich and a bitchy band of ill-tempered pixies roamed the halls.

“A substitute teacher,” I repeated, “who saves the world?”

Sampson’s shrug was one of those “Hey, pal, take one for the team” kind of shrugs and I felt anger simmering in my gut.

“You can ‘teach’”—he made air quotes that made me nauseous—“any class you’d like. Provided it’s in the approved curriculum. And not already assigned.”

I felt my lip curl into an annoyed snarl when Sampson shot me a sparkly-eyed smile as if being given the choice between teaching freshman algebra or senior anatomy was a tremendous perk.

“If this high school isn’t about to slide into the depths of hell or in the process of being overrun by an army of undead mean girls, I’m going to need a raise. A significant one,” I said, my voice low. “And a vacation.”

Sampson nodded, but didn’t say anything.

“So,” I said, my eyebrows raised, “why is this so dire?”

“Do you remember last year when a body was found on the Mercy High campus?” Sampson asked.

My tongue went heavy in my mouth. Though I was well-used to the walking undead and the newly staked, the death of a young kid—a breather who would stay dead—made my skin prick painfully. I nodded.

“That’s what this is about?

Sampson didn’t answer me.

“Her name was Cathy Ledwith, right?”

It had been all over the papers—a local student mysteriously vanishing from an exclusive—and, before that day, safe—high school campus. A week later, her body was discovered dumped near Fort Cronkhite, an old military installation on the Marin side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Though the story was told and retold—in the Chronicle, the Guardian—and the Mercy High School campus was overrun with reporters for the better part of a semester, there weren’t a lot of details in the case. Or at least not a lot were leaked to the press.

“That murder was never solved,” Sampson said, as he slid the file folder over to me.

“Didn’t someone confess? Some guy in jail? He was a tweaker, said something about trying to sacrifice her.” The thought shot white-hot fire down my spine, but I tried my best to push past it. “I still don’t see what this has to do with the high school. Or with me having to go into it. I followed the case pretty closely”—I was somewhat of a Court TV or pretty much anything-TV junkie—“and I don’t remember any tie-back. I mean, the girl was found in Marin.”

“She was dumped in one of the tunnels at Battery Townsley.”

I shuddered. “People go through there all the time.”

“It was a hiker that found her. Her killer obviously wasn’t concerned about keeping Cathy’s body a secret.”

I winced at the mention of Cathy’s “body.”

“I still don’t understand what this has to do with us—with the Underworld. Everything about it screams human. Cathy was human—someone even recognized a van, right? Very few of our clients drive vans.”

Sampson gestured to the folders and I swallowed slowly, then looked down at them. Directly in front of me was a black and white photo of a smiling teenager—all perfect teeth and glossy hair—and it made my stomach roil even more. My high school picture was braces doing their darnedest to hold back a mouthful of Chiclet teeth and hair that shot straight out, prompting my classmates to announce that my styling tools were a fork and an electrical socket. I yanked my hand back when I realized I was subconsciously patting my semi-smoothed adult hair.

“What? The prom queen—?” I stopped and sucked in a sharp breath when my eyes caught the headline plastered over the photo: MERCY HIGH STUDENT MISSING.

I scanned quickly.

My heart was thundering in my ears even before my clock radio started blaring something awful and upbeat. I sat bolt upright, eyes wide open and feeling like I’d stared at the ceiling all night—mostly because I had. Murder, I could handle. I wasn’t especially fond of it, but I was the kind of girl who found corpses and evil like a Kardashian could find paparazzi and Apple Bottoms jeans. But high school chilled me to the bone.

I took a leisurely shower, tossing an entire canister of “Soothing Lavender” bath salts over my head hoping for some Prozac-like relief. It made my head feel like a nicely scented gravel pile, which calmed me enough to allow me to remind myself that I was an adult. That I was no longer that horrible-haired, buck-toothed, scared-of-her-own-shadow girl. I was Sophie Lawson and I kicked supernatural—and the occasion natural but unsavory—ass. I was feeling sassy and confident until I caught a glimpse of the clock and stopped dead.

“Shit!”

I was an adult Sophie Lawson with a heap of wet spaghetti hair boring a damp spot on the back of my blouse, not a speck of makeup on, and exactly eighteen minutes to make it to my first day at Mercy High. I bit my lip, one foot in the bathroom where pretty, pale pink cheeks, under-eye concealer, and sleek, straight hair lay, the other aiming toward the front door and respectable punctuality.

I blew out a sigh, grabbed a morning Fresca and my purse, and decided that my supermodel return to Mercy High School would have to happen another day.

It’s not like there was anyone I was expecting to impress at an all-girls high school, right?

“Whoa, love. You’re out of here like a Tasmanian devil.”

I was chest to chest with Will Sherman, my floppy hair snapping his cheek with a wet smack. He wore his sandy hair just long enough to let a few strands flop over his forehead, making any red-blooded woman willing to sell her soul to push those few strands out of his hazel, gold-flecked eyes. He had the lean, muscular build of a soccer player and an accent that made panties drop, and he lived across the hall from me. Also, he was my Guardian—but not in an “until I’m eighteen” or 50 Shades of Grey kind of way; he simply was the man in charge of defending me against anyone who might seek to gut me, quarter me, burn me alive, or perform any other such unfortunate activity. And for all of this, all I had to do was house a supernatural vessel that held all of the human souls of the world that were stuck in a kind of limbo. It is—or I am—called the Vessel of Souls and it is an artifact that the angelic and evil planes desperately fight over—kind of like a Hatfields-and-McCoys kind of thing that could destroy the world and possibly enslave all humanity. And it was in me. No one is quite sure why, but my guess is some half-naked diaper-wearing cherub thought it would be a hoot to hide the most valuable thing in creation in the spirit of a San Francisco woman who would rather just say a few Hail Marys while eating a donut than spend her life dodging all manor of weaponry—even if it did come with a drool-worthy Guardian.

I jumped back and blinked at Will, then blinked again. “You look fantastic. Like Professor Plum or something.”

Will beamed, opening his arms to show off the crisp pale blue button-down he wore under his tweed jacket, and I took the opportunity to sweep my eyes over the nice way his chinos hung on his hips, the way his blazer did nothing to hide his broad, strong shoulders, the way that button-down clung to his taut, sinewy chest.

“Wait!” He held up a silencing hand. “You haven’t seen the best part.” Will rifled through the battered leather briefcase he was carrying and slid on a pair of heavy, dark-rimmed glasses. With his usually bed-headed muss of sandy brown hair combed back from his forehead, he had a distinctly David Beckham-does-Harvard look, and I wanted to sit down and learn everything he had to tell me.

“Sophie?”

Will was leaning into me, and I felt a blush rush over my cheeks and made a mental note to pray for my overactive imaginary libido to dry up and stop turning me into a puddle of ooze every time Will shot me a grin or a view of one of his pecs.

“No, right, you look terrific. Why?”

“Work. Isn’t this what all the good professors are wearing?”

“You’re working as a professor? That’s funny, because I’m going in to my old high school as a substitute—” I felt all the color drain from my face. “You’re my help.”

Will fell into step beside me. “With all due respect, love, I’m not the help, I’m the Guardian.” He said it as though he was channeling Superman, but I was still flummoxed.

“Sampson is sending you in to keep an eye on me, isn’t he? He doesn’t trust me!”

Will scratched his head and pulled the downstairs door open for me. “Uh, no, I believe he doesn’t trust whatever wiggy it is that’s running around the high school, disappearing girls and carving them up.” He flashed a quick grin and waggled his car keys. “Shall we take Nigella?”

I nodded dumbly and Will led me to Nigella, a thousand-year-old, half-rusted, half-funky maroon Porsche with Pepto-pink interior that he insisted was a classic.

“We’re a team, you know.”

“Hey, how come you get to be a professor and I’m just a substitute teacher?”

Will sunk the key into the ignition and Nigella coughed to life. “It’s the accent, love. Makes Americans think we’re brilliant. So, what’s on your lesson plan?”

“You have a lesson plan? Where’d you get a lesson plan?”

“I made it.” He paused. “Let me guess—you assumed I was just born your Guardian.”

“No.” Yes.

I was up to speed on Will’s involvement by the time we rolled into the Mercy High staff lot. Alex was up for the job, but having been out of organized education since slates trumped binder paper, both he and Sampson thought Will would be a smoother fit. According to Sampson, Will was there to investigate, to see what else he could turn up, but I couldn’t help but feel that his presence on campus was little more than a babysitter for an investigator that Sampson had no faith in.

All eyes were on me the second Nigella sputtered to a stop. The faculty lot and the student lot were separated only by an elbow-high cyclone fence, a sea of shiny, new-model haves on one side, a mottled bay of slightly dented have-nots on the other.

My heart slammed itself against my rib cage in what felt like a desperate attempt to escape as I snapped Nigella’s door shut, hitched my shoulder bag and my chin, and met Will on the sidewalk. I could already feel the heat pricking at my upper lip and my ears were already buzzing with the whispers I knew were coming: Special Sophie . . . the freak of Nineteenth Street. . . . Look at the freak. Look at the freak. Lookatthefreak.

I reminded myself that I had come a long way, that I was the teacher now, that I was helping to solve a murder and possibly take down a wily coven of supernatural evil. A crime fighter couldn’t be a freak.

I threw my shoulders back, and suddenly I didn’t feel like the blistering center of unwanted attention. There were no whispered hums, no more eyes. . .

Because they were all on Will.

At first Mercy students littered the grand lawn, making their leisurely way toward the main building. But just like that every girl stopped, sucked in a collected breath, and straightened, shoving out best assets—breasts, hips, taut teenage butts—and turning their heads toward Will.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I spat.

Will didn’t need to say a word. The grin he tossed over his shoulder at me was flattered, smug, and dancing on my last nerve.

“You just remember we’re here solving a crime, okay? We’re here to find a missing girl.”

Will interlaced his fingers, outstretched his hands, and cracked his knuckles, the universal sign (in my dictionary) for sleazy old man leering at young girls.

“Fine, man whore. If saving a poor little girl’s life doesn’t get you, just remember that statutory rape laws are strong in San Francisco.”

Will just shook his head as though I had uttered an interesting anecdote about higher education or Pippa Middleton.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

Our exchange—my admonishment, his rebuttal—was interrupted by a trio of schoolgirls in their knife-pleated Mercy skirts, their chests straining against their crisp white shirts and sweaters, the high, round breasts of padded bras and youth. I felt myself snake my arms across my chest and curl into my A-cup.

“Are you the new teacher?” the ringleader asked. She was dead center, smoked-sapphire blue eyes glued to Will, black hair Pantene perfect, heart-shaped face flawless.

“We both are,” I said, trying to break the girl’s Spock-like mind control.

“I’m Fallon,” the girl said. She grinned, blinding me with her blue-white teeth, a perfect line of Chiclets that would never dream of going buck or hanging on to a thread of spinach at a dinner party.

“This is Finleigh and Kayleigh.” Fallon acknowledged each girl with a miniscule shake of the head before squirreling her way in between Will and I and threading her arm through his. “I can show you where the admin building is.”

“That would be lovely, cheers.”

The other two—Finleigh and Kayleigh, equally as uninterested in me as Fallon was—slapped perfectly manicured hands over their mouths and giggled.

“OMG, cute!”

“English. Love!”

I rolled my eyes and followed Will and his entourage to the front doors of Mercy High School. They walked in as though they weren’t walking through the gates of teenage hell, as though the memories of being bullied and harassed just for existing weren’t still fresh enough to make my stomach fold over itself.

“Here goes nothing,” I said, stepping over the threshold.

Spires of hell fire didn’t shoot up through the ultra-waxed linoleum. Scary circus clowns didn’t circle me and point, and nobody stopped to give me a body check or a disdainful once over. Maybe things would be different.

I sniffed.

Maybe not.

It’s amazing how the smell of a high school hallway never changes. The janitors can try, they can swap out the district-issued lemony-fresh cleaning products for summer-rain-scented potpourri, but the underlying stench of scuffed linoleum, spiral notebooks, and teenage angst embeds itself in every loop of nondescript carpeting, in every inch of every number-two pencil, and in every rusted, dented corner of every locker of every high school in the world. Mercy was no different.

The girls deposited Will and me at the administration offices, where we were greeted by Heddy Gaines, school secretary—her little carved wood veneer nameplate placed prominently on her desk.

Heddy looked like every school secretary in every high school teen angst-slash-comedy ever made. She had a beige bouffant that was spun like cotton candy with perfectly rounded bangs that barely licked her forever-surprised red-brown brows. Her face was warm and matronly, as was the lacy Peter Pan collar on her dress, as she shoved a little cut-glass bowl of hard candies toward us. As I took a grape candy—and took her in—there was a tiny niggling at the back of my mind. Did I remember her? Her eyes flitted over mine, then went to Will. She offered us a practiced smile, her orange-red lips pressed tightly together.

“May I help you two?”

I stepped forward. “We’re the new teachers,” I hiss-whispered, and one of Heddy’s eyebrows went up even more than usual.

“Teachers?” she hissed back.

“Heddy, Heddy, I’ve got them.”

The gentleman speaking strode over to us, his tie flopping on his chest. He jutted out a hand. “Principal Lowe,” he said, shaking my hand so heartily I thought it’d snap off at the wrist.

For every inch that Heddy looked stereotypically secretarial, Principal Lowe looked atypically principal. He was tall, eye to eye with Will, with close-cropped salt and pepper hair and pale blue eyes that were kind, but rimmed with clear exhaustion. He was slender enough to make me suck in my gut, and his navy-blue suit—white button-down shirt, sans tie—gave him a cool but approachable edge. I vaguely wondered when Lowe had taken over, wondered if it was directly after the cranky old woman who had been the principal when I’d attended Mercy. Principal Stockman had lived up to her name as if it were an honor. She was built like a fireplug with a shock of fuzzy, blue-grey hair, turned-down eyes and a perma-scowl. Or, maybe the scowl was only for me. I shifted now in Principal Lowe’s visitors’ chairs, remembering the hundred or so times I had sat here, shrinking in Principal Stockman’s shadow as she told me that “girls will be girls” and that if I’d just ignore the mean girls’ comments, they would eventually forget about me and move on.

In my freshman year that had seemed like sound advice. By senior year I knew it was a crock of shit.

“I really appreciate you both coming out here,” Lowe said, his pale eyes moving from my face to Will’s. “And Ms. Lawson, I understand that you are a Mercy High, uh, alumna, is that correct?”

I shook my head quickly, then cleared my throat. “That is correct, sir.”

Lowe and Will both broke out into smiles. “You can call me Edward, Ms. Lawson. You’re not in any trouble here.”

I felt a hot blush warm my cheeks and the smile dropped from Edward’s face.

“Well, not in here. But out there”—his eyes flashed to the halls behind us and he shook his head—“I’m not so sure.”

I suddenly snapped into information-gathering mode and pulled my notebook and pen from my shoulder bag. Every cop seemed to have his own black leather flip-open notebook—Alex kept his in his back pocket—and I knew professionally, I would need my own. I couldn’t exactly find the model the cops used, but found that my Target stand-in with the glittery, big-eyed unicorn on the front cover still got the job done.

“Do you have any additional information you can give us, Edward? Anything at all about either of the missing students or any suspicions about your current class?”

Edward blinked at me blankly and Will put a soft hand on my knee. “What she means is, is there anything we should know before going out there?”

Edward shuffled some papers on his desk before handing one each to Will and me. “You’ll be teaching English Two, Ms. Lawson, and Mr. Sherman—”

“Will, please.”

“Will, thank you. You’ll be teaching American History.”

I let out a yip that was half nerves, half amusement. “He’s teaching American History?” I jerked a thumb toward Will. “He’s English.”

“With all due respect, love, we English have a pretty good working knowledge of what’s happened here in the States. We did own you and all.”

Edward cleared his throat and we both snapped back to attention, caught bickering in the principal’s office.

“You’ll each be teaching four classes a day with two free prep periods. You don’t start until after lunch today. The lessons are already prepared for you and left in each of your rooms. You have free rein of the building for your investigation.” Lowe pulled two keys from his top desk drawer and handed one to each of us. “But of course, you’ll keep your true intentions for being here from the student body. The girls were quite stirred up when the uniformed men were on campus. I don’t know what kind of CSI-type havoc they’d wreak if they knew two undercover FBI investigators were here as well.”

Lowe grinned and I smiled back, impressed. FBI investigators, huh? I made a mental note to thank Sampson for giving us a decent cover; the last time I went to investigate some supernatural bumps at a house in the Marina, Sampson told the lady I was an exterminator and I wound up with a tetanus shot and a vague certainty that her demon spider had laid a dozen eggs in my left nostril.

Lowe shrugged, his slim shoulders hugging his ears. “I wish I could give you some more information, some direction about the girls or the administration. Everyone here is like a family. I can’t imagine . . .”

“So, I believe our—FBI boss, Pete Sampson—told you what we’re investigating?”

“Of course.” Lowe nodded. “The possibility of a coven.”

“Yes.” I nodded back, flipping over my notebook in a bid to look uber FBI-like. “Do you know which students are a part of it?”

Edward swung his head and stiffened. “If there even is a coven. All the girls have been pretty tight lipped about their clubs and activities off campus. But I’ve heard the murmurs in the halls.”

“We met three girls earlier. Kayleigh—”

“Finleigh and Fallon,” Lowe finished. “They’re like the three Musketeers.”

“Yes. Are they—is Fallon perhaps part of the murmuring? She seems sort of . . .” I let my words trail off, hopeful that Edward would get the message without me having to say that the pubescent bombshell seemed a bit witchy.

“Fallon? No. She’s a star student here. Very friendly and helpful. Heads up the blood drive every year.”

I shifted in my seat. Nina was in charge of the blood drive at the office, but it was less a good-citizen thing, more of a lunch-truck thing.

I instinctively didn’t trust Fallon. And I swore to myself it had nothing to do with her perfect curves or the lascivious way she rolled her tongue over her bottom lip while hanging on Will’s every accented word.

“Fallon helps out a lot of students—especially new ones. High school can be pretty intimidating—especially here.”

Didn’t I know it.

Lowe turned us out into the hallway and my heart was thudding. Our footsteps echoed through the deserted corridor and I couldn’t help thinking about the green mile, a prisoner walking toward their death.

“Brings back a lot of memories, huh?” Will said. “Bet you were rollicking around here with your pigtails and your high-heeled shoes.”

I felt my upper lip curl. “I was going to high school, not a fantasy porn shoot. And my memories weren’t all good. I’m pretty sure if there’s witchcraft around here, it’s going to be right out in the open.”

“Why would you think that?”

I got a flash of my fifteen-year-old self, dwarfed by a backpack and a headgear, being Ping-Ponged between the popular girls as I tried to make my way to my locker.

“Just a gut thought.”

I pulled the file Sampson had given me from my shoulder bag as we walked the hall in silence.

“Here,” I whispered. “This is Cathy Ledwith’s class schedule. These two are Alyssa Rand’s from the last two years. Anything significant?”

“Yes. Absolutely. American teens are sadly behind in math. Look at this—juniors. Geometry One. A shame.”

I glared at Will, but kept the fact that Geometry One and I had shared more than a few tearful years together a secret. “No. I meant any crossover classes or teachers.”

He scanned the sheets. “They both took art with Mr. Fieldheart in 6B. Both third period last year, Alyssa second period this year. Both took Honors English in their junior year, both with the teacher you’re replacing.”

“Okay, okay, that gives us something to go on.” Will handed me back the pages. “What, exactly, does it give us to go on?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet. Let’s go upstairs and check out room 6B.”

We climbed the stairs and peered into classroom 6B, where a ring of girls sitting at easels turned to glare at us and no one adamantly jumped up and tried to turn us into toads.

“So much for your walk-around-and-stare-at-things plan.”

“I have other plans.”

“And they are . . . ?”

Saved by the bell.

I was congratulating myself for nearly getting through my first day at Mercy while my last class of the day was filing in. I went to turn around and found myself nose to cosmetically perfected nose with Fallon.

I cleared my throat and gripped my briefcase so tightly that I could feel my fingernails digging little half-moons into my palms.

Think, Sophie, THINK!

My mind sprung into action and I pasted on a grin, then relived—in rapid succession—every humiliation I had ever suffered in these halls, at the hands of girls in identical skirts.

I felt myself start to tremble.

You’re the grown-up.

I quickly whipped up a memory of staking a big baddie vampire, of defeating a couple of crazed psychopaths, of having the super-popular-girl luck of seeing a fallen angel and a Guardian naked.

I was pretty kick-ass.

“Are you mute or something?”

The snark in the comment—and Fallon moving toward her seat—thunked me back to the classroom and I blew out a sigh.

“No, sorry, ladies. I was just thinking about when I was a student here at Mercy.” A few girls leaned forward, a few raised their eyebrows, showing vague interest. Fallon whipped out a file and went to work on her right hand.

“My name is”—I paused, scanned—“Ms. Lawson, and I’ll be taking over for the time being while Mrs. Prusch is on medical leave.”

“You mean in the nuthouse.”

I was beginning to recognize Fallon’s voice with every part of my body. Just the sound of her spitting words poked at my stomach.

“Shut up, Fallon.” The mumbled quip came from a girl sitting in the front row. I smiled.

“Hi, again.”

Miranda looked up at me. Sitting in front of me at her desk, she somehow looked much smaller than she had in the cafeteria. She didn’t greet me, just went back to her book. I scanned my girls, then looked back at Miranda.

In real life, she was pretty. She had deep olive skin with thick, black brows and a head of fuzzy, dark curls that rolled over her shoulder. In high school world, however, she may as well have been wearing a kick-me sign: she was enviably thin (from a thirty-three-year-old’s point of view) with curves that the mean girls would call fat. Her curls were gorgeous and natural but neglected and unruly (similar to my own, which had earned me the quaint nickname Electric Head), and she bore the high school equivalent to leprosy: a decent case of acne that peppered her nose and chin.

“I had the pleasure of meeting Miranda at lunch today.” I looked up, thinking my connection to the obvious outcast would make her seem adult and cool. But the mention of her name—as if it were the punch line of some untold joke—caused a quiet ripple of laughter through the classroom. I felt myself bristle, then grabbed Mrs. Prusch’s role book and went through the hallowed high school ritual of butchering the students’ surnames and, in this decade of Ja Net (pronounced Jenae), Niola, Suri, and Jacita, their first names as well.

Didn’t anyone name her kid Jennifer anymore?

“Uh, Kayleigh?”

“Here.” A strawberry blond raised her hand as if it weighed eight hundred pounds and her one-word response would be the last she’d ever utter.

“Finleigh?”

Kayleigh’s neighbor to her right gave me a finger wave and a dazzling smile.

“And . . . so—I’m sorry, I’m not sure how to pronounce this.”

Big blue eyes rolled backward like a slot machine. “It’s pronounced so-fee,” the other girl sandwiching Kayleigh groaned. “Sofeigh.”

I wouldn’t have believed it if it weren’t there in ballpoint and white. “Interesting. I’ve just never seen it spelled that way.”

Sofeigh gave me another eye roll and then exchanged the are-you-kidding-me gaze with Fallon and the other ’eigh-ers. I felt sweat beading at the back of my neck.

You’re the adult, Sophie.

“Okay.” I snapped the roll book shut and slid up on the front desk à la every sexy actress playing a teacher in every film I’d ever seen. “We’re talking today about The Scarlet Letter. Who wants to explain to me a little about the book?”

A heavy silence washed over the room and every eye was turned on me, every pair blank.

Where is a swirling vortex of hell when you need it?

The bell rang and it was the single most sweet, welcome sound that I’d ever heard. The girls were up with laptops, iPads, and English books packed, iPhones whipped out and already in mid-text before the thirty-second bell ceased.

“Remember to read the Prufrock poem in its entirety,” I said to the backs of their heads. I could have raised my voice or rapped my hand on the desk to get their attention, but truthfully, watching the herd of teenage girl heads filing en masse out the door took my breath away. Their desertion of my classroom was a thing of pure beauty.

Until I noticed it wasn’t completely deserted.

“Everything okay, Miranda?”

Miranda was hunched at her desk, shoulders sloped, massive waves of frizzy curls tenting whatever it was she studied. She looked up, surprised. “Is class over?”

I nodded silently, and though I knew should do something teacher-ly and admonish her for reading during my lecture, I felt a certain kinship for her, could understand the overwhelming desire to dip into an artsy world when the real one echoed with monikers like Super Dork and Forever Virgin.

I smiled softly at her. “So, was it as bad as I thought it was?”

Miranda looked up from the paper she was doodling on with a shy smile. “No.”

I held her eye and a blush warmed her cheek; she broke my gaze and studied her notebook. “Well, kind of.”

I bit my lip. “And to think the only thing I was worried about subbing here at Mercy was . . . well, you know.” I watched Miranda’s eyes for any new flicker of recognition/witchcraft/avoidance. She just blinked at me, her face blank.

“You know, the kidnapping?” I paused, breathing deeply. “And the other stuff we were talking about earlier.”

Miranda nodded her head, solemnly. I tried a more nonchalant tactic, sliding up onto my desk, letting my legs dangle. “So, did you know her?”

Miranda went back to doodling, a blanket of hair hiding her expression. “Alyssa? Or Cathy?”

“Either,” I said, my heartbeat starting to quicken. “Or both.”

She continued moving her pencil across her paper, not bothering to look at me. “Alyssa was in this class. Fallon’s sitting in her seat right now.”

“Fallon took over Alyssa’s seat already?” I tried not to gape.

Miranda just shrugged, pushed a lock of hair between her lips and sucked on it. “I didn’t know know Cathy, but she’s kind of a legend here now.”

“A legend?”

“You know,” Miranda made air quotes. “‘The girl who was sacrificed.’”

“So that’s what kids here think? It was a sacrifice?”

Miranda raised her eyebrows in the universal sign of “duh” and went on. “Because of the pentagram. And the stuff carved into her.”

I swallowed sour saliva, hating the image the word “carved” brought up. Then I straightened. “How did you know there was something carved into her skin? I don’t remember seeing that in the paper.”

“Welcome to Generation Internet.”

“So . . . do they think it was witches, because of the carvings? Or Satan worshippers?” I tried to force a lightness into my tone—as light a conversation about a dead girl and human sacrifice could be, anyhow.

Miranda dropped her pencil and perched her chin in her hand. “Do you know that there has never been even one bona fide instance of Satanism or Satanic sacrifice in San Francisco?”

I did know that, unfortunately, and could have corrected Miranda—there’s never been a documented case of true Satanic sacrifice in all of the U.S. But I just played dumb.

“Wow. Well, what about the witch stuff? I heard some of the girls saying that maybe the—what was carved—was, like, a spell.”

Miranda didn’t answer and I rushed on. “When I went here, there were always a few girls messing with that stuff. You know, pentagrams and charms and stuff.” I stifled a manufactured oh-how-silly chuckle. “There was even a rumor about a coven on campus.”

Miranda carefully closed her notebook and laid her pencil on top. My throat went dry and a shot of adrenaline zinged through me.

“Yeah. You told me that already.”

Of course it couldn’t have been that easy.

I tried pulling my pillow over my head and then pulled ChaCha, my ever-trusty three-pound pup over that, but neither did anything to drown out the incessant pounding that was going on in my skull. ChaCha just rolled off me and went to work licking my eyebrows.

“Oh, ChaCha, stop. Mommy has a—” I was going to say headache, but once I sat up in the blackness, I realized the pounding wasn’t coming from my brain—it was coming from the living room.

The pounding started again and ChaCha jumped to attention, a stripe of hair zipping straight up along her back. She curled her little black lips back, exposing frightening—if miniscule—incisors, and growled.

A stripe of fear went down my own spine and I stopped breathing, listening.

Another three raps.

“Go get it, ChaCha,” I said, pointing. “Go defend your turf!”

ChaCha made a second fearsome growl followed by a pitiful yip as she disappeared under my sheets.

“Useless dog,” I grumbled.

I was halfway through the living room, on my way to our sword closet (it’s not that weird), when the pounding came again. It stopped and I stopped, my every living fiber taut with adrenaline.

“Nina?” I hissed.

There was no answer.

“Vlad?”

Again, silence.

Finally, the front door tore open in a Lucasfilm-style haze of whooshing wind and spitting fire.

“Holy crap!”

I stopped, dropped, and rolled. Somewhere in my subconscious I knew that was for earthquakes or bomb raids, but it didn’t seem to matter as chunks of my doorframe blistered and turned to charred dust on the ground. I was being choked by smoke and my eyes stung, but I worked to keep them open until I saw the figure walking through the flaming frame coolly, as if he didn’t feel the heat.

“Who are you?” I screamed. “What do you want?”

“Sophie?”

My heart was clanging like a fire bell and the soft voice saying my name only terrified me further. I knew that voice, I remembered that voice. I gulped, sour saliva dripping down my throat.

“O-o-Ophelia?” I asked, my lips burning from the heat. “Oh, God.”

Ophelia was a fallen angel. One whom, until apparently right this minute, had been dead, killed by yours truly, staked with a trident to a UDA corkboard. The fact that she was the baddest of the fallen angel brigade made her death warranted. The fact that she was my half sister made the whole thing incredibly complicated.

“Oh God, ohGod-ohGod-ohGod,” I mumbled to my hands.

“No, Sophie, it’s me!”

The darkened form came closer and I could clearly make out slim hips, a tiny waist, and thick braids. I squinted. “Kale?”

She did some sort of Samantha Stephens move and suddenly everything—the fire, my charred doorframe—was fine. I took the opportunity to roll out of the fetal position and thank my lucky stars that in my last few years of being surprised, attacked, and other, my bladder was starting to strengthen up quite nicely.

“What the hell are you doing here at”—I glanced at the suddenly non-melted clock next to the door—“three a.m. and what”—I flailed wildly at the door—“was that? Why the hell are you trying to burn my apartment down?”

Kale seemed to shrink into herself and her blue hair as a Corvette-red blush blanketed her cheeks. “I’m really sorry, Soph. But look—” She knocked on the doorframe. “No harm no foul. It was all magik. An illusion.”

“Great. Please tell that to my cardiologist because I’m about to drop dead. Why are you burning shit—illusion or otherwise—at this hour? And why my shit? I thought we were friends.”

Kale rushed toward me and took my hand in hers. “Oh, Sophie, of course we’re friends! This wasn’t for you.” It took a microsecond for the sweet, apologetic look in her eyes to change to one of fiery rage. “It was for Vlad.”

“Vlad’s not here,” I said, my teeth gritted, my breath coming out in spitting gasps. “He and Nina are probably at Poe’s.”

Vlad and Nina—and the rest of their vampire brethren—have no need for sleep and, really, abhor relaxation of any kind (another reason I’m A-okay not being one of the pointy-fanged undead). As the majority of the breathing world fell asleep during the wee hours, some shopkeepers saw their niche in the market and started opening up a select group of shops—bars, coffeehouses, etc.—specifically for their all-night clientele. Vlad and Nina had a special fondness for a little hole-in-the-artery place called Poe’s and spent at least a couple of nights there each week, brooding and drinking blood out of giant cappuccino bowls.

“So sorry about that. And you know, this.” Kale’s bottom lip started to wobble as I prayed for her to leave so I could drop back into my blissful dreams about sexy men and not murder. But I was a pushover. “Come in.”

She did and immediately flopped onto the couch. “I’m just so mad at Vlad. Did you hear what he did?”

“Allegedly,” I mumbled. “But Kale, it’s the middle of the night. You’re eighteen. You should save the blowing up of ex-boyfriends for daylight hours, young lady.” I stifled a yawn. “Besides, aren’t your parents going to be worried about you?”

Kale waved a nonchalant hand and sniffled. “My parents won’t even notice I’m gone.”

“Oh, Kale, I’m sure that’s not true!”

“No, I put an oblivion spell on them.” She turned her watery eyes to me. “Do you think I’m doing the right thing?”

I looked over her shoulder. “If you mean burning down doors at three a.m., no. If you mean trying to make Vlad pay his debts by throwing fireballs and whatnot at him? Still no. Ditto on the magical parental lobotomy. What’s all this really for, Kale? What do you want from Vlad?”

She sniffled again and used the heel of her hand to push the mascara-edged tears away. “I just want him to notice me.”

“Well, burning things might get you noticed, but not in the right way. Why don’t you try talking to him? Or, possibly sending him a nice, quiet text message?”

Kale heaved a weight-of-the-world sigh. “I don’t know. That’s really subtle. Do you think it would work?”

“I think it’s worth a try.”

She looked at her hands in her lap, shaking her head. A fresh round of tears rolled over her cheeks. “It has to work. You’re right, Sophie. I’m already nineteen. I don’t want to be alone forever.”

I bit into my bottom lip as Kale looked up at me with those round, earnest eyes. Eyes that truly believed that eighteen was, apparently, approaching the crest of “the hill” of which I was most notably over.

“I just don’t know how you do it. You don’t have anyone and you’re still just so confident.”

My left eye started to twitch. I pressed my index finger to it in a vain attempt at stopping the thrum. “You should probably head home now, Kale.”

Kale nodded and touched my hand softly. “Thanks, Sophie. You’re really wise.” She stood up and brushed her palms over her jeans. “And again, I’m sorry about waking you up.”

I swung the lock on the door and crawled into bed after Kale left, intent on getting at least another three hours of sleep.

I wasn’t going to be alone for the rest of my life, I reasoned. My life was very full with two incredible guys. One who was supernaturally bound to me and another who could never be truly happy unless he killed me.

Maybe I should go back on Match.com.

I tried to drift off to sleep—tried counting sheep and reciting the Gettysburg address, both usually fail-safe knockouts—but twenty minutes later my heart was still slamming against my rib cage and my whole body was tense, humming with adrenaline.

Kale was willing to show up in a shower of fire to get Vlad’s attention. She is willing to cut off his head due to jealousy, I thought. Yes, but she’s a teen witch, I reasoned. With non-witchy hormones.

I sat bolt upright in bed a second time.

Jealousy.

I grabbed my cell phone and counted the rings.

“This better be a matter of life or death, Lawson.”

I took a brief, fluttering second to absorb the velvet smoothness of Alex’s voice—even as it was throaty and gruff with sleep.

“How’d you know it was me?”

“A thrilling combination of good detective work and caller ID. To what do I owe this pleasure?”

I sucked in a breath and began pacing. “Sampson said you’re working on the Mercy kidnapping case, too, right?”

“Strictly the aboveground part of it. No creepy-crawlies or bump-in-the-nighties. Why?”

“Have you interviewed the girls’ friends yet? Cathy and Alyssa’s?”

I could hear the mattress groan as Alex changed position and I clamped my knees together and bit into my lower lip, scolding myself for thinking of Alex, position, and mattress all in the same sentence.

“So, Alyssa’s disappearance. What if it’s not the same unsub who snatched Cathy? What if it’s something entirely different?”

“I’m listening.”

“What if it’s jealousy? Alyssa was popular and friendly, everyone seemed to like her. She disappears and two days later another girl is sitting in her seat. Her clothes are burned on campus. That could be very significant. What if another girl is literally trying to be her?”

“Wait, wait, wait. What is this about Alyssa’s clothes being burned? And on campus?”

My chest tightened. “Didn’t Will mention that earlier? He was supposed to call you.” A flash of guilt washed over me and burned at the back of my neck.

Alex grumbled. “I don’t trust that guy.”

Ever since Will had inadvertently stabbed Alex in an attempt to defend my life, the two weren’t so keen on each other. And my Freudian slip—or my tossing of Will under the bus as it were—wasn’t helping.

I tried to appease my guilt by making a mental note that once the universe stopped vaulting into hell and raining down dead bodies, I’d throw some kind of bowling party or something so they could really bond.

But now wasn’t the time.

“I think I was supposed to call you. It wasn’t Will’s fault.” It rolled out in one complete string and Alex’s silence on the other end of the phone did nothing to make me feel better about coming clean.

“Where did you find Alyssa’s clothes? When? Who found them?”

“We found them. Today. In the Dumpster. They were on fire. Well, the Dumpster was on fire, but we were able to save some of the fabric. Enough to at least be able to figure out what it was.”

“How did you know it was Alyssa’s? Aren’t all the girls pretty much in the same uniform? Did it have her name printed on it somewhere?”

“No.” My stomach churned and I could feel the slightly warm plastic sole of Alyssa’s shoe in my hand. “We found one of her shoes. Her name was written on that.”

There was another beat of silence. Then, finally, “Lawson, this isn’t a game. A girl’s life is at stake.”

“I wasn’t trying to keep anything from you—”

It could have been an innocent cough, but I was pretty sure it was a derisive snort from Alex’s side of the phone. It wasn’t too long ago I was sitting in the passenger seat of Alex’s squad car, lying to his face.

I gulped and muttered weakly, “I promise.”

I could hear Alex processing the information. “Fine. But bring me the burnt uniform and all the information you have tomorrow. And no more conveniently forgetting to relay information. Deal?”

I nodded, knowing he couldn’t see me on my end. “Deal.”

“Now can I get some sleep?”

I chewed the inside of my lip, considering whether or not to tell him my theory. “No. My theory.”

Alex sighed.

“You said you wanted me to tell you everything.”

“And I’m already starting to regret it. But go ahead.”

“Well.” I sucked in a steadying breath. “A girl who is jealous of another girl can be ruthless.”

“Ruthless, sure. But murderous?” Alex sounded skeptical.

“People have killed for a lot less. It’s not like when you were—” I caught myself before saying “alive.”

“So you’re vetoing Sampson’s witchcraft idea?”

I sat back onto my bed and pinched my lower lip. “Not exactly. I’m just throwing a theory out there for you.”

There was an audible, painful pause and I held my breath until Alex spoke. “Look, Lawson, I appreciate the tip, but you’re with Will on this, aren’t you? Working the Underworld angle?”

I could hear a strain of something—annoyance? jealousy?—in his voice, but I couldn’t recognize it. “Yes, but—”

“How about you two stick to your end and I’ll stick to mine, okay? Physical evidence—anything other than black cats or pointed hats—is my end. Bring me the uniform tomorrow.”

The sudden change in Alex’s tone hit me like a ton of bricks. “Uh, well, oh—”

But Alex’s phone hit the cradle before I had a chance to respond.

Just down the hall from where I stood I saw the crowd and briefly wished for kick-ass leather and some kind of sword as I raced toward the students.

“Girls, girls!”

They scattered like billiard balls from a crack and left at their center was Miranda, eyes wide and terrified, and Fallon, lips pressed in a hard line, eyes sharp and accusing.

“What’s going on here?”

Fallon snaked her arms in front of her chest but didn’t take her eyes off Miranda. “Nothing, Ms. L.”

“Nothing? Miranda?”

Miranda cleared her throat and pushed a fuzzy lock of hair behind her ear. “She’s right, Ms. L. It was nothing.”

“It wasn’t nothing, Ms. L. I saw the whole thing.” Kayleigh blazed down the hall, pointing. “Miranda shoved Fallon. I saw it. That girl is crazy—she needs to be expelled. And look, look, she ripped Fallon’s shirt!”

There was a small tear at the collar of Fallon’s shirt. She looked embarrassed or guilty—I couldn’t tell which—and began pulling her long hair over her shoulder to cover it. “That happened a long time ago.”

“So neither of you are going to tell me what was going on?”

Miranda and Fallon looked up at me and blinked. I watched the bright pink edge of Fallon’s tongue poke out from between her pursed lips and slide across her bottom lip, leaving a glossy trail. “We told you,” she said slowly.

My forehead started to pound and I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Okay, fine. Move on. You, too, Kayleigh. Go.”

Kayleigh threaded her arm through Fallon’s and tugged her away, throwing sinister glances over her shoulder and muttering to Fallon. Miranda’s eyes were glued to Fallon’s back and I could see her cheeks burn, her teeth clench. I put a hand softly on her shoulder.

“Ignore her, Miranda. Girls like that—”

“Only grow up to be bigger girls like that.”

I smiled, despite my attempt to be adult and full of after-school-special wisdom. “Yeah, a lot of them do. Believe me: I know better than anyone what being bullied feels like. Especially because you don’t fit in with the pretty girls or the popular girls or the smart girls.”

I looked at Miranda hopefully and saw the crestfallen look on her face.

“Oh, no, not that I meant that you’re not all of those things—pretty, popular, smart—it’s just that, well, I was bullied in high school. Right here, in these halls.” I pointed to the scuffed tile underneath us as though my tortured footprints would still be there as proof. “It was torturous and everyone hated me because I was different. And I stayed different. But when I became an adult, being different is what got me my job, my best friend, even my boyfrie—” I choked on the word, and the need to check my cell phone for a call I didn’t hear or a text I hadn’t read burned up my arms.

“You were a student here?”

I nodded quickly. “Yep.”

“And your being different got you a job as a substitute teacher.”

My mouth dropped open. My “being different” got me a job thirty floors underground and got me into a hell of a lot of scrapes. “Um, in a way, yes. You should probably get going.”

Miranda nodded and stepped away.

“Oh, wait!” I swiped the book that had been laid flat on the floor, just behind Miranda’s left foot. “You dropped this.”

I held it out to her and Miranda’s eyes shot over it as though she’d never seen it, then up at me. I glanced down at the cover and my heart lurched.

“Protection spells?” I remembered my own desperation. I would have done anything to make myself invisible, to grant myself a few hours free from the demons in my high school hallways.

Miranda reached for the book and I eyed her. “If you need help, you need to tell someone. A silly book of spells isn’t going to protect anyone.”

She snatched the book out of my hand and shoved it in her bag. “I know,” she said to her shoes.

I watched Miranda walk alone down the hall, trying my best to swallow the enormous lump that had formed in my throat.

“Everything okay, love?”

I jumped and grabbed at my thundering heart. “Oh! You scared the crap out of me. Someone should get you a bell.”

“So you could ring every time you need your bell rung?” Will’s grin was familiarly salacious, his hazel-flecked eyes slipping from my lips to my naked collarbone, to the cleave of my Nina-scaffolded breasts. I covered my chest and narrowed my eyes.

“No, that would mean that I would have a bell. And thanks, by the way, for ruining a very touching moment here. Have you dismissed your fan club?”

Will leaned against the bank of lockers, tossing a handful of peanut M&Ms into his mouth. “Can I help it if these girls are fascinated by history?”

I rolled my eyes.

“And your ‘moment’? Saw it,” he said, chewing. “Wasn’t that touching? Nice with the ‘I was bullied, too’ stuff.”

“I was bullied,” I muttered, still staring down the hall.

“Anyway, ready to go? Oh.” Will kicked at the ground. “Dropped this.”

He handed me a receipt and I took it cautiously as though it were a snake about to bite. “This is a receipt.”

“And this is a man, walking toward the door.”

“It’s from Simply Charming out in Marin.”

Will shook another handful of candies into his mouth. “And I pegged you more as a Crate and Barrel kind of bird.”

“Simply Charming is a shop for potions, spell books, candles. And this receipt isn’t mine.”

Will stopped then and turned, eyebrows raised. “So we have a witchcraft type killer and a receipt from a witchcraft type store.”

“Yeah, but this must have fallen out of Miranda’s book. She dropped a book of protection spells when she got in a scuffle with Fallon just a few minutes ago.”

“So Miranda is dabbling in the dark arts?”

I put my hands on my hips. “No, Miranda was buying a book of protection spells because Fallon keeps bullying her and knocking her around.”

Will came toward me, crushing the M&M bag in his hand. “And you don’t find it the least bit coinky-dink that she went directly to a spell book rather than, say, the principal? Or her parents? Or a bodyguard?”

“We don’t know that she went ‘directly’ to magic. She’s probably tried everything else to get Fallon off her case and she knew if she went to the principal it would only get worse. She was probably too humiliated to go to her parents.”

The rest of the school day passed uneventfully. After I scarfed the granola bar Nina had tossed in a paper lunch bag for me, I started topping each empty desk with the single-page pop quiz Heddy had delivered that morning. I paused when I got to the end of the room, brushing my finger over the carving on one of the last desks.

“Hello,” I said, dropping the test papers and sliding into the desk. I bit my lip, still tracing the little round carving. I recognized it, but I wasn’t sure from where.

After wracking my brain, I joined the twenty-first century and snapped a picture, sending it to Lorraine—my own personal witchcraft Wikipe-dian. As I waited for her response, Will poked his head into my classroom, did a quick sweep—obviously not seeing me in the back of the class—and sauntered in, snagging my cup of dry erase pens.

“Ahem.”

Will made the exact same high-pitched yip that ChaCha made the time I had accidentally stepped on her paw. I broke down laughing, watching my collection of pens—cup and all—rain down on Will’s head.

“Holy God, Sophie! There’s a killer in our midst and you’re trying your sodden best to add to the body count.”

I sat back against the attached-chair’s backrest and shot Will my best cop look. “Looks like murder might not be the only crime afoot. Why were you stealing my pens?”

Will strode toward me. “I think the real question is why weren’t you protecting your pens?”

“You know that makes no sense, right?”

“Subject changed. What are you doing back here?”

I grabbed a few strands of my frazzled red hair and twisted them around my finger. “I’m waiting for Lorraine to call me back. See what I found?”

I pointed out the carving and Will craned his neck to look at it. “Looks like a circle.”

“Look closer.”

Will squinted, but obliged. “A circle with stuff in the middle.”

“Really, you should share your brilliant powers of deduction with the world.”

Will opened his mouth to respond, but my phone exploded into an annoying series of chirps. I glanced at the text.

“Circle with stuff in the middle my butt! According to Lorraine, that’s a symbol of protection. It’s usually found on talismans. The pattern is called Luaithrindi, and these”—I drew my finger over each of the crossed lines—“are swords. The eight Ciphers of the Angels. This part where they interlock forms a—and I quote—powerful shield of protection.”

Will crossed his arms in front of his chest. “So a girl goes missing a year ago. She turns up with carvings all over her body.” He gestured toward the desk. “Do we know if this symbol showed up?”

I bit my lip and shook my head. “Not that I remember.” My stomach roiled. “Not that I want to remember.”

“One year to the day another girl goes missing. Her clothes are dumped and lit on fire. Same thing with Cathy?”

“No. I don’t think Cathy’s clothes were ever found.”

Will pressed his lips together, using his index finger to tap his clean-shaven (a rarity) chin. “So, how do we know that this”—he mashed his finger against the symbol—“has anything to do with our case?”

I could feel the adrenaline beginning to well. “Sampson suspected witchcraft. We find a symbol of protection carved into the desk, and earlier today . . .” I raised my eyebrows, assuming he’d finish my thought.

“Earlier today what?”

Of course not.

“The book—Miranda’s book of protection spells. She’s afraid of something—or someone.”

“So Miranda settles into her seat here in the back and carves herself some protection.”

I stopped cold, clamping my mouth shut. Then, “This isn’t Miranda’s desk.” I swallowed. “Up until last week, it was Alyssa’s. Now its Fallon’s.”

Will cocked a smug grin. “Well, then I guess we know the school’s not evil—just the students.”

I blanched, thinking how any girl—especially one not even old enough to vote—could be warped enough to kidnap, murder, and maim, whether or not she thought she was a powerful witch or just wanted to be.

I rested my head in my hands and massaged my scalp. “At least, for the first time in years, I’m not the one they’re aiming to kill.”

“And now it’s done.” He threw up his hands.

I looked up at him; he stood with arms widespread, a look of clear disappointment marring his hazel eyes.

“What’s done?”

“You. You are. You’ve essentially double-dog-dared every Vessel baddie in the known world to come take a swing at you.” He shook his head, clucking his tongue. “I really didn’t want to get these shoes scuffed.”

“Fine. Change into your defensive shoes while I go to the bathroom. Then we’re going to Cathy’s house.”

Will looked surprised. “On a bombardment mission?”

I rolled my eyes. “Her mother knows we’re coming. I called her between classes and got her address.” I produced the scrap piece of paper I had written the Ledwiths’ address on. “There was no answer at Alyssa’s, so we’ll have to search her place another time.”

Will left on a sigh.

My phone chirped just as I exited the classroom.

“Hey, Neens, what’s up?”

“I have great news,” she said, breathless.

“Really? Awesome. I could use some good news right now.”

“Well, first things first, I dumped UDA: The Musical .”

A little starburst of joy shot across my heart.

“Aw,” I said in my best that’s-too-bad-voice. “What made you decide that?”

“I suck at writing music. And you know what rhymes with Underworld Detection Agency? Nothing.”

“So . . .”

“So I have a new plan. And this one is legitimate. I am going to be writing, casting, and directing UDA: The Documentary.”

“Do you cast a documentary?”

“Sampson was muttering something about our need to drum up more business, so I thought what better way to do that than to advertise? And what better way to advertise than to make a commercial?”

I bit my thumbnail. “And the documentary comes in where?”

“See, that’s the great thing. I’ll have the camera people following me while I make the commercial. Isn’t that going to be incredible?”

I knew better then to remind Nina of all the enormous loopholes in her new project—she couldn’t be seen on film; the clients, and existence, of the Underworld were supposed to be kept under non-major-media wraps—so I just gave her my most enthusiastic, “That sounds amazing!”

She paused for a beat, and I knew that she was biting her lip on the other side of the phone line. “Just one totally little teensy thing.”

My hackles were going up and my tolerance was going down. “What?”

“I just may need to use the apartment for some non-apartment-related things.”

I was imagining hobgoblin slobber soaking the carpet and blood spattering every wall—Nina was nothing if not incredibly theatrical and the documentary would be that times a thousand. “Like what?”

“Writing, storyboarding, meeting with the crew, casting.”

A whoosh of relief went through me. “As long as I don’t walk in on you on the casting couch with some hot little actor, that’s totally fine with me.”

“You’re the best, Soph.”

I clicked my phone off and put a little hop in my step. Things would work out. We were going to find Alyssa and solve this case and my alma mater would be no worse for the wear. High school was terrifying enough without adding a cache of teen witches—and Mercy didn’t have any, anyway. I smiled to myself. By this time tomorrow I could be peeing in the comfort of the Underworld Detection Agency, right next to the tiny pixie stall, with Nina giving me advice from her perch on the sink where she stared at her non-reflection.

I was disgusted—yet slightly comforted—to see that the girls’ room in the Junior Hall hadn’t changed since my years of hiding from my tormenters there. The tile was still that same horrid, milky pink with once-white grout that had endured years of pens and fingernails being driven into it. I tried not to breathe in, lest the stench of canned potpourri and industrial-strength cleanser stick in my lungs.

I flushed, and was mentally picking out tomorrow’s outfit when the overhead light started humming. It crackled, and my heart stopped beating while the light did one of those horror-movie flashes before going back to normal. I laughed at myself and yanked on the stall door, and nothing happened.

I jiggled the handle. I jiggled the lock. I yanked. I pushed. I pulled.

“Hello?” I called in the universal come-kill-me-now fashion.

The lights buzzed and flashed again, and heat zipped up the back of my neck. I started to panic, clawing at the cold metal door, kicking it, throwing my full weight against the chintzy lock. It gave at the same moment the lights went out. I stumbled over my own feet and barrel rolled onto the cold tile floor, gagging at the thought of bathroom floor touching skin and whimpering at the all-encompassing darkness. The room was pitch black and deadly silent, the only sound the heavy beating of my heart and my own open-mouthed panting.

And then came the sound. A bristling howl—primitive, inhuman—and deafening. I clapped my hands over my ears, trying to press the brain-numbing sound out, but it only got louder. I hunched down into myself as each stall door barreled open on its own accord, the metal slabs clanking against each other. The toilets were next—one, two, three—exploding pistols of water straight up toward the ceiling. A chilling blue light swirled with the water and I pushed myself up, steadying against a sink as water swirled around my ankles.

I gaped. The mirror was smeared with angry slashes of red, the words GET OUT scrawled across the mirror, hacking through my reflection. I was screaming and crying, tears and snot rolling over my chin, throwing my weight against the bathroom door when a heavy force pushed against me. My legs were matchsticks and I crumpled back to the horrible pebbled tile and Will looked down at me.

“Soph?”

In an instant the bathroom was bright and dry. The mirrors reflected the unscathed Pepto-pink stall doors and the only sound was the slight hum of the overhead lights and my own thrumming heart.

I could see that Will was geared to say something smart, but the second he saw me, he crouched down at my feet and pulled me to him, one hand on my shoulder, the other cradling my cheek. He thumbed a tear from the end of my nose. “What happened?”

I looked over both shoulders, expecting singing birds or a giant neon sign blaring CRAZY PANTS with an arrow pointing to me.

“There was, and then—” I sniffled. “Something happened in here, Will!”

Will stepped around me, poking his head in each stall, doing a quick check. He turned to me and shrugged, his expression surprisingly sympathetic.

“I—I don’t know what to say,” Will said.

I pushed myself up and used the heel of my hand to wipe away the tears, then scanned the room myself from the safety of the doorway.

“Lights were blinking, and then they went out and there was—” I paused while Will studied me. I couldn’t tell if he was listening hard or considering whether or not my family history of nuttiness and pure evil had seeped into my brain. “There!” I pointed to the ceiling, cocking my head. “There, you hear that, right?”

The ominous squeak-squeak-squeak sounded again. I grabbed Will by both lapels. “Tell me you hear that!”

Will slid his arms around my waist and carefully led me into the hall. His eyes were intense. “Yes, I heard that, too.”

Part of me felt like collapsing in relief in his arms. The other part of me wanted to climb the length of his body and bury myself in his neck while we ran from imminent danger.

“What is it?” I whispered.

The triple squeak stopped, but my heart continued to hammer.

“Wait,” Will hissed. “Listen.”

Something heavy hit something hard. I could hear goo, something—blood?—sloshing and I started to heave. “That’s a body. That’s a body hitting the ground if I ever heard it.”

Will took his hands off me and turned carefully. “Go back into your classroom and lock the door. Don’t come out until I tell you to.”

I clung to his back, wrapping my arms around him and burying my forehead in the cleft between his shoulder blades. “No. No, no, no, no, no. I can’t lose you, too. I won’t sit by and watch you die.”

He looked over his shoulder. “Thanks for your vote of confidence.”

“There it is again!” I gripped fistfuls of Will’s shirt and moved with him, my eyes clenched shut.

“This would go a lot more smoothly if you would let go of me.”

“I can’t.” My muscles had seized up, my full body molded into the shape of ardent terror. “If I survive, I’m going to be in this position forever.”

“Lucky me. Would you just—” He wedged his hand between my front and his back and I was forced to move a quarter inch. “I thought you were supposed to be some great crime-fighting asset. Weren’t you learning to be tough or something?”

That’s right! “That’s right!” Adrenaline shot through my entire body and I imagined myself giving whatever terror awaited us the ass-kicking of a lifetime. I’d stake a vamp with the number-two pencil in Will’s shirt pocket. I would stop a zombie with a head-removing scissor kick.

Squeak-squeak-squeak.

My bladder felt heavy, but I was ready.

Finally, I felt Will’s body loosen slightly. He pulled my hands from his shirt. “This one’s yours.”

He stepped aside and I imagined myself jumping into my most Buffy-esque fighting stance before doing some sort of dive roll into a helicopter kick that would disable my attacker.

In actuality, I was crunched myself into a chair pose and held my fisted hands close to my sides, protecting my breasts. The smell of fear, adrenaline and fate hung in the air.

And it smelled like bleu cheese.

“Steve?”

Steve, the Underworld Detection Agency’s resident troll and three-foot-tall stalker, grinned at me, baring all three of his snaggled yellow teeth.

“What the hell are you doing here? You almost got your ass kicked!”

“By him?” Steve motioned toward Will, who was doubled over, holding his gut, doing that silent, tears-down-the-face kind of laugh.

I wanted to slap him.

“What are you doing here?”

“Sophie needs Steve. Sophie is in danger, and Steve would never leave his Sophie in danger.” He looked disdainfully at Will. “A true gentleman would never leave his woman in danger.”

“I’m not your woman. And why do you have a bucket? Why—” Knowing—sickening, overwhelming knowing—crashed over me. “You’re wearing a uniform. A janitor’s uniform.”

“Steve is undercover. Steve knows that’s the best way to protect his woman.”

Will stopped laughing and gasping for air long enough to say, “Does he always refer to himself in the third?”

“Steve does,” said Steve.

“Okay, okay, wait. Both of you—wait. Steve?”

“Steve is filling in for the janitor on vacation.” He looked at his bucket and frowned. “Steve doesn’t like his job very much.” He flapped nonexistent eyelashes. “But anything for my Sophie.”

“Did you just start today?”

Steve nodded.

“So when you said Soph—I—was in danger, it was just general. You don’t have any pertinent information, do you?”

A slip of Steve’s forked black tongue washed across his bottom lip. “Steve always has pertinent information.”

Will straightened. “Share it, mate.”

Steve shot him a blood-curdling glare. “Steve only shares with his woman.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose, hoping that would stop my new, suddenly pounding headache and the fact that my left eye was starting that twitching thing again. “Okay, Steve, what information do you have?”

He grabbed the wooden handle of the mop he had been slapping across the linoleum and pointed to the second floor with it. “Toilet’s clogged.”

I gaped. My eye twitched. “That’s your pertinent information?”

“Steve fixed the clog.”

Will blew out an annoyed sigh. “Fabulous. You’ve exorcised the crap out of the toilet.” He clapped. “Brilliant job, mate.”

“Steve, we don’t have time for this. Will and I need to—”

“Doesn’t Sophie want to know what clogged the toilet?”

I felt myself blanch. “Not especially.”

He poked his mop into his bucket and laboriously fished out a sopping wet sweater. “Not even if it was this?”

I took a step closer. “Is that a sweater?”

Will took a step closer. “From here?”

Steve flicked the sweater end of the mop in Will’s direction. “For Sophie’s eyes only.”

“Fine, Steve. It is a Mercy sweater,” I told Will over my shoulder. “Where did you get this?”

“Steve feels like he’s sharing a lot of information.”

“Of course. What do you want, Steve?”

Steve puckered up. “Little kiss?”

“Not if you pulled Jesus himself out of the toilet.”

Steve narrowed his eyes and started to sink the sweater again.

“Wait! Wait! I’ve got something even better. A kiss is so fast. It just comes and goes—”

“Not when Steve kisses.”

I let that roll off me and kept going. “This is way better.” I fished a tube of lip balm out of my pocket and held it in the palm of my hand. Steve poked his head forward, then tentatively came around his bucket, pulling my hand just under his nose.

“Lipstick?”

“Better.” I uncapped the balm and spread it across my lips. “Lip balm. I use it everyday. All the time. If you take this, it’s like your lips will be touching my lips all the time.”

Steve cocked his head.

“That’s awfully sexy. If the little man here doesn’t want it—” Will went to reach for my hand, but Steve rolled up on his tiptoes, yanked the balm from my hand, and squirreled backward with it tucked against his chest. He glared at Will. “Steve’s woman.” He uncapped the lip balm, rubbed it across his lips. I looked away as his eyes rolled backward and a little moan of pleasure emanated from his thin black lips.

“Where’d you get the sweater, Steve?”

“Someone tried to flush it down the toilet in the bathroom upstairs.” He rolled the balm over his bottom lip and closed his eyes. “Sweet kisses.”

“The upstairs bathroom? When?”

“Sweet, sweet, Sophie kisses.”

“When, Steve?”

He cracked open one eye. “After lunch. Took Steve a while to get it out. Not because Steve is weak.” His eyes flashed open, panicked. “Because water is strong.”

“Which toilet?”

“Huh?” Will asked.

“Which toilet was that stuffed in?”

Another swipe of the lip balm. Another ecstatic roll of his eyes. “Second from the wall. Next to the handicap.”

I dug through my purse and yanked out a travel bag, covering my hand, plucking out the sweater and dropping the sodden thing into it. “Thanks, Steve. You’re the best! Let’s go, Will.”

Once we were clear of Steve and the high school, Will turned to me. “So you traded some ChapStick for a toilet-soaked sweater? That’s—that’s horrific, love.”

“No—I mean, yes, it’s gross—but I was there, Will. I was there when this sweater was flushed.”

Will looked mildly impressed.

“I was in the upstairs bathroom and someone came in. She was crying, but it sounded like she was angry. She screamed a little bit and then went into the stall next to me and I heard her throw this”—I pointed to the bag holding the sweater—“in.”

“You heard it or you saw it?”

“I heard it because she—well, she didn’t know I was there in the bathroom. But I know I heard it. She wasn’t going to the bathroom because her feet were facing the wrong way and it didn’t sound like someone going to the bathroom. And she was wearing sneakers and socks! I heard something hit the water and then she flushed. And I thought it flushed for a while, but then I didn’t really think about it.”

Will’s impressed look went to one of slight disgust. “I think this is the most disgusting clue we’ve ever found.”

“Well, we have to look at the sweater. We have to find out who it belonged to.”

Will grimaced. “You didn’t recognize the flusher by the shoes?”

I brightened. “Well, I can certainly narrow it down that way. I know it was a student. Who was wearing white socks and sneakers.”

“Excellent. That cuts out approximately six people. Well done, love. Now take a look at the sweater.”

“I’m not going to look at the sweater. You look at the sweater. I already told you the information. So technically, it’s your turn to do something.”

“You happened to be taking a pee when someone walked in and may or may not have tried to flush a sweater. It’s really your investigation. You started it.” He gestured toward the bag. “You should finish it.”

I chewed my bottom lip. “Okay, how’s this? We’ll let it dry out a little bit while we go to Cathy’s and then we can both figure out what to do with it.”

Will didn’t look convinced, but he agreed anyway, and started the car.

The closer we got to Cathy’s house, the further my heart dropped toward my gut. I couldn’t get her mother’s voice out of my head—the slow, sad way she spoke, the overwhelming sense of hopelessness even when I told her that Will and I were looking at her daughter’s case with new eyes.

“I think this is it,” Will said, jutting his chin toward the tract home in front of us that looked like every other tract home in the neighborhood. I swallowed hard, looking at the two front windows that seemed to stare back at me, two black eyes accusing, burning into my soul.

“Do you really think we should be doing this?” I asked.

Will swung his head toward me. “You told me you talked to the girl’s mum. You told me she was okay with it.”

“I did and she is, but”—I massaged my palm with my thumb and stared out at the house—“I feel bad now.”

“Isn’t this the proper way to ‘work a case,’ as you say?”

“Yeah, but I just feel so—like we’re taking advantage of Mrs. Ledwith. She sounded so sad on the phone and now we might be using her daughter’s death to bring another girl home?” I shook my head. “It just doesn’t seem fair.”

Will wrapped his big hand around my elbow and squeezed gently. His eyes were soft, a lick of hair blowing over his forehead. “A girl dead, another one missing—none of this is fair, love. But if Cathy’s death could help another family to not go through the same grief, don’t you think her mother would want that?”

I shivered; the idea of death and kids had once been so blissfully foreign to me. I liked it that way. “Yeah, I guess so.”

I followed Will up the walk, still trying to assuage the guilt that welled in my chest. This was Cathy’s house. Cathy had walked up this path everyday. Had her mother stood out here and waited the day Cathy didn’t come home?

I was overwhelmed with a paralyzing grief. My stomach went heavy.

“You okay, love?”

I swallowed hard and took Will’s arm when he offered it. I let him lead me to the porch. Cardboard boxes were stacked just to the left of the house’s double doors. I squared my shoulders and rang the bell while Will peeked in the top box. “Kitchen stuff. Looks like someone is moving.”

Julia Ledwith pulled open the door and offered Will and me a close-lipped smile. “You must be the investigators.”

Will looked at me, slight question in his eyes, but went with it.

“You’re Mrs. Ledwith?” he asked.

She opened the door wider and ushered us in, pulling on the neck of her faded Stanford University sweatshirt. “Actually, it’s Ms. Foley, now, but you can call me Julia. Can I get you both something to drink?” Without waiting for an answer, she turned and left us standing in the foyer.

I did a quick scan of the entryway and dining room before us. Both were nearly bare and scrubbed clean, each with its own stack of carefully labeled cardboard boxes in the center.

Julia came back with two glasses, handed us each one, and looked around as though she had just noticed her surroundings.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “The place is a mess. I’m moving, so . . .” Both her words and her eyes trailed off, her eyes scanning the walls, our clothes, looking anywhere except directly at Will or me. “We can sit in the kitchen.”

A thick fog of uncomfortable silence set over us as we sat at the kitchen table. I sipped at my lemonade and wished that I were anywhere else on the planet, Will took in his surroundings, and Julia stared into her cup.

“Nice place here,” Will said. “Had you been here long?”

“Sixteen years,” Julia said without looking up. “It’s too big now without Cathy. And Peter and I”—her shoulders slumped—“we’re divorcing.”

I shot Will a murderous look when Julia’s voice cracked.

“I’m sorry,” I said soothingly. “I’m sorry we have to be here and bring all this up again.”

“You’re not bringing anything up. It’s not like ‘it’ has gone anywhere.” She laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Do you want to know about the day she went missing?”

I was taken back at the abruptness of Julia’s question. This woman who moved slowly, looked about questioningly, suddenly sounded like she was asking us if we wanted to see her Avon catalog. The lemonade I had been sipping burned at the pit of my stomach. “Yes. Please.”

Julia cleared her throat and set down her glass. “There was nothing special about that day. Not a single thing. Cathy got up, got dressed, came downstairs. She probably poured herself a bowl of cereal and we probably glared at each other across the table as she ate it.”

“You two had problems?” Will asked.

“What mom and her teenage daughter don’t? It was nothing really terrible—I would ask her to do things and she would tell me I was ruining her life.” Julia smiled, her eyes becoming glassy. “I drove her to school, she got out of the car and—and”—she looked down at her hands, sniffling—“that was the last time I saw her.”

“Again, Ms. Foley—”

“Julia, please.”

“Julia, I’m sorry,” I said, licking my lips. “I am sorry to have to—”

Julia waved her hand. “The cops have been over this a hundred times, but if anything helps save—save another little girl . . .”

“Did Cathy have any problems at school?”

“Her grades were exceptional.”

I edged forward. “Was Cathy in any clubs on campus?”

Julia’s smile was genuine. “What club was that girl not in? She cheered, she sang, she was president of the French club—she even did animal rescue on the weekends. Ran bake sales and things at school to pay adoption fees. When it came to extracurricular activities, there was nothing she didn’t do. She was interested in so many things.”

Julia’s eyes teared up and she pressed a napkin to them, then coughed. “Sorry.”

I put my hand on her arm, my heart in my throat, my gut reaction demanding that I find Cathy’s killer and Alyssa’s kidnapper right now, today, and skin him alive. Every muscle in my body was taut, alert, and the anger pricked under my skin.

“How about with other students?” Will asked. “Was she ever bullied, or, did she ever mention anything about having a hard time with some of her schoolmates?”

“No, no. Cathy got along with everyone. I mean, there were always little tiffs or ‘drama’ as the girls say—said—within her social circle, but nothing out of the ordinary.”

I perked up. “Her social circle? Do you remember the girls she hung out with?”

Julia nodded. “Kristy Thomas. Kelly Peck. It was mainly the three of them. Kristy and Kelly have both gone off to college now. Oh, there was a new girl, a younger girl that used to tag along, too. She had a different name.”

“Kayleigh?” I asked, my breath catching in my throat.

“No. Uh, Faith. No, that’s not right. It was—Fallon—that’s right, Fallon. Real pretty girl. Pretty standoffish, though. Didn’t seem very friendly. Cathy said she was just shy. She was like that—would take girls under her wing who were new or she thought were having a hard time.”

It was hard for me to imagine Fallon ever having a hard time at anything.

“She and this Fallon girl got very close.” Julia’s lips pressed against her gritted teeth and I could tell she was fighting not to cry. “Fallon came over once after—after. She brought flowers—Stargazer lilies, Cathy’s favorites. She was very upset. I remember she went up to Cathy’s room and curled up on her bed, crying. Then she fell asleep. I didn’t have the heart to wake her. She was gone the following morning. She left a nice note, though.”

I straightened. “A note? What did it say? Did you keep it?”

Julia nodded and stood, staring at the stacked boxes with her hands on hips. She skirted them all and pulled open a drawer of a curio cabinet.

“I don’t know why I kept it,” she said as she sat back down. “It’s silly, I guess.”

“No, not at all. May I see it?”

She put the folded piece of binder paper—one edge frayed from the spiral binding—into my hand. I unfolded it, my heart pounding, the blood pulsing in my ears. Will slid his chair closer to me; I could feel his shoulder brush mine.

Dear Mrs. Ledwith, I read silently. I am so sorry for all the pain and grief you must be feeling right now. I wish I could bring Cathy back for you—for all of us. I loved her. I wish I could have done more. I should have done more.

The breath that caught in my throat was now sucked out of my body along with all the air in the room. I shot Will a knowing glance, but he was too busy pushing the ice around in his cup to register my silent Aha!

I refolded the note carefully, blinking hard to hold back the tears.

“I don’t think I can tell you much more, unless you want to know about the—the day she was fou—”

“No, no, that’s okay, we don’t need to—”

“Have you packed up Cathy’s room as well?” Will asked, his accent ricocheting around the room—and knocking through my head. I tried to shoot him my most demonic look, but, as usual, he was focused on something else.

“No, Julia, we don’t mean to—”

Julia set down her cup and wrung her hands in her lap. “Actually, I haven’t touched Cathy’s room since—since it happened. I keep telling myself I’ll get around to it.”

“Do you mind if we take a look?” Will wanted to know.

“No, of course not. Top of the stairs. You’ll know the one. I hope you don’t mind if I stay down here.”

I pushed the note into her hands and Will and I trudged up the stairs.

“Did you read that?” I whispered, my lips against Will’s ear.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think we should be looking through Cathy’s room. I think we need to be looking through Fallon’s.”

“Why’s that now?”

“Why?” I gaped. “Were we not reading the same note? ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘I wish I could bring Cathy back’? If those aren’t the words of a guilty conscience, I don’t know what is.”

Will and I stopped on the landing. He looked down at me, the sympathy in his eyes quickly chased out by steadying logic.

“I thought the note sounded very much like a grieving, guilt-ridden survivor.”

“‘I wish I could have done more’? ‘I should have’? That’s not admitting anything?”

“No, love, it’s not. Maybe Fallon wishes she could have done more to help find Cathy. Maybe she wishes she could have done more to help the Ledwiths grieve.”

I let out a whoosh of air, putting my hands on my hips. My eyebrows slammed together in one of those Really? looks. “You really think that’s what Fallon meant? You know her!”

“Not really. And I know even less of who she was a year ago, just after one of her closest mates was found murdered.”

I knew, intellectually, what Will was saying made sense, but I was having a hard time believing it.

“But—”

“But she’s a teenage girl, Sophie. Who you’re accusing of killing her best friend.”

I narrowed my eyes. “I’m not saying she killed her, I’m saying that Fallon may have had more to do with it than you think.”

“And I’m saying she may have had less to do with it than you think.”

“You don’t know teenage girls, Will. You don’t know what they’re like.”

Will took a step back from me, his eyes raking over me in a way that made me feel exposed. “Those are your demons, love. Not hers.”

I stood, silent, dumbfounded, wounded—and not wanting to admit that Will was right.

“Are you two okay up there?” Julia was standing at the base of the stairs, one hand wrapped around the wrought-iron bannister, one foot on the bottom stair. She pressed her toes into the carpet, and I could see the muscle flick in her arm as she seemed to toy with whether or not she would take a step.

“You can’t miss her door,” she said, a slight catch in her voice. She turned and disappeared around the corner before we had a chance to answer.

Julia was right: there was no missing Cathy’s door. It was the only one closed, the only one with any semblance of life—a big, glittery C nailed to it, a heap of hairbands choked around the knob. Will pushed the door open and sauntered inside, but I hung back in the hallway.

“Come on, then. What are you waiting for?”

I bit my bottom lip and Will turned on a sigh. “Sorry about the demons crack, love. I just meant—”

“No.” I held up a hand. “You were right.” I eyed Cathy’s door. “It just seems—wrong.”

Will opened his legs slightly and crossed his arms in front of his chest. His eyes staring down at me. Whether the stance was his version of alpha male or Sigmund Freud I wasn’t sure. “Why do you think it’s wrong? We’re investigators, remember?” There was the slightest hint of play in his voice. “We’re investigating.”

I toed the carpeted threshold. “I feel like we’re violating Cathy’s privacy. Her last bit of respite.”

Before I could recoil, Will reached out and grabbed my arm, pulling me into the room. “With all due reverence for the dearly departed, we’ve got business to tend to and a rapidly pressing time line.”

“Right. Yeah, sorry.” I shook myself and did a three-sixty, my eyes sweeping the sweet-pea pink walls. Most of the paint was covered over with posters, photographs of smiling, beautiful teens, and glossy cutouts of sunken-cheeked models stomping down runways. Cathy’s desk was cluttered with papers, makeup pots, and all manner of girlie tchotchkes—all except one thirteen-inch rectangle.

“What do you think went there?”

I brushed my hand over the blank spot. “A laptop.”

“Was that mentioned in the evidence collection?”

I tapped a finger against my bottom lip. “Her backpack, I think two textbooks, a pencil case, and a notebook. Spiral not viral.”

“We’ll want to ask Julia about that. Are you just going to stand there or help me look for some clues?”

I raised my eyebrows. “Why, Will Sherman, when did you become a detective?”

He held up an admonishing finger. “Private investigator. Angel Boy is the detective.”

“Noted,” I said. “Don’t you think it’s even a little telling that Fallon was friends with both the girls who went missing?”

“Well, there are four-hundred-eighty girls in the entire high school. Everyone was pretty much friends with everyone, right?”

I snatched a picture of Cathy and someone who must have been Kristy or Kelly from Cathy’s corkboard. Though she was shadowed in the background of the shot, I could still make out Fallon’s low brows, the menacing purse of her lips. “Everyone may have known each other, but everyone definitely wasn’t friends.”

Will slugged an arm over my shoulder and pulled me to him, ruffling my hair and kissing me gruffly on the top of my head. “Aw, like a wounded bird.”

I rolled my eyes and in my attempt to shove Will and his lame attempt at comforting me, I dropped the photo. It wafted to the ground, fluttering just under Cathy’s dust ruffle. I groaned, then dropped to hands and knees. I could feel Will move behind me.

“Did I ever mention—”

I swung my head and glared at him. “If you’re going to finish that sentence with ‘how much I love America,’ I’ve heard it. You seem to become incredibly patriotic whenever my ass is in the air.”

“Not just your ass, love.”

“Even better. Hey.” I swiped at the photo, then slid out the wooden box stashed behind it. “What’s this?”

It was a plain rectangular box about the size of a jewelry box but with absolutely no adornment. I flipped it open and sucked in a breath.

“Oh. Well, that casts a bit of new light, don’t you think?” Will said, pointing at the cluster of herbs in a plastic baggie. I picked up the bag, gave it a sniff, and frowned. “It smells like Thanksgiving.”

Will took the baggie from me, squinted, then sniffed. “It’s sage.”

“You know about herbs?”

“Don’t look so completely surprised. I can cook, you know.”

“You store your cleats in your oven.”

Will shrugged. “I said I can cook. I didn’t say that I do cook. So, is sage smoking the new black in SF? Or was our girl planning on cooking . . . secretly?”

I took the sage back. “No. Sage is used—especially bunched like this—to cleanse evil spirits from a room.” I put the baggie aside and picked out a few other trinkets—another grouping of dried herbs with flowers mixed in, two orange votive candles burned down to the tin, and a quarter-sized charm hanging from a length of black satin cording.

“What is that?” Will said, taking the amulet end of the necklace in his hand. I chewed the inside of my cheek, my heartbeat starting to thud. “It’s the symbol that was carved into the desk.” I turned the amulet around and showed it to Will.

“Another girl who thought she needed protection.”

Will pulled the last item from the box—a thin, fabric-bound book.

“That’s the same book Miranda had,” I said, taking it from him. “It’s a book of protection spells. The exact same one Miranda had.” I flipped it over, looking for some kind of discernible marking. “I wonder if it was from the same place.” I could feel myself starting to chew on the inside of my cheek again and I shook myself. “Do you think Cathy knew what was going to happen to her? And if so, does that mean Miranda is next?”

Will took the necklace and the book from me, slipping them both in his pocket and slipping the box back under Cathy’s bed. “Only one way to find out.” He stood and opened the bedroom door. “Coming?”

“We can’t just take that,” I hissed. “It’s Cathy’s property. Shouldn’t we at least tell her mother?”

“I think Julia has enough to deal with already,” Will said without turning around.

It was nearly seven o’clock when Will and I left Cathy’s house. I dialed Alyssa’s home number, my stomach doing flip-flops with each ring. Finally, the voice mail kicked on.

“I guess we’re out of the luck for the day, huh?” Will asked as we crested the Mercy High driveway.

I pinched my bottom lip, held up an index finger, and dove into my shoulder bag.

“What’s that?” Will asked, gesturing with his chin at the thin book I pulled out.

I slapped on the overhead dome light.

“Hey! Careful! Nigella is a collector’s item, remember?”

“A trash collector’s item,” I grumbled, trying to make anything out in the dim light. “Aha.” I grabbed my cell phone and dialed the number. “It’s the high school directory,” I whispered to Will as I let the phone ring. “I’m calling Miranda.”

“Why?” he whispered back.

“She could be next. She could be in danger right now.”

Miranda’s voice mail kicked on and I smacked the phone shut. “Damn it!”

“You don’t want to leave a message?”

My eyes bulged. “Really? What would I say? ‘Miranda, dear, this is your teacher. You’re in grave danger, so try not to leave the house. Or maybe you should leave the house. TTYL!’”

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t end with ‘TTYL.’ I was thinking more along the lines of ‘can you call me when you get this.’”

I flopped my head back against Nigella’s cracked maroon headrests. “I don’t know what to do anymore, Will. I feel like we aren’t getting anywhere. Maybe it’s time to leave this one to the professionals.”

Will was silent for a beat before he clicked off the overhead light. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, and by that time Will had slipped my hands into his and pulled them close to his chest.

“You are a professional, love. The police department is doing what they’re best at, and you’re doing what you’re best at. Sampson knows—this is not just about teenage girls. This is about witchcraft and you know how to deal with that.”

“That’s the thing, Will. Some toilets blew up. Some girls have spell books. What else proves that this has anything to do with witchcraft? And it is about the girls. We’re looking for bedknobs and broomsticks and Alyssa is still missing.”

He squeezed my hands and the warmth of his—his smooth palm, our fingers interlaced—shot a comforting warmth through me and I wanted to believe anything he said.

“We’re going to find her, love.”

Will and I sat in his car for a silent beat. My heart was hammering in my chest and I licked my lips, looking at the monolith of Mercy High in front of me. It was imposing in the daytime, but at night, barely highlighted by the silver slashes of moonlight, the building looked ominous, threatening. I half expected a flash of lightning to crack through the sky, an MGM warning that this particular building sat like a lightning bolt for all things evil.

“We need to go back in the building.”

Will looked at me, eyebrows disappearing into his sandy hair. “Back into the high school? Why? We’ve checked it over twice.”

I sucked in a slow, deep breath. “I don’t think I was ready to see anything.”

Will’s brow furrowed and he pressed his lips together.

I rushed on. “I didn’t want to see anything there except for what I knew—in my head, in my—what is it? Repressed memories.”

Will reached across the center console and took my hand tenderly in his. He cocked his head slightly and blinked, the honey-amber of his eyes warm and inviting. “You’ve never repressed a thing in your life, love.”

I snatched my hand back and grabbed the door. “Are you coming or not?”

We stood in front of the glass double doors and stared, somehow both waiting for the ultimate evil to come barreling toward us or for a commercial break. The school remained silent, the double doors cloudy and revealing nothing, and there was no pause to regroup or offer some sort of cheery distraction. My heart was thundering in my ears and Will had been uncharacteristically silent the whole walk from parking lot to school entrance. A wind kicked up and a handful of skeletal leaves and garbage brushed past us.

“Ready?” I asked, my fingers closing around the administration key Principal Lowe had offered me.

Will shrugged and attempted to look nonchalant, but his eyes never left the keyhole. “I guess.”

I unlocked the door and stepped aside, waiting for Will to push it open.

“What?” he asked.

I gestured. “You always open doors for ladies.”

He cocked a brow. “I didn’t know gender roles held firm even in the face of unspeakable danger.”

I steeled my body and tried to sum up confidence I didn’t feel. “What are you so worried about? You said yourself we’ve checked the place twice already and found nothing.”

Will pushed open the door for me and I hesitated before stepping through. “Yes, but that was before your whole ‘I see dead people . . . if I care to look’ routine.”

I huffed, crossing my arms in front of my chest. “I don’t see dead people. I mean, I’ve seen dead people.” I shuddered. “I’ve probably seen more dead people in the last two years than most people will see in their whole lives.”

Will glanced at me before slapping a flashlight into my hand. “You’re not the best at putting people at ease, you know?”

I flicked on the flashlight and shined the yellow bulb toward Will’s face. “Hey, you’re the Guardian.”

He slung an arm over my shoulder. “And if there’s a team of fallen angels lurking around this place, then you’re in luck.”

“Otherwise?”

Will flashed his light down the blackened hallway. “Otherwise? You’re on your own.”

“What a relief,” I groaned.

“They don’t pay me enough.”

I rolled up on my tiptoes and glanced through the windows into darkened classrooms that looked as benign as they had during the day—desks in neat lines, unoccupied by witches, hobgoblins, or any other manner of creepy-crawly; stacked textbooks; glossy posters reminding girls to stay off drugs.

“I ask again,” Will said as we approached the last room. “What exactly are we looking for?”

“I don’t know, exactly. Just keep an eye out for anything that seems . . . off.”

Will swung his light toward me, and I was enveloped in a bright yellow glow. I rolled my eyes.

“You’re funny.”

“You’re off.”

“Upstairs.” I shined my light and took the stairs two at a time. By the time I crested the second floor my hackles had gone up. Something hung heavy in the air; there was a sort of buzz, a crackling electricity that hadn’t been there before.

“Do you feel that?” I hissed over my shoulder to Will.

He just wagged his head, eyes focused on me.

My skin started to prick and I could feel the sweat start to bead at my hairline and over my upper lip. My heartbeat sped up, the thrum a solid ache in my chest.

“There’s something here,” I whispered, shaking my head. I clawed at my chest and pressed my palm against my quick, steady heartbeat. I was finding it hard to breathe. My eyes stung, and every muscle in my body perked, then stiffened. I felt like I was walking into something—something cold, something with icy fingers that walked down my vertebra bone by bone—something evil.

I paused and Will stopped behind me. I could feel his energy—warm and comforting—a hairsbreadth behind me.

“There.” I didn’t know when I did it, but I had turned and was facing a door, my arm extended, index finger pointing.

“We need to go in there.”

Will obeyed wordlessly, slipping past me and pushing the door open. His hand went for the light switch, but I stopped him. “No.”

I knew there was something in the room. I knew there was something that would be disturbed by the light. I clicked my flashlight off and Will did the same, the thin strips of moonlight coming through the window the only illumination in the room.

“This is the art room,” Will said, looking around. “Haven’t we been in here before?”

There were no desks in this room, just a circle of wooden easels surrounded by high stools. Some easels held canvasses in varying stages of completion, some were empty. There were half-canisters of paint, brushes scattered on a long table, nothing out of the ordinary. But still, something nagged at me.

“There,” I said finally, pointing to a tiny scrape of white peeking out from underneath one of the easels. “Do you see that?”

Will’s gaze followed the length of my finger, toward where I was pointing. “Nope.”

I sighed, handed him my flashlight, and pushed the stool and easel aside. I could see another line now, thick, white, and arched, chalked on the floor. “You have to see that.”

I saw him squint in the darkness, then sink down onto his haunches. “I have no idea what you’re pointing at, love. It looks like cheap linoleum to me.”

I groaned and pushed a few more easel setups aside, sucking in a surprised breath when I had uncovered an entire half-circle etched onto the floor.

“It looks like someone has made a chalk outline of a circle,” I said, pointing again and now walking beside the arch. “You can’t see it?”

Will shook his head, eyes still fixed. “I can’t.”

I frowned. “Help me push the rest of these out of the way.”

He did as he was told, the look of confusion marring his features the whole time. “I’m sorry, I just don’t see what you’re seeing.”

I stepped back and felt my mouth drop open. The front legs of the stools were set up on a large circle. The back legs of the easel were covering a slightly smaller inner circle, and inside that—a star.

“It’s a pentagram.”

Will swung his head yet again. “I’m sorry, Sophie, I just don’t—”

I did a mental head slap. “It’s veiled.”

“Huh?”

I gestured toward the drawing. “It’s veiled. It’s been hidden—magically. I can’t—you know—I can see through that stuff.”

Will looked at me, and even though I knew that he knew that one of my “special” abilities is that magic can’t be done on me—the characteristic also allowed me to see things hidden magically—I still felt weirdly exposed standing here in a high school classroom.

“You can’t see it because it’s veiled.”

Will put an arm around me and pulled me to him as if he felt my awkwardness—and wasn’t repulsed by it. The warmth of his body the length of mine was comforting.

“So, it’s here.” I pointed out the loop. I leaned down, brushed my fingers over the line. “And it looks like it’s been drawn in chalk. Geez. It’s—it’s like the whole thing is vibrating.”

The chalked circle looked almost animated—thicker, deeper than it should be, and almost as if the line itself were pulsing.

“It’s definitely magiked. This isn’t just a few kids playing with chalk.” My stomach started to roil and the heat broke out again, all over me. “This is big, Will. There’s more to this.”

“Well, of course there is, love—”

“No. No. I mean this.” I gestured to the circle. “There’s more to this. Here. Now.” I looked around the room. “I can feel it.”

“Okay.” Will’s gaze swept the room. “So how do we deal with a ‘feeling’?”

I chewed my bottom lip, then pulled my cell phone from my pocket.

“Tupperware, toads, or finance, this is Lorraine.”

“Hey, Lorraine, it’s Sophie.”

“Sophie! You must have heard about the new salad spinners. They are ex—”

“No, thanks. I have a salad spinner, actually.” Not that I’d ever used it. “I’m calling about a spell.”

I heard Lorraine suck her teeth—whether she was angry about losing a potential salad spinner sale or the idea of imparting her witchy wisdom to me, I wasn’t sure. I continued on anyway.

“I’m standing in front of a pentagram, chalked into the floor. But it seems like something—like something is underneath it, maybe? It’s like it’s pulsing.”

“Ooh.” Lorraine sounded interested. “It’s active.”

“Like in use right now?”

“Not necessarily right now, right now, but recently, likely. Or there is another more active one underneath it. That happens sometimes especially when legends of hallowed grounds brings out the fake teen witch crowd.” She didn’t bother to hide the disdain in her voice.

“Well.” I pinched my bottom lip as Will pulled out a stool and perched himself on it. “If someone were to draw something on the floor and then erase it, is there some kind of spell that would bring it back up?”

“Um, like an anti-Mr. Clean spell or something? That’s not really what we focus on—”

“No. If someone were to draw a pentagram on the floor and then clean it up. Like you said. Maybe one stronger than the other.”

“Oh! Oh, of course. Anytime a circle is drawn in the earth it leaves a faint magical outline.”

“Thank you! Will doesn’t believe me.” I glared at him as he bit his thumbnail, looking wholly uninterested.

“That’s because he probably can’t see it. If a pentagram has been used magically, it’s veiled.”

“Okay.” I paced the perimeter of the room. “This one is really bright—to me, at least. Is there some kind of spell that could restore the other circle?”

“Oh, sure.” I imagined Lorraine pressed back in her chair, scratching her hellacious cat Costineau between the ears. “Super easy. You’re going to need four orange candles, some dust from the floor, and an eight-inch string.”

I bit my lip, looking around the classroom. “I have two flashlights—one is almost orange, dust from the floor and”—I scanned, then brightened—“one of Will’s shoelaces?”

“What?” Will snapped to attention. “These are my good shoes.”

“Good shoes don’t have laces,” I hissed. Then, to Lorraine, “Will any of that work?”

“It’s not perfect, but probably close enough. Place the flashlights torch-side-up on the opposite points of the circle. Sprinkle the dust in the center.”

I relayed the instructions back to Will, who growled at me, stomping around the room in one shoe, but did as he was told.

“Now you’ll need to take the dust and the string—or shoelace—and go stand in the center of the circle.”

A flutter of nerves rippled through my stomach as I crossed the threshold of the pentagram and found its center. “Okay, now what?”

“Sprinkle the dust and repeat after me: Goddess Hectate, bringer of all we know, chants of the past bring a dazzling glow.”

I slowly circled, dusting, and repeating Lorraine’s chant.

“Now take one end of the string, and let it flow out as you circle, chanting.” Lorraine cleared her throat and I did the same, pinching the string between my forefinger and thumb.

“Goddess footsteps shall never be stopped, bring me wisdom so I too may walk.”

I stopped, Will’s shoelace flopping to the ground at my feet. “Nothing happened.”

“Give it a second,” Lorraine said before hanging up.

“Well, that was quite a fun show,” Will said, striding into the circle and snatching back his shoelace. “But—”

He paused, openmouthed, as a rumble emanated from the floor. I could feel the vibration through the soles of my shoes; it was as if hundreds of students were running through the halls.

I saw Will’s mouth move, but any word he spoke was drowned out in the chanting wail that shook the walls of the art room. I couldn’t make out one single voice or one single word; each blended into the others, creating a din so solid and loud that it pressed against my chest like a weight. A hot wind shot up, too, circling us.

I felt Will’s hand slice through the air and grip me around the waist, pulling me so that my hammering heart was pressed up against him. A light kicked up—then a thousand lights—circling us and moving in time with the din.

“Oh my God, Will, look!”

The pentagram on the floor was slowly, painstakingly being formed. A line of chalk arched into the circle. Another one, slightly larger, moved faster. Star upon star upon star etched itself into the ground.

The etching sped up, the wail hitting an ear-splitting crescendo as the thunder of unseen footsteps shook every bone in my body. And then, as quickly as it had appeared, the sound, the movement, the hot wind, the chalk, all disappeared.

“What the fuck was that?”

I stared down at the circle around us. The lines were thick, heavy, well defined. My throat was suddenly dry and I tried to swallow, tried to talk, but my tongue was plastered to the roof of my mouth. Finally, I was able to point a single shaking finger toward the floor.

“It was them.”

What seemed like hundreds of pentagrams—one on top of the other—were outlined around us. Some were exact, some were slightly skewed, but each had a point that formed a direct line toward the bay.

“You can see them too then?”

Will circled slowly, once hand clenched around his jaw. “Of course I can. There must be at least a hundred here. What is this? What is this room used for?” He gaped at me. “What the hell kind of classes do they teach here?”

I scanned the macabre graffiti, my stomach clenching with each new line. “I don’t know. I’m pretty sure the only electives they offered when I was a student were jazz band and home ec.”

When my phone rang, I went light-headed and Will dodged for the door. “It’s only my phone. Were you taking off?”

Crimson washed over Will’s cheeks. “I was securing the door to save you.”

“Right. Hello?”

“So, did it work?”

It was Lorraine, and once my heart dropped out of my throat and into my chest, I spoke. “Yeah. Maybe a little too well.”

“What does that mean?”

“There are pentagrams everywhere. The spell illuminated at least sixty—maybe more.”

Lorraine paused for a beat. “Really?”

“Really. What does that mean?”

“It means that you’re definitely not dealing with a couple of kids messed up with the occult. You’re dealing with a legacy, Sophie.”

I clicked the phone shut and looked at Will. He swallowed slowly. “So?”

“Lorraine says we’re dealing with a legacy.”

“A legacy? What does that mean?”

I picked my way across the room, careful not to step on any of the fading lines on the floor. My entire body ached and my skin felt pinpricked and tight. My heart dropped down to a normal beat, but the thuds were heavy and hard. “It means that Cathy Ledwith wasn’t the first. And, unless we stop this, Alyssa Rand won’t be the last.”

ChaCha was snoring away, making those little dream-doggy running motions with her tiny legs while I stared at the ceiling. Headlights from three stories down streaked across my ceiling and every time I tried to pull my eyes shut, they popped back open again, the voices in my head chattering, needling, telling me I was missing something. By 3:45 AM I gave up, clicked on my bedside light, and buried myself in my closet.

I found it behind an avalanche of polyester pants and Nina-vetoed hoodies, shoved in the farthest corner of my closet: a cardboard box, packing tape still pristine, the word SOPHIE printed across it. I sucked in my breath as bat wings flopped in my gut, then I pulled the tape off in one swift motion.

In the same instant, Nina was in my room, a quarter inch from me, staring down. No matter how many times it happened, I could never get over the vampire super-speed, super-stealth thing.

“God, Nina, you scared the crap out of me.” She flapped at the air, rolling her coal-black eyes. “I know, I know, I should get a bell. Just wanted to make sure you had your clothes on.” She grinned, all Crest-white fangs. I rolled my eyes and she plopped her bony butt right down beside me on the floor, the chill from her skin sending goose bumps over my flesh.

“What are we doing?” she wanted to know.

“I’m checking something out and you’re scaring the bejesus out of me.”

“Oh, Soph, you’re such a pansy.” She pushed herself onto her knees; then her whole top half disappeared into the newly opened box.

“Well,” she said from its depths, “I can see why you wanted to keep this particular expedition to yourself.” She flopped back out, each hand clutching a framed picture of the Backstreet Boys in various just-dangerous-enough poses.

I yanked the frames from her grip. “It was a long, long time ago.” I shoved the photos behind me, surreptitiously using the sleeve of my pajamas to wipe a leftover Bonne Bell Lip Smackers kiss from the glass. “Move.”

“Oh my gosh. Did you wear this? Sexy!” Nina had a piece of my Mercy uniform in each fist. I ignored her and dug in the box myself, while she yanked on my old skirt and blouse, rolling the skirt to porn-star heights and tying the blouse over her smooth, perfect midsection. I glanced up.

“Yep, that’s exactly how I wore it, too.”

Finally, after pawing through a hideously thoughtful senior photo and seventeen wistfully dog-eared prom dress ads, I found what I was looking for. Nina’s eyes went wide, the glee shooting from her mouth all the way up to her ears.

“Yearbooks!” She yanked one from me, sat down again and started thumbing through it. “You never showed me these before!”

I opened the top one left on my stack and sighed as seventeen-year-old me stared out from the pages, my hair a frizzy, barely-in-the-frame mess, my black eyes pleading for death. Or, possibly, that was just my interpretation.

“Self-preservation,” I said without looking up.

“Aw, Sophie! You were adorable!” Nina cooed, holding the page with my junior-year photo up against her cheek. “Bless your heart!”

I narrowed my eyes. “Bless your heart is what people say to sugarcoat something ugly.”

“Bless your heart,” Nina said again.

“I hate you.”

“I hate this beehive! Didn’t anyone let this Heddy creature know the sixties ended a hundred and fifty years before this picture was taken?”

I smiled. “That lady is still at the school. I ran into her again. Sans beehive.”

“Well, I suppose I should forgive a woman who dedicated fifty years of her life to high school girls.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’ve been out of school barely ten years.” Give or take.

Nina ignored me. “Who’s Gretchen Von Dow?”

She turned the yearbook around, her finger pressed against the smiling, half-page photo of a very blond, very pretty student.

“Why does it say ‘we’ll miss you, Gretchen!’? She die or something?”

I bit my bottom lip. “I don’t think so. She was a foreign exchange student.” I took the yearbook from Nina and pointed to the smaller text. “See? ‘Gretchen is a foreign exchange student from Hamburg, Germany, who shared her many traditions and sparkling smile with us for the past two years. She is now back home, but will never be forgotten! From the members of the Lock and Key Club.’”

“Touching,” Nina said, bored. “What’s Lock and Key Club? Some kind of bondage thing?”

“What kind of high school did you go to? Lock and Key is one of those honor society, public service things. You know, to look good on your college applications. They have them at tons of schools.”

“Were you one of these Locked chicks?”

I pursed my lips. “Not exactly. I was more the locked-out chick.”

“Isn’t it weird for a foreign exchange student to be somewhere for two years?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess not.”

Nina tossed the book aside and grabbed another one from my lap. “So, what brought on the three a.m. walk down memory lane?”

I sighed, leaning back on my palms. “Nothing. I guess I just thought there might be some kind of clue, something that would point me in the right direction. I filled Nina in on the day’s activities—including my chat with Lorraine and the dozens of glowing pentagrams.

Nina shivered. “Those witchcraft things always creep me out with their symbols and their chalk and stuff.”

I couldn’t help grinning, watching my undead roommate flip yearbook pages, the tip of her tongue playing with the point of her angled fang as she fretted over witchcraft.

“Doesn’t vampire trump witch?”

Nina cocked a brow. “Vampire trumps everything, toots. Except for sunlight. But we do what we do”—she splayed a hand elegantly against her pale chest—“because we have to. Essentially, we’re not born bad, we’re made bad.”

I squeezed Nina’s bare knee. “You’re not bad.”

“But witches?” Her upper lip curled into a disgusted snarl. “They choose to be bad.”

“Some of them.”

Nina cut her eyes to me. “Tell that to my nephew who practically got shish-kabobed today in the finance meeting.”

“Kale’s still mad?”

Nina flipped a page. “Madder. She hit the roof— el kabob-o—because she saw Vlad talking to a Kishi demon in the waiting room.”

“Kishi demons tend to eat the faces off the men who engage them.”

Nina shrugged. “Not punishment enough in Kale’s eyes. So you’re strolling down memory lane, looking for the pentagram-drawing club?”

I closed the yearbook on a sigh. “I guess there’s nothing in here. And you were right. I want to find Alyssa. I just keep feeling like I should be doing more than sitting around looking for clues. I should be out looking for her.”

“And Sampson said stay put. Look for the coven only. Check yes for coven, no for no coven.”

“And then what?”

“And then UDA goes in and tries to make them compliant.”

“But they could be murderous witches!”

Nina fixed her eyes on mine. “Check yes for coven, no for no coven. Even if they’re murderous, it’s not your investigation.”

I shrugged.

“It’s Alex’s. He does the normal, you do the para. Right?”

I shrugged again, looked away. “Like you’re such a rule follower.”

Nina cocked an eyebrow, then produced a blood bag from her robe pocket and pierced it with a fang. “I like the deeply contemplative senior pic,” she said, holding it up for my inspection. “It looks like you’re considering whether you should read Tolstoy or Nabokov next.”

“Probably more like Seventeen or Cosmo Girl—I wasn’t that deep. Or that smart. The only chick who read Tolstoy—and paid for it dearly—was Suri Lytton.”

“Suri? Like Suri Cruise?”

“No, like the name Suri existed independent of the late Cruises. Look her up; she’s probably right next to me.”

Nina looked back at the book and frowned. “Nope. No Suri. Maybe she was younger?”

“No, we sat next to each other in every class. She’s got to be in there.”

Nina flipped back to the index. “Not here either.”

I opened my book, thumbed a few pages, then pointed. “See, right here next to me. Junior year.”

“And not here senior year.”

I flopped back onto the carpet and yawned. “I don’t know, I can’t remember. I have to get more information.”

Nina’s head bobbed over me, her long black hair swishing over my cheeks. She grinned, her fangs pressing against her lower lip. “Spy trip?”

I bit my cheek to hold back my grin. “I need to get the police reports from Alex.”

“Didn’t Sampson give you a copy?”

“Of the preliminary report, but I know there’s more.” I pinched my bottom lip. “But how am I going to get it? Last time I broke into the police station—”

“You broke out with your left arm handcuffed to a desk chair.”

“Yeah, that really slowed me down. We need someone here. We need someone who can get into the computer system. Someone who’s good with technology and has no moral compass.”

As if on cue, the front door slammed and we heard Vlad shrugging out of his duster and unloading his keys onto the counter.

Nina waggled her brows. “I think we’ve found our morally bankrupt companion.”

“Vlad!” Nina and I went tearing into the living room, catching Vlad wide eyed, a half-smashed blood bag in one hand, a tiny trickle of velvet red dribbling down his chin. He caught it deftly with the tip of his tongue and my stomach lurched. “What?”

“Can you help me out with something?”

I yelped as Nina body checked me, shoving me aside. “Here is your mission should you choose to accept it,” she said, hands on hips, legs akimbo. “And you have to accept it or we’re kicking you out. You are to break in to the SFPD computers and filch a couple of case files for us.”

“Please?” I said, poking my head over Nina’s shoulder.

Vlad regarded us coolly, crossed his arms in front of his chest, and cocked out a hip. “So you’re asking me to break into the city’s computer system.”

“It’s a matter of life and death.”

“It’s illegal,” he said, as though he had suddenly sprung a conscience.

I gaped. “You care?”

“No, I just want to make sure you know what I’m risking.”

“Can you do it?” Nina wanted to know.

Vlad scoffed. “Of course I can.”

He crossed the room to his laptop, and I nipped at his heels behind him. “You can do it without anyone knowing, right? The police”—Alex, I thought—“absolutely can’t know. Will they be able to trace this back to us?”

Vlad sat down, minimized the CGI vamps in the middle of his BloodLust game, and glared at me. “I need some space. You need some toothpaste.”

I snarled, backed away, and did one of those huff-breaths into my cupped hands. I was a little dragon-breathy. But then again, it was nearing 4 AM.

As Vlad’s long, thin fingers weaved deftly over his keyboard, my heart thumped, the adrenaline shooting like ice water through my veins. I paced, then finally grabbed my shoulder bag and upturned it on the table, spreading out the preliminary files that Sampson had given me, the receipt, my sparkly unicorn notebook containing all my notes, and an etching of the protection symbol carved into the desk. I sat down, grabbed a pen, and waited for Vlad to feed me information. Instead, he poked his face around the side of his laptop screen and narrowed his coal black eyes at me. “What are you doing?”

“Waiting. You find the files, shoot me any pertinent information and I’m here”—I waggled my pen—“waiting for it.”

Nina came up on my left, her arms wrapped around her as if she was chilled. “Are you sure about this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Alex, Sampson getting pissed at you?”

“Yes,” I said, standing. “I’m way more worried about the forces of evil schoolgirls raining down on me.”

Vlad popped around the computer again. “Schoolgirls?”

“Keep working.”

Nina pulled out a chair. “So it’s officially schoolgirls, not witches?”

I nibbled my bottom lip, considering whether or not to share my bathroom experience.

“Will said you got locked in the john,” Vlad murmured.

Nina clapped her hands over her mouth, her small body collapsing in giggles. “Is that true?”

“It was magic! I was magically . . . locked in the john. Have you found anything yet?”

Vlad pursed his lips and crinkled his nose. “Okay, here they are.” He looked up at me, his dark eyes fixed and steady. “You sure you want to do this?”

I looked from Vlad to Nina and back again. “For once I have the opportunity to help on a case in which I am not the deadliest catch. Print, dammit.”

I took the pages out of the printer as it spit them out, stacking them carefully. I divided the two files on the kitchen table, laying the preliminary files I had gotten from Sampson next to them, and topping each side with a photo of one of the girls. My evidence pile looked substantial and Nina came up over my shoulder, nodding, impressed.

“Looks like you have a lot of information.”

“Yes.” I slipped into my room and came back with four years’ worth of yearbooks. “And these, too.” I started to pace. “Now we know that a student may have disappeared my senior year of high school, and that there is a legacy”—I glanced at Nina and Vlad to see if either of them were impressed with my witchly knowledge—“of spell casters. Cathy goes missing last year, Alyssa goes missing this year.” I flipped open the files. “The dates the girls went missing are within days of each other and each feature the number seven.”

I put the kitchen calendar in Nina’s hands. “Look up these two dates. Did anything significant happen on the days the girls went missing?”

I took my seat and opened my sparkly unicorn notebook, ready to write.

“Yes,” Nina said. “Cathy went missing on the seventh, which was a Tuesday, and was officially declared Birds Eye Frozen Foods Day in 1957.”

“I think I remember that,” Vlad said with a nod. “There was a parade.”

I pressed my fingertips to my temples. “How is frozen food significant to this case?”

Nina narrowed her eyes at me. “You asked for significant happenings. Not necessarily significant happenings in view of this case.”

I groaned.

“So I suppose you don’t care that the day Alyssa went missing is National Send a Card to Your Grandparents Day?”

I could feel the itchy buildup that started my left eye twitching.

I snatched the calendar from Nina and pointed to the square in question. “Half moon. That is slightly more significant than frozen vegetables.”

“I was getting to that! You didn’t let me finish!”

“Half moon the day Alyssa went missing, too.” I raised my eyebrows. “Coincidence?”

“You people tend to do crazy things at the full moon,” Vlad said with a cluck of his tongue.

“Us people?”

“Breathers.”

“Right, we do. But witches tend to cast on full moons, too, right?”

Vlad waggled his head as if considering. “Depends on the spell. Incantations, portals, protections, callings—usually done on full-moon nights.”

“What the hell does a half-moon mean?”

Vlad shrugged. Nina looked blank. But I refused to be deterred. I was moving forward. I was taking steps in the right direction. I had my friends—my real friends. I didn’t need Alex or Will.

I scrawled, Half moons, in my notebook, and started to hum.

I was going to solve this case. And I was, for once, going to do it without putting myself in danger.

ChaCha’s yips broke through my pat-on-the-back revelry as she tore from my bedroom across the living room, her quarter-sized paws scratching the front door.

“What’s up, ChaCha?” I said in the customary high-pitched voice one must adopt when talking to children or pets.

ChaCha allowed me to sweep her up, but she kept her little marble eyes focused on the closed door, growling fiercely, as her tiny paws scratched at the air.

“Guess she needs to go,” I said, shrugging my jacket over my pajamas and grabbing her leash. I opened the door and was mid-step over the threshold when I saw it.

A shoebox. Wrapped simply in brown craft paper and stringy twine, settled up against the threshold.

Fingers of fear crept up my back, touching and chilling each vertebra. My mouth went dry and a whoosh of chilled air seemed to wash over me.

“Are you coming or going?” I heard Nina yell.

I swallowed.

“There’s something out here.”

Nina poked her head over my shoulder. This time, her super speed didn’t faze me. “What is it? Who’s it for?”

She crouched down, poked the box. It moved an inch, the motion benign, not setting off a slew of knife-wielding Vessel thieves or rabid witches with skin-carving tendencies.

“It’s probably from Amazon. Open it.”

I frowned. “Amazon boxes have a smile on them.”

And I got the distinct feeling that this box wouldn’t make me smile.

I bent over anyway, picking up the box. It was surprisingly light and ChaCha sniffed at it, her little paw working its way under the twine. I set her down and slipped the twine off myself, the brown craft paper popping open and slipping to my feet.

I thumbed the lid open carefully, squinting my eyes and peeking in.

Then I slammed the lid down hard.

“Jesus Christ, it’s a dead bird!”

Nina was back on the other side of the room, standing on the table, arms flapping like, well, a live bird. “Ew! Ew! Get rid of it!”

While garlic, holy water, and sunlight were the reigning terrors to most vampires, Nina had one more to add to the list: birds. Dead or alive, in any form. They terrified her.

I looked into the box again and my heart started to swell for the poor creature laying silent in the box. And then my heart dropped down like a fist to the gut.

“People only send dead livestock for one reason,” I said, licking my paper-dry lips. “It’s a warning.”

Vlad looked up from his computer, his fingers still hovering over the keys. “About what?”

The little corpse shook in the box as my hands started to tremble. I clamped my eyes shut, thinking back to the horrendous clanging of metal, of porcelain, of the water shooting to the ceiling in the Mercy High bathroom—the words GET OUT scrawled in angry red across the mirror.

“About me getting any closer with this investigation.”

“What now?”

My head snapped up to Will’s door, cracked open, and Will, his eyes narrowed and caked with sleep. He stepped out of his apartment and raked a hand through his sleep-ragged hair, sandy brown streaks pointing in every direction. He was dressed in nothing except a pair of well-worn jeans, and he didn’t look happy.

I was almost too distressed to notice that he was shirtless, his incredible abs tanned nicely, his jeans slung low enough that the muscles under his hip bones were exposed, sloping toward his groin, a glaring invitation.

“S-Someone left this,” I said, tearing my eyes from the abs I wasn’t staring at because I could be in the midst of a life or death situation and once again, there was a sexy-as-hell, half-naked man in the middle of it.

Will crossed the hall in two swift strides and gingerly took the box from me.

“Get rid of it!” Nina screeched from her tabletop perch.

Will glanced into the box and then up at me, his hazel eyes clouded. “Are you upset because it’s a terrible gift or because you didn’t get anything?”

I frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s for Vlad.”

Will upturned the lid. There was a thin, white envelope with the name VLAD scrawled across it.

“Oh.”

“I don’t care who it’s for or who it’s from. It’s a dead. Freaking. Bird. Get rid of it! Those things carry disease! They carry the plague!”

I looked at Nina. “You’re immortal. What do you care?”

Will shook the box. “It’s just a pigeon.”

Nina gaped. “A pigeon? It’s not even a classy bird!”

Once we were able to dispose of the bird—which we soon learned was a warning from Kale, for Vlad—and lure Nina from her spot on the dining room table, Will and I sat down with two cups of tea.

“So, I take it that it wasn’t just a dead bird that woke you up in the middle of the night?” Will said, wrapping his hand around his mug.

I wagged my head. “Couldn’t sleep. I just don’t feel like we’re doing enough, Will.”

“We’re doing all we’re supposed to do.”

I pinned him with a glare. “And that’s not enough. We’re no closer to finding—” I paused, then snatched the papers Vlad had printed out for me. “I forgot.”

“What’s that then?”

“Police files.”

Will cocked an approving brow and I handed him half the stack.

“Wait a minute—didn’t the preliminary report say that they found Cathy in Marin?”

I nodded. “Yeah, Battery Townsley. Definitely over the city line.”

Will looked up. “If you’re going to drop a body anywhere around the city, that’s the place to do it.”

I nodded. “What else?”

Will scanned. “It says there was a preliminary search, but they didn’t find any additional evidence and deduced that the Battery was merely a dump site. Subject was not killed there.”

I bit my lip, thinking of Cathy, of her pink-and-cheery room with the frozen-in-time smiles and the deep, ridged lines on her mother’s face. Hearing her referred to as a “subject” that had been “dumped” made my heart clench, became a tightening knot in my chest.

“Feel like going on a field trip?”

Will looked over my head, out the front window where the sky was even blacker than normal, the lights of the city barely punctuating the all-encompassing blackness. “I have a feeling there is absolutely no chance I’ll be able to go back to sleep if I don’t go.”

I smiled and nodded. “You catch on quickly.”

I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable with San Francisco in the hours just before dawn. Normally, the city vibrates—it pulses with life, with people going about their day, with horns honking and smoke spewing and, just, life. But in these hours the entire city is still—but perilously so—as if something is slowly lurking, fingers of evil trailing through the night, claiming victims, claiming life.

I leaned forward in my seat and kicked up the heat, circling my arms around me and trying to shrug off a cold that was bone deep.

“It looks like the end of the world, doesn’t it?”

Will looked sideways at me, the light from the passing streetlights shining over him, then plunging him right back into darkness. “You mean because the streets are so empty?”

“Yes—and no.” I shivered again. “It feels like something more this time.”

Will guided Nigella toward the Marina, each mile toward the bay thickening the fog around us. “Something more?”

“You can’t feel it? It’s like . . .” I looked out the window, pressing my forehead against the freezing glass. “Unrest.”

I didn’t look at Will and he didn’t answer me. We crossed through the Marina and coasted onto the bridge in silence. The fog was cotton-ball thick now, squeezing through the night-muted cables of the Golden Gate, wafting over our windshield, leaving spitting drops of moisture. Behind us, the city faded into it, the lights struggling against the haze. I knew there was a mountain in front of us, but all I could see were the two slashes of Nigella’s headlights illuminating the fifteen feet in front of us.

“I’m thinking we probably could have done this in the morning.”

I swallowed. “Probably. But we’re running out of time, Will. And this”—I waved the sheaf of police reports Vlad printed out—“just proves that the police aren’t any closer to finding Alyssa or catching her kidnapper either. There’s something more. Girls don’t disappear into thin air.”

“And a dump site isn’t just a dump site?”

We were turning off the bridge and beginning the steep road up and down toward Battery Townsley. I bit my bottom lip the whole way there, and let out the breath I didn’t know I was holding when Will pulled into the deserted parking lot. He handed me a flashlight.

“Ready?”

My heart thumped. My skin felt too tight. But somewhere, in the back of my head, I could hear that voice. Alyssa, calling. Pleading. Begging.

“Yeah.”

The ice cold hit me like a stinging slap in the face the second I pushed the car door open. It was a wet cold, heavy with salted sea air, and it snatched my breath away and clawed at my hair. I zipped my jacket to my chin, cursed myself for not changing out of my pajama pants, and yanked my hood up over my head. I jutted my chin toward the black blanket of grass leading to the battery.

“That way.”

Will and I cut across the damp grass, walking in companionable silence, the round blobs of light from our flashlights bobbing in front of us. The wind howled and whipped and the water sloshed below us when I stopped, my flashlight hand dropping straight to my thigh, suddenly feeling as though it were tied there.

Will stopped and looked at me, his concerned face yellowed by the glow of the flashlight. “You okay, love? Cramp or something?”

My tongue was solid, stuck to the roof of my mouth. All I could do was shake my head and command my arm to move, but it didn’t. I moved a finger, then two, then wrestled my arm a half inch from my side before wincing at a searing pain around my wrist.

“Sophie!” Will’s arms were around me, but I couldn’t feel them. All I could feel was the searing heat circling my wrist—both wrists now—and the terror that washed over me. Heat pricked at my hairline and burned the back of my neck. I struggled against invisible bonds that pressed against my shoulders, my rib cage. The pain was intense. I felt my skin splitting.

Finally, I fell backward, suddenly and without warning, expelled from whatever “held” me. Will ran to me and crouched.

“What the hell was that?”

I sputtered and coughed, pushed Will away and pushed myself to standing, righting my flashlight. “Let’s go,” I said, my voice a strangled choke.

I stomped across the grasses and Will trotted behind me before grabbing my left shoulder and turning me toward him. “What the hell was that?” he repeated, slowly this time.

“Cramp,” I said, my eyes holding his.

I bit down hard on my molars so the tears wouldn’t fall, and pulled my hands into my sleeves so he couldn’t see the bruised, reddening marks that circled each wrist.

I needed to focus on Alyssa now.

I was breathing heavily by the time our flashlights swished over the entrance to Battery Townsley. We stopped and I flashed my light toward Will, who stared straight ahead, his lip curling into a scowl.

“That’s it?”

The front side of the Battery (or the backside of the gun) was a plain cement opening half hidden in the edge of the bluff. The words BATTERY TOWNSEND were carved in the concrete above the opening, and a rusted metal gate hung gaping open at the mouth.

“What were you expecting?” I asked Will, taking a step forward.

He looked over his shoulders, then zipped his jacket up to his chin. “Something less sinister looking is all.”

“It’s a dump site for a body,” I reminded him. “And it looks a lot less foreboding during the day.”

“Remind me again why we decided it was absolutely necessary to come out here tonight?”

I glared at Will, challenging him, as I mustered the courage to take a step forward. Finally, I took a small one, then another, closing the distance between the mouth of the Battery and where we were standing. I flashed my light up and down the cement supports, examining every bar of the rusted-out gate.

“Find anything?”

“No,” I said, my teeth starting to chatter.

“Where exactly did they say she was found?” Will wanted to know.

I swallowed, the fear welling up in me.

“There.” I pointed through the gaping black doorway. “In there.”

Will flashed his light in the direction I pointed, his meager light barely piercing the blackness. He looked back at me, then held out his hand.

“Come on.”

I looked at his offered hand, the wind and mist slapping my face, chapping my lips. Behind me was San Francisco, the Underworld, Alex. In front of me was Will, hand outstretched, eyes clear and open. But there was a gaping blackness behind him.

“I—I—I’m not sure—”

The snap of the wind knocked the breath out of me and Will lurched forward, grabbing my wrist. He rolled me into him and we were both slightly airborne, his arms wrapped tightly around me. In a flash our lights were out and we were plunged in total darkness, standing in the concrete entranceway to the Battery. Will flattened himself against the wall and pulled me to him, my body pressing up against his.

I listened to his heart thud in the blackness.

“What was that?” I whispered.

Will glanced down at me. It took a second for my eyes to adjust, but I was able to make him out, the slope of his jaw, his pursed lips, his index finger pressed against them.

We stayed like that for what seemed like hours, but I’m certain was only a few minutes. Finally Will poked his head into the Battery, the silver of the moonlight outlining his profile.

“Okay,” he said, his voice audible, but low.

“What was that all about?” I asked, shaking my flashlight that refused to come on.

“I thought I heard something—someone.”

I was going to say something smart, something about the crashing waves and the deafening wind, but I could see the slight sheen of sweat above his lip.

“Oh, God, Will, you’re serious.”

He instantly avoided my gaze, snatching my flashlight and pulling the batteries out. “Maybe I just wanted to cop a feel in the darkness.”

But the lightness in his voice, the usual snark of sexy Will was gone. I looked to the sky.

“The clouds are moving. There’s a lot more moonlight now.”

Feeling emboldened by the bit of light, I walked into the Battery, toward the center. The second my sneaker crossed the threshold it was like I had been hit with a Taser. There was a crack of nearly blinding light and I doubled over, pain searing every inch of my skin.

“Something happened here,” I whispered. “This is where she was found.”

Will stepped toward me, lacing his arm around my waist.

“Come on. There’s nothing here for us. Let’s go.”

“Wait,” I said, pushing him away.

“Are you ‘getting something’?” The way he said it let me know that he thought my “feelings” were right up there with revelations from Dionne Warwick and her Psychic Friends Network. “Come on out when you’re ready.”

He took off toward the mouth of the Battery and that creaky metal gate while I walked around and around the circle. Something caught the moonlight, something on the ground. I crouched and squinted and stood back, certain I was missing something. Finally, I crawled my way up the side of the bluff, using the moonlight behind me to stare down into the Battery. There, things became clearer.

And then completely dark again.

I felt the clamp over my mouth before I felt the crushing grip around my rib cage. My arms were pinned to my sides, but I clawed just the same, thinking that I would feel nothing but air as another feeling overtook me. But I felt the arm around me clench tighter, pushing the air out of my lungs in a silent whoosh. I tried to scream, but a leather-clad hand pressed against my open mouth, my assailant’s thumb digging into my cheeks. I squirmed and struggled. He remained stalwart. He took a step backward and I fumbled with him before slumping and angrily digging my heels into the soft dirt.

I heard him huff, heard his heartbeat speed up and his breath come in short bursts as he struggled with me.

“You. Have. The—” he huffed and I used the leverage of my heels in the mud to arch my back, giving my arms just enough play to land a solid blow to the groin. I heard the grunt and then the break of his arms as they fell from my mouth, from my sides. The wind slapped at my face as I ran, screaming into the wind, not daring to look behind me.

Where is Will?

It was the last thought I had before I felt the world slide out from under me. There was no extra give, no few seconds of Scooby Doo-like running on air—I went straight down.

My feet slapped at the mud and my shoulders banged against the earth.

And then everything stopped.

“Lawson?” I heard Alex’s breathy call on the wind.

Angelic.

Oh. I had died. I had fallen off the earth or into the ocean and died, and Alex was there. In Heaven.

Or maybe I was in hell?

I tried to struggle, to move, but the cold was everywhere, around me, sinking into my clothes, through my sneakers and into my socks.

“Where am I?” It was an aching, gut-wrenching scream. I expected fire and brimstone or flying monkeys or the gates of St. Peter at any moment. But all I got was the overwhelming stench of fresh earth and a pair of muddy Nikes right under my nose.

“What the—?”

A blinding wash of light poured over me and I tried to use my hand to shield my face—but my arms were still stuck by my sides. So I squinted, then sunk back against the dirt.

“Alex? Where are—why—what the hell is going on?”

He crouched down next to me, settling his flashlight on the ground so it wasn’t blinding me anymore. “I could ask you the same thing.”

I was about to answer him in some fashion—I still had no real idea where I was or what, exactly, had happened—when Alex went vaulting forward, the toe of his sneaker scraping across the top of my head. I heard the sickening sound of flesh hitting earth and I tried to turn, but I was stuck, held solid by this—dirt.

I stopped.

“I’m in a fucking hole,” I mumbled, awed. “I’m in a fucking hole!” I craned my head over my shoulder as far as I could get it. “Will, help me!”

Will had pummeled my attacker and was on top of him now, pinning him into the dirt, about to land a blow.

“Will?” I heard.

“Alex?” Will asked.

“Alex? Alex!”

“Lawson?”

“Oh, holy Christ.”

Will rolled off of Alex and pushed himself to standing, offering Alex a hand—which he didn’t take.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Alex spat.

“Why the fuck are you attacking her?” Will returned, throwing a gesturing arm my way.

“You’re trespassing at a crime scene.”

“Guys!” I yelled from my hole. “Guys!” I tried to dig my toes against the wall of the hole, but without the use of my hands—still bound by the narrow hole to my sides—all I could do was wobble back and forth uselessly.

“Sophie and I were here looking for clues. We were assigned this job.”

I rolled the abandoned flashlight with my chin so that both Will and Alex were illuminated. My stomach dropped when I saw the fire in Will’s eyes, the hard clench of Alex’s jaw. The guys were nearly nose to nose and spitting mad. Will’s hands were fisted at his sides, and Alex kept one hand resting on his holster.

“Guys!”

“I’m on this case. The SFPD is on this case, not the UDA. You shouldn’t be here.”

“I’M IN A FUCKING HOLE, HERE!” I screamed.

Both Alex and Will swung their heads to look at me as though they had just realized I was there.

“Why are you in a hole?” Will asked, calm as ever.

“I fell in.” I gestured with my chin toward Alex. “I guess you thought I was an intruder. He chased, I ran. I fell.”

Alex’s ice-blue eyes washed over me. “I was just doing my job. We were staking out the Battery.” He jutted his head toward me in my hole, then cut his eyes toward Will. “Doesn’t look like you were doing much of your job.”

Will’s nostrils flared. “I am doing my job just fine. She’s not hurt. The Vessel is still intact.” He took a half-inch step closer. “It’s not like I lost it.”

“Guys?” I asked, half to diffuse the spitting glares between Alex and Will, and half because I was still stuck in a goddamn hole on the Marin headlands in the middle of the night.

“I didn’t lose it,” Alex said, biting off his words—and completely oblivious to my stump of a head in the dirt.

They were talking about the Vessel of Souls—before it was me. Alex stole it, which caused his fall from grace. There is much more to the story as it’s rather long and complicated and I was praying to God, Buddha, and Oprah that they wouldn’t go over the details now, while I stood in my HOLE IN THE GROUND.

“Really?” I screamed. “Really, guys? I’m down here. IN A HOLE. I fell into a hole that’s about as big around as my shoulder span. I’m in a hole!” I could hear the hysteria and panic rising in my voice, but I didn’t care, because my mind was suddenly full of all the bugs and maggots that climbed around underground, mere centimeters from my exposed skin.

Suddenly, I was an upright corpse and I swear to God there was a worm on my arm.

“Get me out of here!”

“How’d you end up standing upright in a hole?” Will wanted to know.

“Just get me out!”

The guys stared at me and walked around the hole as if somewhere I was hiding a spring trap door.

When Alex and Will shared a shrug and a glance, I realized that I would likely have to spend the rest of my life in this hole, begging for people to bring me marshmallow pinwheels or dig me out with soup spoons.

“Can you get your arms out?” Alex asked.

My enormous, exasperated sigh was lost in ten inches of damp dirt. “I can’t do anything. This”—I think I shrugged—“is what you have to work with.”

“All right,” Will said over my head. “I’ll take this side. I think we can slide our hands in enough to reach under her arms and pull from there.”

“From her armpits,” Alex clarified.

Will nodded and counted to three, and suddenly I was being remarkably molested by four strong hands. I tried to help, squirming in one direction and then the other, but that only served to first lob one boob into Alex’s hand, the other into Will’s.

“Those aren’t my armpits.”

“Sorry.”

On three, there was a larger-than-necessary groan, and I was free from my upright tomb. The fresh air whipping through my clothes was cold but freeing. I would have run, but the guys were still holding me, my feet six inches from the ground, dangling.

“You can put me down. I’m free. I’m okay.” I swung my head, addressing Alex and then Will. “Nothing’s broken or anything.”

But neither Will nor Alex was focused on me. Each of their heads were bent downward.

“We’re going to set you down, but keep your right foot raised, okay?” Alex asked.

“Okay, I guess.”

The guys placed me down gently, my one sneaker touching the tuft of soft grass in front of me, my right leg bent, foot swung in front of me. I could feel my eyes widen. My teeth started a chatter that had nothing to do with the cold. My stomach folded in on itself.

“Wh-wh-what is that?” I asked, pointing.

“Don’t freak out, Lawson.”

Will still had my arm as Alex whipped a Ziploc bag from his pocket and used it to gingerly remove the thing that was hanging from the cuff of my jeans.

He moved his hand and I saw what he’d picked from me as it crossed the yellow beam of light.

“Is that a—”

Will’s grip on my arm tightened and I heard Alex say again, “Lawson, don’t freak out.” This time his words were stern, but they did nothing to slow me down.

“That’s a hand! That’s a hand!”

I felt the heat shoot up the back of my neck and throb in my temples. Suddenly, I was doubled over, then on my hands and knees, my body jerking and heaving as I vomited.

I barely had enough time to register my rage when I heard Alex yell, “Keep it away from the hole!” because the sudden stench of moist dirt and decay assaulted my nostrils and I heaved again.

I felt Will’s cool hand lace through my hair as he pulled it back from my face, his other hand touching the small of my back tenderly as I sputtered and coughed, hot tears mixing with snot dribbling over my chin. I sat back on my haunches and Alex handed me his handkerchief. It may have been my nerves or my recent assault by a disembodied hand, but I thought I saw a flash of jealousy in Will’s eyes as I took the white cloth from Alex.

“What—whose—who does that belong to?” I croaked, dabbing at my nose and mouth.

Alex had the hand laid out on the plastic bag as Will shone a light down on it.

“Doesn’t look too recent,” Will said, squinting.

“Most of the flesh has been eaten away. Kind of hard to determine time of death at this point.”

My stomach lurched and I prepared for another round of vomit that thankfully, never came.

“It’s a female,” Alex said. He pulled a pencil from his pocket and pointed it toward the hand’s clawed index finger.

“Is that a ring?” Will asked.

“Looks like it.”

I crawled over, unable to help myself, and stared. Among the dirt and muck was a tiny band of something silvery, pushed up against the knuckle. “It has a stone in it,” I said, amazed.

Will pushed the eraser end of the pencil toward the stone that I pointed out and nudged the moist earth aside. A sliver of emerald green—muted and fogged—caught the light.

I swallowed heavily and sat back on my haunches, suddenly overcome with grief.

“Hate to break up the bio lesson but, wouldn’t you say where there’s a hand there’s probably—”

Alex glanced up at Will, his eyes reflecting the light. “An arm?”

Will nodded solemnly and they both looked at me. My heart thumped. “What are you looking at me for? I found that, I’m done for the night.”

Alex handed Will the flashlight as he pulled his cell phone from his back pocket. “I’m going to call this in. There’s probably a body in there.”

“A body.” I heard myself say it, the word dropping solid on the cold air.

Will rolled the extra flashlight to me. “Just take a look.”

I chewed the inside of my lip and begged that this hand had come upon this hole independently. But when the yellow streak of my light caught the glossy mud walls I’d had leaned up against, my stomach went to liquid.

Suri. Gretchen. Cathy. And now—Alyssa?

“It’s not a body,” I said slowly. “It’s a couple of bodies.”

Once home, I showered and changed in record speed—fast even with Nina’s wrinkled nose and directive to “change into something that doesn’t look like I buried my Aunt Fanny in it.” I interpreted the Aunt Fanny crack to mean a never-been-worn pale blue cashmere sweater and a pair of charcoal-grey slacks that had miraculously become cigarette-slim while living in the back of my closet.

“Way better,” Nina said, handing me a Fresca and a bagel in a brown paper bag. She shrugged. “You should probably go grocery shopping.”

“We’re out of detergent, too,” Vlad chimed in, scaring the bejesus out of me. He poked his head over the top of the couch and grinned.

“Look, I was out all night—”

Nina held her hand out, stop-sign style. “No need to brag about your conquests with a C-H-I-L-D in the room.” Her eyes cut back and forth from the top of Vlad’s head to me.

“I’m not a child,” Vlad snapped. “You’re a child.”

“I wasn’t out conquesting. I was out.” I took a deep breath, trying my best not to recall the image of that gnarled hand, of the makeshift graveyard the police were unearthing as we argued about my nonexistent sex life. “We found some bodies. Several, we think. Out at Battery Townsley.”

Nina blinked and popped a straw into the blood bag she’d helped herself to.

“With Alex or Will?” Vlad asked.

“Both.”

“Kinky.”

I narrowed my eyes and took a big swig of my Fresca. “You’re disgusting.”

“My vote’s for Will, personally,” Vlad said as I gathered my purse.

“No.” Nina hopped off the counter, following me into the living room. “Alex. The whole doomed love is so romantic.”

Vlad snarled. “I don’t like that guy. I’m so over his holier-than-thou shit.”

I grabbed my keys. “You have no soul, Vlad. Everyone is holier than you.”

He resettled himself on the couch. “Not everyone has to act like it.”

I was still grumbling from Vlad and Nina’s lackluster response to our break in the case—but then again, for a couple of undead vampires, the actually dead really did little to pique their interest—when I crossed two lanes of screeching traffic and bolted into the Philz Coffee parking lot.

“Coffee,” I mumbled to absolutely no one.

I yawned and blinked, my eyes stinging and dry from lack of sleep. “Code Thirty-three,” I said to the perky, well-rested barista. “A big one.”

She studied me intently for an uncomfortable beat before reaching out to touch my hand. “You look just like him,” she said, her voice low and breathy.

“Excuse me?” I asked, heat pricking out along my hairline.

She snapped her hand back from mine, but her grin never faltered. “I said that will be $3.71, please.”

I felt my mouth drop open and I worked to push the words past my teeth. “No—no. You said—you said that I looked just like him.”

The barista cocked her head, the sweet smile still plastered across her glossy lips. “I’m sorry, you must have misheard me. Three seventy-one, please.”

I handed over the cash without taking my eyes off her. She gave me my change and I stepped aside, far enough to get out of line, but close enough to hear her should she murmur something else.

She was all business with the next customer.

I must have imagined it or misread her. I really need to get some sleep.

I slurped the last of my Code 33 as I pulled into the UDA parking lot, the octane hitting my bloodstream in one hot, energetic explosion. Thirty-six floors later, the big silver elevator doors slid open on the familiar chaos of the Underworld Detection Agency. Kale was at the reception desk with a cheek full of Hubba Bubba as she cocked her head and listened to a voice screaming on the other end of the phone line. The velvet ropes were bulging with clients already annoyed—a couple of zombies with brand-new papers, a windigo who shot a cool breeze at the oblivious vampire behind him.

I hadn’t even broached the UDA STAFF ONLY door when Sampson caught my eye and made a beeline for me.

“Sophie, great. You picked a perfect day to come back.” He waved toward the crowd. “First of the month. Everyone wants everything renewed or reneged.”

I stepped back. “Oh, I’m—I’m not here to work. I have to get back to the high school.”

Sampson frowned. “But yesterday you asked me to pull you and Will out.”

“Sorry, that was a mistake,” I said, shaking my head. “That was before—we found bodies and symbols and—I think we might actually be on to something.”

“So you have a lead about Alyssa?”

“Not exactly.”

Sampson’s shoulders slumped, the motion barely visible under his steel-gray suit.

“But I expect this thing to unravel really soon. Really soon. I just came down here to see Lorraine.”

“Well, Lorraine’s not in yet and Principal Lowe has already called in your replacements for today so . . .”

I snapped my fingers, brightening. “That’s okay. That’s actually good. Will and I can observe and poke around the school and check out a few things.” I stepped backward, edging my way toward Lorraine’s office. “Thanks!”

I wasn’t sure if my sudden thundering heart was due to actual adrenaline or still the Code 33 kick, but I took the opportunity to photocopy the receipt I had from Miranda’s book and stack that, along with a second shot of the protection symbol from the Mercy desk, and a photo Will snapped looking down into Battery Townsley on Lorraine’s desk. I clipped the stack together and slapped a Need your thoughts on this Post-it note to the top.

My thumb was hovering over the speed-dial button on my cell phone when I ran into Kale rounding the corner.

“Just the person I was looking for!”

I held up a hand. “I’m sorry, Kale, but I’m in the middle of something.”

Kale clapped her hands together, prayer style. “Two seconds.”

I dropped my phone hand to my side. “Okay, two seconds.”

She immediately produced a square envelope and began trying to push it into my hand. I stepped back. “No, sorry. I won’t be the go-between for you and Vlad’s lover’s spat.”

Kale’s cheeks pinkened. “Vlad said we were lovers?”

“Kale . . .”

“Okay, okay, sorry. This isn’t for Vlad, though. It’s for Nina. Give it to her for me, please? It’s just an apology for the bird incident.”

I looked over my shoulder. “Nina works here. Can’t you give it to her yourself?”

Kale paled and wagged her head slowly. “Vampires are so scary when they’re mad. Especially Nina.”

Knowing that my sweet roommate had once decimated an entire army for pissing her off, I couldn’t really blame Kale.

I took the envelope. “Fine. But I don’t know when I’m going to see her.”

“You’re such a sweetie, Sophie!”

I zipped past Kale, then paused. “Hey, make sure that Lorraine reads the stuff I left on her desk, okay?”

Kale pumped her head while her lips worked a giant orb of hot pink bubble gum.

The high-pitched, hysterical laugh that came out of my mouth echoed through the empty hallway.

“That’s funny to you?”

“No.” My heart thumped in my throat. “Gretchen Von Dow—we were at Mercy at the same time. She didn’t go missing though. I’m sure of it. Nina and I looked it up just last night. She wasn’t missing. Unless—unless it was far after high school.”

“Clothing with the Mercy logo was dumped in the makeshift grave. How are you so sure that she didn’t disappear when she was in high school?”

I licked my lips, confidence welling up inside me. “Because she was a foreign exchange student. From Hamburg, Germany. She went back during our junior year. It’s in my yearbook. ‘We’ll miss you, Gretchen,’ etcetera. Did someone try to locate her in Hamburg?”

There was a beat of pregnant silence on Will’s end of the phone. “I think you may have gotten some bad information, Soph.”

“No, no.” I started to tremble, started to need to be able to explain to Will. “It’s in the yearbook. Gretchen Von Dow was a foreign exchange student. If something happened to her while we were in high school, I would have known. I would have.”

I wasn’t sure if I was trying to convince Will or myself.

“Sophie,” Will tried again.

“No,” I said, wagging my head. “Gretchen Von Dow left during our junior year. Legitimately. She was a foreign exchange student.”

I could hear Will’s fingers flying over a keyboard. “Open your iPad.”

I paused, then slowly pulled the iPad from my bag and flipped it open. “Okay.”

“Gretchen was a foreign exchange student?”

I nodded as though Will could see me. “You know, they come here, we go to their country. An exchange. For foreigners.”

“Look, I know you people consider San Francisco its own planet or whatever, but I’m pretty sure the school system would step in and disallow exchange students from San Mateo.”

“What?”

“I’m sending you the information now.”

I forced myself to look at the text populating my page.

Gretchen was born in San Mateo County and lived there until she disappeared.

I swiped the screen and frowned down at the birth certificate that flashed on my screen.

“She went back to Hamburg,” I mumbled.

“Gretchen Von Dow went missing the August before her junior year in high school.” I imagined Will scanning the screen, the black words reflected in his hazel eyes. “There were no leads, no witnesses. She was filed as a possible runaway.”

My legs went to jelly and I slid down the lockers, my butt hitting the floor, hard. “I can’t believe this. How did we not know she went missing?”

“Apparently, because you thought she was a foreign exchange student.”

“Well, yeah, that’s what all of us at Mercy thought, but, but, a kid missing. That would have been in the paper, right? That would have been big news.” I bit my lip. “Right?”

The keyboard clacked again on Will’s end of the phone. “Open those,” he commanded.

There was a little plink! then a message from Will. I opened it and files started popping up all over my screen.

“These are the local papers from the day after Gretchen was reported missing.”

I scanned one after the other, a vague recollection of headlines blaring news about a Black Friday movement, the parks in peril. “There’s nothing here.”

I began clicking through page after page of the paper, getting further and further away from blaring headlines and moving closer to the not-as-noteworthy news.

“Here!” I said, strangely triumphant. “The police blotter.”

“‘Sixteen-year-old high school student Gretchen Von Dow was reported missing by parents Lola and Howard Von Dow after failing to return home from school Thursday afternoon. Police are investigating .’”

My stomach turned in on itself. “That’s it? That’s all there is?” I yanked the article down the screen and maniacally scanned for something else, something with more meat on Gretchen and her disappearance. “There isn’t even a photo. Or a ‘she went missing from here.’ Didn’t anyone care?”

I could hear the crack in my voice, could feel the hot sting of tears behind my eyes. “Didn’t anyone look for her?”

Will’s voice was soft. “I’m sure someone looked for her, love.”

“But—but—” I flopped the cover back on my iPad. “No one did anything. And I—I didn’t even know her. I didn’t even know she went missing. None of us did.”

“It’s not your fault, love,” Will was saying, his voice soothing. “You were just a kid.”

“And I was totally wrapped up in my own stupid issues. I was giving myself home perms and crying over the Backstreet Boys while my classmate was snatched. Probably hidden away somewhere. Tortured. Words carved into her flesh.” The image of Cathy’s ravaged body flashed in front of my eyes and I heaved.

“You need to relax. You couldn’t have done anything even then. You thought she was a foreign exchange student.”

I suddenly stopped crying and used the back of my hand to swipe at my wet cheeks. “Yeah. I did.” I pinched my bottom lip. “Why did I think that?”

“What do you mean?”

I slumped back against the locker. “Well, why would I just assume—I mean, we had foreign exchange students, but Gretchen—” I squinted, remembering. “She didn’t look all that foreign.”

“Maybe she told you she was from a different county. I used to tell birds I was Australian. Upped the mystique. Every girl wants to bed a bloke from Oz.”

“No.” I shook my head, using my fingernail to trace a line of grout. “I was social napalm. No one told me anything. At least not directly. And you’re disgusting.” I sighed. “Maybe it was just a rumor.”

“Who would start a rumor that a girl who had gone missing was actually just a foreign exchange student on her way back to the mother country?”

I bit my lip. “The person who made her disappear.”

At that moment, the bell rang. I pushed myself up from the linoleum as students flooded out of their classrooms, the bell soon drowned out by the flurry of conversation and the general din of movement.

“A bunch of bodies,” I heard someone say.

“Bones, like, thousands of them,” someone else whispered.

“Hey, Ms. Lawson!”

I looked up from the sea of navy blue to see Miranda, arm raised, a wide grin on her face. I took one step closer to her and then she was gone, girls closing over the small hole she made in the crowd.

“Miranda?”

“I think she needed to sit for a spell.” Fallon’s lips were right at my ear, her voice serpentine, like a black snake winding its way into my brain.

Just as I was about to respond Fallon was washed down the hall, too, the only remainder of her a high-pitched giggle mingled with Finleigh and Kayleigh’s.

“Miranda!” I yelled, pushing my way through the crowd. “Miranda!”

Miranda was on her butt on the ground—just as I had been—and probably with the same dumbfounded expression. Her books were strewn around her and I crouched down hurriedly, gathering her things, feeling every bit like I was stepping back into my own high school life.

Miranda pushed herself up, her cheeks blazing red. “Thanks, Ms. Lawson,” she said, taking the books I held out to her.

I smiled. “You can call me Sophie. I’m not working here anymore.”

Miranda’s face fell. “You’re not?”

“No. I’m needed elsewhere.” I sounded like a dumb superhero, but Miranda didn’t seem to notice. “Did Fallon just shove you?”

“No. No, I just tripped. I’m clumsy.”

I crossed my arms in front of my chest. “I was clumsy in high school, too. You don’t have to take that, Miranda. Bullying is a crime. Or, you know, a lot of what bullying has become is. You can talk to me.”

Miranda took a step away from me, a cold front going up. “I’m fine. I can take care of myself. But thank you for the public service announcement.” She whipped around and ducked into a classroom.

I sighed, and turned just in time to see the swarm of girls parting like the Red Sea, their voices dropping away until only silence remained.

And then I knew why.

Framed in the open doorway and against the mid-day fog was Vlad. His eyes scanned the crowd and he licked his lips, a tiny triangle of blood-red tongue running across them. As gross as it was, he was stunning against the gray backdrop, his usually helmeted hair slightly mussed by the wind outside, his thick, deep navy peacoat buttoned up over what I was certain was an unattractive Dracula-style puffy shirt. I saw his dark eyes scan over the sea of ardent adorers before he caught mine.

The door snapped shut behind him, and it was like every girl had been released from her silent trap. The murmuring started and reached nearly deafening levels immediately, ponytailed heads snapping between Vlad and the girl he may have been looking at, a plethora of whispers of “how’s my hair?” and a Sephora’s worth of lip gloss being whipped out and applied.

“Sophie!” Vlad’s deep voice cut through the crowd and all was silent again, though every mouth was open, every eye fixated on me, every onlooker completely floored that he was looking for me.

If he hadn’t been Vlad—my manager, my roommate, Nina’s BloodLust-playing teen nephew—I would have kept up the mystique, let the girls ogle me in wonder while I rewrote what never happened in my high school past. But it was Vlad and I was miffed.

“What are you doing here?”

Vlad edged his way through the girls and I held my breath, half-expecting a series of fainting spells as he made contact with the girls.

I bent my head when he approached me and pinched my lips together, trying to talk as discreetly as possible. “You better not be using a glamour.”

Vlad grinned at me. “That’s the funny thing. I’m not.”

I rolled my eyes and cocked out a hip. “What do you want?”

“Nothing, but Lorraine said I should give you this.”

He held out a royal-blue velvet shoulder bag. I wrinkled my nose. “I already have a purse.”

“It’s not the purse. She wanted you to have what’s inside.”

I frowned, then popped open the purse. I immediately snapped my hand over my mouth. “Oh my God, what is that?”

Vlad just shrugged and tossed some senior one of those “how you doin’?” head bobs.

The smell that was coming from the innocuous-looking bag was noxious to say the least. Kind of like a cross between Steve’s socks and flaming garbage.

“She said you need it for protection.”

“From what?” I pulled the bag shut. “From anyone with nostrils in a forty-five-mile radius? And why does she suddenly think I need protection?”

“I don’t know.” Another head nod as the girls went back to normal motion—although the majority of them seemed to find one reason or another to brush their breasts up against Vlad. “She said you put something on her desk and there was something dangerous in it or something.”

I gaped. “She said there was something dangerous in the photos or something? What was dangerous, Vlad?”

He shrugged. “I don’t remember. Something. What’d you put in the photos?”

“There was a picture of Battery Townsley, a picture taken here at the school, a receipt—”

“I definitely remember that she didn’t say anything about a receipt.”

I rolled my eyes. “Great.”

“And I’m doing you a favor bringing this here.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You’re doing me a favor?”

Vlad nodded.

“Out of the goodness of your black heart?”

Vlad’s eyes narrowed.

“And you got nothing out of it. Nothing except the satisfaction of knowing that I will now be safe against not-receipts.”

Vlad blinked. “I may have gotten something out of it, too.”

I waited and Vlad sighed.

“Fine,” he groaned. “Lorraine is going to talk to Kale. Maybe try to smooth things out so I could talk to her without her, you know, cutting off my head and spitting fire down my throat. Oh, and Lorraine said there’s something in there that you have to wear.” He took the bag from me, reached in, and yanked something that looked like a cat horked up, tied to a piece of twine. “This thing. You’re supposed to wear it all the time. Under stuff. It’s supposed to touch your skin.”

I took the charm from Vlad. As I brought it closer to my face, my mouth started to water with that familiar pre-vomit saliva. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Lorraine said you would get used to the smell.”

“Not likely.”

I held my breath and put the thing over my head anyway, immediately pushing the cat-hork end under my shirt, hoping that would stamp out the smell.

Vlad smiled. “Gotta go.”

He wound his way through the crowd and out the front doors. I briefly expected a rush of girls pressing their noses against the windows, pound-puppy style. Instead, I came eye to eye with Fallon.

“You know him?”

“Of course I do, Fallon. And you know what? I’m glad you’re here. I want to talk to you about something.”

Fallon looked over her shoulder and then back at me. She paused for a beat, then wrinkled her nose. “What smells?”

I took a deep breath and then instantly regretted it, visualizing my insides turning into withering blackness as the stench whipped through my lungs. “I don’t know. Come with me.”

I was surprised when Fallon did, falling into step with me. She pressed her palm against her nose. “It’s like the smell is getting worse.”

I pulled open the door to my old classroom and ushered Fallon in. She looked around as though she hadn’t been in that room every weekday of her junior year. “You’re not working here anymore. Are you allowed to pull students into an empty room like this?”

“Look, Fallon, I know what’s going on between you and Miranda.”

For the first time since I’d known the girl, Fallon’s eyes widened, her perfect façade cracking just slightly. She recovered almost immediately.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I put my hands on my hips and did my best to stare down and intimidate her. “The hall the other day? And then today? You said she wanted to ‘sit down for a spell.’ What did you mean by that?”

There was a miniscule twitch at the edges of Fallon’s mouth, the infinitesimal start of a smile. “She wanted to sit down.”

I inched closer. “You said, ‘for a spell.’”

“It means for a while.”

“I know what it means. What I want to know is why you chose that particular phrase.”

Fallon took a step back and waved her hand in front of her nose. “Is the smell coming from you?”

“Fallon, at least two girls have gone missing from Mercy High in the last two years. And according to things uncovered by the police—and by me—possibly a lot more. You know this is all tied to witchcraft.”

Again that tiny, twitching smile. “I do?”

I cocked my head, pinning her with a glare. “Why would you say ‘sit for a spell’?”

Now it was Fallon who stepped forward, suddenly uncomfortably close to me. “Are you accusing me of something, Ms. Lawson?”

“Tell me about Cathy.”

“She was murdered. Before that, she was alive.”

I blinked, and Fallon blinked back at me, as if daring me to ask her to elaborate.

“Alyssa?”

Fallon held her ground for a beat before turning stiffly, her hair fanning out behind her. “I don’t have to—”

She stopped when I grabbed her arm. Her eyes sliced over her shoulder and narrowed, first staring at my hand on her arm, then looking directly up at me. “Get your hand off of me,” she said sharply.

I let her go as if her skin had burned my palm.

Once Fallon disappeared into the hall, I slid up on my former desk, resting my face in my hands.

Did I really believe that Fallon was some kind of witchy serial killer?

At least three bodies . . . Will’s voice echoed in my head. Gretchen Von Dow . . . I hopped off the desk and started shoving things in my shoulder bag, humming a riff from a Bon Jovi (my era) tune when there was a knock on my door.

I didn’t look up when the door opened. “Nice, Will,” I said, grabbing a sheaf of papers. “You knock on my classroom door but barge in on me in the bath—” I stopped, my eyes wide. “Tub. Kayleigh, hi. I was just—can I help you with something?”

I was fairly certain that the abject horror in Kayleigh’s eyes—Teachers have lives outside of school?—mirrored my own. She went beet red from the tips of her ears all the way down to the tops of her UGG boots.

I cleared my throat and blinked at her, flashing a pleading “let’s pretend this never happened” look.

“Can I help you with something?” I said again.

Kayleigh’s hands went from fingering the strap on her crossover bag to fumbling in front of her. She licked her already glossy lips and took a tentative step forward without saying anything.

I laid my shoulder bag back down on my desk and practiced one of those “open stances” that supposedly welcomed communication—or so Dr. Phil said.

“Do you want to talk to me about something?”

Kayleigh glanced over her shoulder—quickly, nervously—before stepping all the way into the room and pulling the door closed behind her. She waited until it clicked shut to let out a shaky breath.

“It’s about Fallon,” she said, her voice a low whisper. “And Miranda, in the hall the other day.”

I felt my ears prick as my hackles went up. I was instantly protective of Kayleigh, of whatever it was she needed to tell me.

“You can tell me anything, Kayleigh. We can keep it just between us.”

“Fallon would murder me if she knew I was talking to you, but this—this is getting really serious. You—you don’t know the whole story—everything that’s happening with Fallon and Miranda.”

“No, I guess I don’t. Why don’t you tell me about it?”

Kayleigh licked her lips and hugged the strap of her bag tighter against her chest. She opened her mouth, but her words were drowned out by three hard, heavy raps on the glass. She whirled and my head snapped up, just in time to see Fallon’s narrowed eyes, that slate-blue stare boring into me. She was in the hallway, her lips set in a hard, thin line. She disappeared from view, the snap of her gum echoing in the hallway before she pulled open my door. Her eyes regarded me coolly before zeroing in on Kayleigh. I was shaking for her, the sweat breaking out at the back of my neck, but Kayleigh dropped into the iceberg-cool mode I was sure I’d never master.

Fallon snapped another bubble.

“Do you want a ride home or not? I’ve been waiting for you for, like, ever.”

I surreptitiously glanced at the clock: nine minutes since the last bell. I was about to let Kayleigh off of Fallon’s barbed hook, but she spoke, shaking her long hair over her shoulder and turned her back on me.

“Old lady Lawson said my Beowulf paper lacked depth.”

“She should know all about lacking depth,” Fallon said in a low snark.

I rolled my eyes, then grabbed a page off my desk, scrawled my number down and stepped in between the girls, shoving the half-folded paper into Kayleigh’s hands. I caught her eye, held it.

“Here’s your paper back. If you’d like help, you can call on me, anytime.”

I waited for a miniscule flash of thanks or apology to flit through Kayleigh’s eyes but got nothing. She just snatched the page and edged past Fallon to get out the door. Fallon said nothing, but she shot me a look that was so icy that I actually shivered before she let the door go. I caught it before it snapped shut and stood there, considering. When I caught a mane of fuzzy dark hair out of the corner of my eye, I dashed toward it.

“Miranda?”

Miranda, her back to me as she sipped from the water fountain, straightened, then turned slowly.

“Um, Ms. L?”

I leaned in so our foreheads were nearly touching. “I need to talk to you.”

Miranda tried to inch away from me, her butt up against the water fountain. “I told you—”

“It’s not about Fallon,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s not about bullying or what happened in the hallway.”

Miranda looked around. I realized we were circled now, girls strategically angled to look like they weren’t paying attention to us, but every eyebrow was quirked, every glossed lip was pursed in a slick smile. Miranda looked part horrified, part pacified—as though being the center of unwanted attention was something she had gotten used to.

“Please?” I said on a whisper.

Miranda took a step forward and I led her to an alcove in the hall. I would have dragged her into my room, but after Kayleigh and Fallon, I figured it wouldn’t be long until Heddy or Principal Lowe stationed an armed guard there.

“You’re not really a teacher, are you?”

I started. “Well, no. I’m a substitute.”

Miranda smiled. “Yeah?”

I felt an instant wave of guilt and I made a mental note to get my hormones checked. I was investigating a crime scene undercover, and feeling guilty for lying to possible major players.

“Yeah. Look, I know we talked a little bit before—about clubs and stuff on campus.” I held her eyes, hoping my raised brows would convey what I didn’t want to say.

“Yeah, so?”

I lowered my voice. “And the covens?”

Miranda shrugged. “Yeah, we talked about that.”

I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Look, I don’t work for the school, okay? At least not officially. But I really need to know, Miranda, are there girls who think they’re witches here?”

Miranda didn’t seem startled by my question, but she didn’t answer, either.

“The book that you dropped in your scuffle with Fallon? This is it, right?” I unfolded one of the color copies of the book’s cover.

Miranda gave it a cursory look, her shoulders rising a half inch. “Yeah, why?”

“It’s a book of spells, Miranda.”

“I know. You don’t think that I—I’m not some kind of witch. I just—some girls . . .” Her voice trailed off, her eyes focusing on her shoes.

“It’s okay. I know what they are.”

Miranda’s head snapped up, her eyes wide. “You do?”

“Protection spells. I know what this is, too.” I unfolded the copy of the symbol carved into the desk in my classroom.

Miranda took the page from me and studied it. “Is this in the book? I didn’t really read it.”

“You don’t recognize this symbol?”

Miranda swung her head. “Should I?”

“You said you weren’t friends with Cathy Ledwith.”

Miranda leaned against the alcove wall and yanked on the straps of her backpack. “Not really, no.”

“You knew her from around school?”

She nodded wordlessly, her eyes skittering to mine, then going back to her toes.

“Did you know she had the same spell book that you have?”

Miranda looked up, but the “oh my!” expression I was wanting wasn’t there. Instead, she shrugged again and said, “No. Was she one of the witches?”

I swallowed hard. “No, I don’t think so. But the book is for protection. So is the symbol. Cathy had both and now you—you at least have the book. What—or who—are you afraid of, Miranda?”

Miranda kicked at the ground, the toe of her sneaker grimy and well worn.

I hunched so I was directly in her line of sight. “Miranda, this is important. You’re not going to get in trouble if you tell me.”

Finally she looked up, her cheeks blazing red. “I bought it by mistake.”

I felt my eyebrows arch up. “By mistake?”

Miranda kicked at the floor again, checked her backpack straps a second time, and glanced at the ceiling—anything to avoid my gaze while the blush on her cheeks went all the way to the tops of her ears. “I thought it was a book on love spells.”

“Love spells?” I said it out loud, then clapped a hand over my mouth. Then, in a whisper, “You wanted a book of love spells?”

“Yeah.” It was barely a mumble.

“What for?”

Miranda looked up at me. “What do you think?”

Now I felt myself blush.

“Look at me, Ms. L.”

“You’re beautiful.”

“Because I’m smart, funny, and some day some amazing guy is going to come along and realize it, once guys are mature enough to see over my current idiocy? Thanks, I’ve heard it. I’m sixteen. I’ve never even held hands with a guy.”

“Well, you are at an all-girls school.”

“I know it’s stupid, but I don’t have any friends at school so it’s not like I can even go to one of the mixer dances. Like I’m just going to walk in there alone and stand there the whole night, waiting for Mr. Mature to throw someone like Fallon or Kayleigh aside and ask me to dance. Never. Going. To. Happen. Never! I thought maybe—I don’t really believe in the stuff—but I thought maybe I could get a little extra help.” Her smile was small, almost apologetic. “I figured, what could it hurt, right?”

I sighed, wanting to hug her, wanting to gush about all the dances I sat at home through, how the last actual date I’d been on ended with a jaw-snapping werewolf and a zombie pub crawl. But I also wanted to give this kid hope.

“You don’t need any book of spells to get a boy to notice you. Maybe just—” I put an index finger under her lowered chin and gently tilted her head up. “Maybe just look up once in a while. Make eye contact.”

Miranda smiled, her cheeks still pink. “I was so embarrassed buying that book that I walked into the store, went straight to the book shelf, and assumed any book with a red binding must be about love. I guess I picked wrong. I hadn’t even opened it.”

“So you didn’t buy a book of protection spells because you thought you were in any danger?”

“Only in danger of being alone for the rest of my life.”

“That won’t happen. But no more spells, okay?”

“Okay.” Miranda turned and was halfway out of the alcove before I stopped her.

“Hey—what do you know about Lock and Key Club?”

She shrugged. “Only that I can’t get in. Ask one of the perfect girls.” She waved, made a point to look me in the eye, and disappeared down the hall.

I went back to my classroom to gather my things and sat there, alone, until the school quieted as students filed out of the halls and into the parking lot. It was still early, but the fog had already rolled in, casting shadows through the large picture windows. I was in a silent, mourning stupor, which is why I nearly tossed my cell phone across the room when it started sputtering a jazz-heavy version of “God Save the Queen.”

“You changed my ringtone again, didn’t you?”

“And a good day to you, too,” Will chirped into my ear. “Where are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Simple question, love. Where. Are. You. I, myself, am sitting at your kitchen table enjoying a spot of tea.”

I hopped off the desk, offended. “Why are you at my house? How did you get into my house?”

“A good Guardian shall always have access to his charge’s place.”

“A good Guardian wouldn’t have to call to know where his charge is.”

“Touché.”

“I thought you’d come down here, to the school,” I said, pressing my fingers against my just-starting-to-ache forehead.

“I have my every confidence in you. Besides, football’s on.”

I could hear the rush of the crowd from his side of the phone. “Whatever. I’m going to grab a couple of those yearbooks, maybe poke around a bit, then I’m on my way home. Be ready to go by Alyssa’s house when I get there.” I glanced at the closed door. “And maybe Fallon’s. Okay?”

“Aye aye, love.”

I hung up the phone on a groan.

I heard the clack-clack-clack of Heddy’s shoes before I saw her. Then suddenly she was in front of me, all pudges and grins.

“Well, Sophie! I didn’t know you were still here.”

“Um, just wrapping up a few things. Actually, though, it’s a good thing I ran into you. Does Mercy have a policy against bullying?”

Heddy’s eyes were wide behind her big round glasses. “Oh my, yes. The bullying has gotten so bad nowadays.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “So you’ve had bullying here on campus?”

“Heavens, no! The girls here all get along. They’re just angels! Well, you remember that from your years here, don’t you?”

I thought back to my cowering, terror-filled years, the overwhelming silence and screaming into my pillows at night. “Yeah, sure. It was a big ol’ love fest.”

Heddy smiled at me and hiked up her bag, flipping up her collar as though she were heading into the Arctic. “I hope we get to see you around under better circumstances,” she said as she pushed open the door.

I offered her a pressed-lipped smile and waved. The door snapped shut behind her and echoed through the silent hall.

The semi-deserted parking lot shouldn’t have been scary. There were splashes of light from poles that dotted the concrete, and five hundred feet away cars honked, tires squeaked, and muddled bass thumped as traffic eked down Nineteenth. But either way I was a woman who was aware, who watched all the “it could happen to you” specials and who had been pummeled by everything from a sweaty book agent to a rabid vampire. I walked with purpose, making a zippy beeline toward my car with my keys threaded through my knuckles—a makeshift set of eyeball-gauging claws.

It was these claws that tumbled from my hand when I awkwardly tried to stab them into the door lock. I bent over to retrieve them and my shoulder bag walloped me in the chin while my backpack clipped the back of my head. I steadied myself against my car door and pressed myself back up slowly (lest I behead myself on a side view mirror). That was when an engine revved and the headlights from the car half a parking lot away clicked on and flooded me and mine in glaring white light. I was temporarily blinded, unable to see anything but the glowing white orbs. I squinted and the driver revved his engine again.

“Big engine, small dick,” I mumbled, searching for my car key.

I heard the faint crunch of gravel and then the unmistakable sound of rubber peeling over concrete. My head snapped back and the white orbs were growing bigger and bigger as the car came hurtling toward me, its engine throbbing so loudly that the sound pinged through my bones, made my teeth feel weird and achy.

The driver saw me, I know he did. Or if by chance he didn’t, there was no mistaking my car beside me, my smashed-up, vampire-scrawled car. But he didn’t seem to care. The headlights didn’t waver, didn’t move a millimeter to either side. The driver knew where I was and was aiming right for me—quickly.

My brain told me to move, to dive, to swerve, to run, but my feet weren’t mine. They wouldn’t respond, couldn’t respond, and kept me rooted to the vibrating concrete as the car closed the distance between us.

I could smell the exhaust from the car, the fast burn of gas on the chilled night air. I knew it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds—five at the most—but it felt like a lifetime, me rooted to that spot, my meager offering of skin and bones and muscle and flesh against two thousand pounds of rocketing steel. Adrenaline shot through me in fiery waves and my legs gave out. I felt my hair whip across the flying car and I clenched my eyes shut, crushing my palms against my ears as the sound of metal pulverizing metal deafened me. I heard the pop of glass, saw the shards fall in delicate slow motion—like snowflakes, I thought—as they danced to the ground, glistening in the weakening light. I felt my flesh breaking, hot against the concrete.

And suddenly it was quiet. Dead quiet.

I couldn’t feel anything. My heart wasn’t beating, the blood that had been coursing through my veins was stiff and oddly silent. I dropped my head and felt the concrete grating into my cheek.

Then there was pain, and noise.

Cars honking, tires squeaking, the muddled bass of cars on Nineteenth.

Blood pulsed from my bottom lip, now swollen and tasting like dirt. I edged myself out from under my car, amazed that I had gotten there. My arms and palms looked like someone had taken a cheese grater to them and bloomed with fresh heat.

My heart started to thunder. The blood started to pulse. Suddenly, I was gasping, crying, coughing, doubled over with my arms wrapped around my stomach, hugging myself while fresh tears rolled over my nose and fell onto the ground in front of my shoes.

“Ms. Lawson? Ms. L, is that you?”

I heard Miranda’s voice over the din of traffic. I inched my eyes up, and when hers met mine, she vaulted out of the doorway and sprinted toward me.

“Oh my gosh, Ms. Lawson, what happened to you? Are you okay? Should I call someone? The police or 9-1-1?”

I sucked in a deep, steadying breath and pushed myself to standing. Miranda’s cheeks were flushed—whether from the short run from the school or her concern for me, I wasn’t sure—and her eyes were glassy and wide.

“No, thanks, Miranda,” I said, shaking my head slowly. “I’m okay. Really.”

She shifted her weight and a shard of glass from my smashed side-view mirror popped under her foot. She jumped. “What was that? What happened?”

“That”—I used the toe of my shoe to nudge some errant glass aside—“is what remains of my mirror.”

“Your car mirror?”

“Someone tried—” I paused, biting my bottom lip. I could feel the lump tightening in my throat, but I couldn’t cry in front of Miranda, in front of my student. And I couldn’t drag her into this. “Someone just cut a little too close to my car while they were leaving the lot.” I felt my heart thunder, remembering the brush of metal against my hair even as I lied about it. “They must not have seen me.” I managed a small smile.

Miranda studied me suspiciously. “You look like you were crying.”

My hand flew to my face. “Oh, do I? Probably because I was thinking of how much my insurance was going to go up. You know, hit and run and all.”

I saw Miranda’s gaze go over my shoulder and examine my shit heap of a car. “You have insurance?”

“Um, what are you doing out here? It’s late. Can’t possibly have been in detention.”

“I stay late a lot.” She thumbed over her shoulder. “Heddy—Ms. Gaines—lets me do some administration stuff for her while I wait for the bus so I don’t have to hang outside the whole time.”

“You stay until”—I glanced down at my watch—“after six every day?”

“Oh, no. Not every day. Today I talked to you, and that made me a little bit late so I missed the earlier bus.”

My near-death-experience emotional rush was replaced by an apologetic blush. “Oh, no. I’m really sorry.”

Miranda yawned, then shrugged. “No big deal. Not the first time I missed it,” she grinned, wide and genuinely. “Won’t be the last.”

“Why don’t you let me drive you home?”

She shook her head with a sweet smile. “That’s okay. It’s probably out of your way.”

“It’s the least I can do for making you miss the first bus. And you may have saved me from a potential mow-down. I kind of owe you.”

Miranda opened her mouth just as the Muni bus wailed to a stop at the curb. “That’s my bus,” she said, taking a step back.

She gave me a tight wave before turning around on her heel and sprinting toward the bus, backpack bobbing behind her. I watched until she boarded. She turned and glanced back at me, her whole body illuminated by the heavy yellow glow of the bus lights.

The bus belched out a puff of black air as it groaned away from the curb; I watched the illuminated trip board blaring HUNTERS POINT/ BAYVIEW and sighed. Hunters Point was the most undesirable place to live in the whole city. Miranda wouldn’t let me drive her home because she didn’t want me to know where she lived.

“It never changes,” I mumbled to myself.

It was a whisper at first, then louder, more insistent. I tried to turn my head, wanted to lean toward the sound, but I was still frozen—bound, somehow. Red washed over my eyes and I could see bits of light in front of me. My shoulder blades ached as they pressed against something wet and cold; I could feel the moisture seeping through my shirt. Now I was the one who wanted to beg for help, but my lips were cracked and dry and my throat was sandpapery and hoarse. I knew—somehow—that it was from hours of screaming.

A figure leaned over me, his edges blurred. I blinked and then blinked again, trying to clear my eyes, trying to get a better look. A coarse cloth brushed over my bare arm and I strained to shrink away from it—but I was still frozen, still bound.

My lips parted and I winced at the needling pain as the skin at the corners of my mouth slit and tore. Blood trickled past my lips.

“What do you want?” I heard myself whisper. “What do you want from me?”

But when I saw the edge of the blade catch on the moonlight, I already knew.

“Whoa, Sophie!”

I felt like I had been underwater and suddenly broken the surface. I gasped, and Officer Romero grabbed me by both arms, his eyes the size of dinner plates. “Let me call Grace.”

“No!” I stumbled backward. “No. I—I’m sorry, I was just daydreaming and you surprised me.”

Romero’s dark brows went up. “You were daydreaming in the doorway of the police station?”

“I’m fine, really,” I lied, as my heart hammered like a fire bell. “Fine.” I squeezed by Romero into the safety of the vestibule. “I’ve just got to get—” I forced a smile, relief crashing over me when Romero kindly smiled back. “I’ve just got to get my head on straight.”

“Yeah,” Romero said, finally grinning. “I can respect that. Have a good night.”

I stayed rooted in the vestibule until Romero crossed the parking light and disappeared into his squad car. By that time, I could feel little beads of sweat prickling at the back of my neck while I mashed my finger against the elevator’s down button twenty times over.

The Underworld Detection Agency waiting room was deserted. The rows of blocky chairs and tattered magazines looked benign under the sodium chloride safety lights, but the calm façade did nothing to settle my nerves. I headed directly to my office, shoved the stack of papers and messages on my chair to the floor, and sat down on a sigh, holding my head in my hands. Finally, I steeled myself and picked up the phone.

“’Lo?”

“Lorraine? It’s me. It’s Sophie. Can I ask you something?”

Lorraine sounded like she was chewing on her end of the phone, and she didn’t bother to stop. “If it’s quick. I have six orders to drop off tonight.”

I licked my lips. “Can a witch—can a witch make someone see—or hear something? I mean, like, could someone like you remotely make someone—”

“Someone like you?”

I sucked in a breath. “Yes, someone like me. Can someone like you remotely make someone like me hear someone’s voice?”

“Tell me exactly what happened.”

I relayed the details of my police station parking lot experience, cringing with each new word and each new thought that I was finally losing my marbles.

“Oh, God, Sophie. You’re dealing with someone pretty powerful. This is from the school case, huh?”

I pinched my bottom lip. “Yeah. Look, Will and I found a couple of spell books—just protection spells. Is this the kind of spell that someone can learn?”

“From a book?” Lorraine snorted. “No way. There are some spells and incantations that can be learned from a book and some that are only passed down through families and covens. The spell that overtook you? It’s the latter. Its not the kind of thing someone just messes around with.”

“But why would someone—this mysterious, powerful witch—want to show me something incriminating? Or at least something that could possibly help me find Alyssa?”

“Could it help you find the girl?”

I frowned. “No. But there was someone in a robe and a knife. That’s got to be pretty specific to a certain spell, right?”

“Absolutely. With a robe and a dagger, a witch can bind another being, call dark forces into their servitude, and ensure that a herd of cattle stays fertile. Among other things.”

“Great. So I’m not even a tiny bit closer to figuring out who—or why—or anything.”

Lorraine paused for a beat. “I’ll come by tonight. I can run a few clarification spells, do some star mapping—maybe I can shed some light on what’s going on.”

A little sliver of hope pierced my heart. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

I rode up the elevator and when the big silver doors opened, I stood there mutely until the door began to slide shut again. Then I took a few tentative steps into the police department.

It was late enough that the majority of standard business was done there, and the only people left in the office were the nightshift and their newly caught, grumbling against their restraints or wailing that the police “got the wrong dude.” Eventually, I found myself heading directly for Alex’s office and hoping against hope that he was momentarily away while his office door was wide open, all the evidence in the Mercy kidnapping case spread out wide for me to take.

No such luck.

I rounded the corner and found myself in a standoff with Alex.

“What are you doing here?”

It wasn’t the warm, fuzzy, possibly kissy greeting that I always hoped for, but it was pretty much becoming standard Alex Grace.

“Can I talk to you in your office, please?”

I watched Alex suck in a deep breath, his cut-crystal eyes sharp and suspicious.

He sank into his desk chair and I perched in the visitor’s chair across from him. “So, how are you doing?”

Alex leaned back in his chair, the leather groaning underneath him. “What do you want, Lawson?”

I swallowed. “I want you to look up these names. They were students at Mercy with me, and well, suddenly, one day they weren’t. I think they might be part of this.”

I handed the page across the desk to Alex. He glanced down at it, his eyes giving it a quick glance before he moved it aside. “Thank you.”

“Aren’t you going to do anything about it?”

Alex blinked. “Right now? No. I’ll get around to looking at this after we bring Alyssa home.”

I felt a flicker of anger growing at the pit of my stomach. “But this could help. If we find out what happened to these girls, we might be able to find out who—or what—is responsible. I’m trying to help you, Alex.”

“Look, Lawson, we’re doing all right, okay? Believe or not, the police department here can function without your help.”

The sting shot through me and my cheeks burned. “Wait, what?”

“We have plenty of leads. We know we’re looking at a serial.”

“But the carving—and the witchcraft!”

“Probably happened after the fact.” He slid my paper into a manila file folder and laced his fingers on top of it. “There really isn’t any evidence that Cathy Ledwith’s killer and the person who desecrated her corpse are the same people.”

“You know that they are!”

Alex shrugged. “There’s no evidence to support that.”

“Let me just take a look at your files. I can show you mine.” I yanked my notebook from my shoulder bag. “We found spell books and a pentagram. And a carving.” Even as I said it, I knew how weak Will’s and my “evidence” really was. “I didn’t believe it either, but there’s something there, Alex, I’m sure of it. Check the names. Look at this.”

“Lawson, what do you want me to do? We’re”—he pointed from himself to me—“not working together. And we’re”—this time he circled a finger, indicating the police department—“not interested in finding a group of witches.”

“A coven.”

“What was that?”

“A coven. A group of witches is a coven.” I zeroed in on Alex. “I can’t believe you won’t let me help you. We’re friends, remember? Maybe even more than friends. Somebunny in San Francisco loves me?” I quoted the cheesy words from the plush hat he had given me, doing my best to squelch down an embarrassed burn.

“You had a concussion.”

Heat snaked up my spine and I gritted my teeth. “What’s with you? One day, you’re kissing me and saving my life, the next day you’re all fallen, no angel.”

His expression stayed hard. “I’m sorry I’m not everything you dreamed of.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“That’s supposed to mean that you and I have a working relationship. Period. You remember what that means, right?” He narrowed his eyes, the tiny muscle at the side of his jaw jumping.

“Are you—are you accusing me of—”

“What else can I help you with, Lawson?”

I was too angry to sputter back at him, to throw his own on-again, off-again behavior back in his face. “What happened to you?”

“You know what I am, Lawson. You’ve known since the beginning.”

I stood up, seething. “Yeah, but I didn’t peg you for such an asshole.” I turned on my heel, but not before seeing Alex’s cheeks flash red and something—sorrow, apology—flit through his eyes. He opened his mouth but closed it again, silent.

I stomped through the police department, livid.

I could still hear his breath when I woke up. It was fast and hot, and had just the slightest scent of . . . Alpo.

“ChaCha?”

She jumped up happily on her Popsicle-stick legs and pranced over my shoulder, nuzzling the spot between my neck and chest and giving me an enormous, salutary lick from chin to eyebrows.

“Thank you, baby,” I grumbled, scratching my pooch behind the ears. “Did I imagine you were a big, strong man last night? Did I dream that you were Uncle Will?”

“Uncle Will, huh?”

He was in my doorway in a towel slung so low around his waist it should have been a sin, with a bare chest and a decadent smile. I was face forward on the carpet, feeling the draft from my nightshirt shoved up around my waist when I fell out of bed. I scrambled over, yanking my Giants nightshirt down toward my ankles.

“Why did you shower here? You live right across the hall.”

Will tousled his damp hair. “But my shampoo doesn’t smell like mangoes.”

I rolled my eyes as he gestured to my hands holding fistfuls of black and orange fabric. “You know I’ve seen all that before, right?”

I blushed right up to my eyebrows.

“You may have, but that was a long time ago.”

Will grinned, and the heat kept up. He tapped an index finger against the side of his head. “Good thing I’ve got a hell of a memory, huh?”

I yanked my comforter from my bed and rolled myself up in it, standing. “Shouldn’t we get to work? We still have a case to solve, don’t we?”

Will raised his eyebrows. “We were all just sitting around waiting for the queen to grace us with her consciousness.”

He walked in and I walked out, even though everything from my nipples downward screamed at me to stay in my room and to suddenly get very interested in collecting errant towels.

The Indiana Jones–looking spread on the dining table brought back a vague recollection of the night before.

“Hey,” I said to Vlad, who was stretched out on the couch watching something on mute.

Vlad blinked up at me, and I could see the enormous dent—and the angry-looking bruise surrounding it—on the side of his head.

“How did that happen? And how is it still like that?”

Vlad’s upper lip curled and he sunk into the couch a small bit farther. “Kale hit me with an otter.”

“Ooh,” I muttered. “Oscar. But how’s it still all—” I did my best intimation of an obnoxious, blood spurting bruise.

Vlad touched two fingers to the wound and winced. “I had just eaten—a lot.” He patted his belly. “I’m still pretty full. Once the blood wears down it’ll go away. Damn that woman. I can’t go out looking like this.”

“Why? All the other vamps on the playground going to make fun of you?”

I thought I heard a low growl from the direction of the couch.

“I don’t remember everything,” I said, curling myself into my robe. “But I do remember the way you went to her after the crash.”

He avoided my gaze, grabbing the remote instead and turning the volume up high.

“So, make any sense of the thing?”

I spun as Will stepped out of my room, jeans on now, T-shirt thrown over one shoulder, towel thrown over the other.

“Of what thing?” I wanted to know

Vlad poked his head over the couch. “Before the pummeling. Lorraine and Kale and that star map thing.” He jutted his chin toward the table.

I leaned over the map and frowned, pushing my finger over charred masses of what had once been star patterns. “It wasn’t like this last night, was it?”

“No,” Will said, closing the distance between us. “Lorraine was doing some spell—well before the group walloping. After, the sodding thing caught fire. She wrote these notes down before I had to save the day with the fire extinguisher and wrestle the otter from the bird.”

“Wait—you were walloped. I was fine. Did I put out the fire?”

Vlad snorted and put the TV on mute again. “No, you were pretty much useless, mate. I put out the fire and saved what was left of Lorraine’s writings. Then we all went to the hospital, this one pitched to the floor.” His eyes cut to me. “Lorraine went into surgery, the doctor said Kale was fine, and she beat me with an otter once we came back home.”

“So just another quiet night at home,” Will said, kicking his feet onto the coffee table and lacing his fingers behind his head.

I took the notes from the table and read out loud. “‘Spell chanted on the seventh calendar day when the zodiac and the stars’—we knew all this. Cathy was found seven days after her abduction. We’re working on the same timeline with Alyssa.” I pushed the burnt star map aside and brushed my hand over the blond tabletop, now marred with black blossoms of charred wood. “We ruined a perfectly good table to figure out information we already knew?”

“Seemed like the information was pretty powerful to you. How’s that goose egg?”

Will rubbed a hand through my hair and I winced when his fingers went over a sore spot. “Ow! What was that?”

“I told you, love. You passed out.”

I shook Will off me and began cleaning the debris from the table. “So we know—again—that Alyssa’s kidnapper and Cathy’s”—I cleared my throat, still somehow unwilling to say the word—“assailant were—or are—using the girls as sacrifices to call on Satan. Both Cathy and Miranda have books of safety spells. Great.” I sat down in a dining room chair. “We are absolutely nowhere.”

“Why is someone trying to sacrifice girls to gain favor with the devil?” Vlad chuckled. “That’s lame.”

I felt myself pale. “I don’t know why I’m asking, but why is that lame?”

Vlad rolled his eyes as if I’d just asked his opinion on Justin Bieber. “Because first of all, no one uses human sacrifice anymore. And everyone knows that blood isn’t used for summoning, it’s used for opening.”

“Uh, opening?” Will asked.

“Blood, fluids, whatever—used for opening portals. Bodies are offered in reverence or thanks.”

“So our dude is thanking your pops for something?”

I pinched my upper lip. “We’re not entirely sure that Satan is my father.”

“Right,” Will said, picking up a magazine. “It could still be a dictionary salesman from Skokie.”

“Anyway, Lorraine specifically said the carving was an incantation. It was a calling.”

“So he used the girl as a bit of lovely stationary and as a thank-you gift? Is that what we’re thinking?”

I put my hands on my hips. “Blood opens a portal. The incantation was a calling of something.”

Will looked from Vlad to me. “Opening the door to hell, kind of like a Pied Piper thing drawing the devil out? That makes sense, right?”

Vlad barked out one of those “as if” laughs.

“Hey, stop with your brooding and moping, and help us, would you?” Will yelled, giving him a thump with the rolled-up magazine.

Another eye roll by Vlad. Wouldn’t kids ever come up with something new?

“Try opening up a portal and then drawing something to it. That’s what your perp is doing,” Vlad said, glaring at us as though it were dead obvious.

“Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

He sniffed. “No one asked me.”

I groaned. “Vlad! Okay, okay, tell me this. If our guy is opening a portal and calling something to it, why is he doing it again?”

“He could be calling something that is only out for a limited time.”

“Like the holiday china you get from Burger King?” Will asked.

Vlad scrunched up his nose. “Kind of like that. Or, it’s not working.”

“I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t it work if he’s got the incantation and the girl?”

Vlad launched himself off the couch and into the kitchen, knocking over a series of long-expired condiments before finding himself a blood bag. He pierced it, took a swig and glanced up at it. “Because he just hasn’t found the right girl.”

Will and I exchanged a look as heat walked up my spine, vertebra by vertebra. “This is going to keep going unless we stop it.”

I flopped down onto the couch, feeling incredibly defeated. “We can’t ask Lorraine who or what this witch is trying to summon. She said some of the incantation was wrong on the original—” I swallowed, my throat dry. I didn’t want to say “body,” but that was the image that sparked in my mind’s eye. “It was wrong in the original case.” I paused, considering. “Hey, Vlad, what do you know about a store called Simply Charming?”

Vlad closed his laptop and shot me a narrowed glare. “I know that you can’t get me near that place with a ten-foot pole.”

“Why’s that?” Will wanted to know.

“Because that’s the kind of place where Kale shops and I do not need another wallop to the head anytime soon.”

“Bitches be crazy, right, cuz?” Will said in a spot-on American accent as he gave Vlad a fist bump.

“It’s like I’m in the Twilight Zone,” I muttered.

I turned the corner toward our apartment building and slid into a parking spot just as a carpet-covered van vacated it.

Will looked at me and smiled as I pushed the car into park. “Rock star parking. Maybe things are looking up for us.”

I had my hand on the door when a bolt of heat shot through me. “I’m not so sure. Look.”

Will followed my gaze to the girl sitting on the stoop in front of our building. She had her knees pressed up against her chest, her hands buried in the enormous sleeves of a charcoal-grey hoodie. Her head was down, and a very recognizable, fuzzy shock of hair slid out from under her beanie.

“Is that Miranda?”

I pushed open the car door. “Miranda?”

Her head rose slowly, the majority of her face hidden in the shadows. “Ms. Lawson? Mr. Sherman?”

“Yeah.” I rushed toward her. “What are you doing here?”

I could see from the slice of light over her beanie and hair that she was trembling.

“I probably shouldn’t have come here,” she said finally. “But I didn’t know where else to go.”

“No, no, it’s fine.”

Will slid an arm through Miranda’s and helped her up. It was then that I could see her face clearly. My chest tightened painfully and the familiar prick of tears itched behind my eyes. “My God, Miranda, what happened to you?”

A purple-red bruise peeked out from under her beanie and marred the left side of her forehead. Puffed red scratches shot dangerously close to her swollen eye. Her cheeks were flushed red and slick with dried tears. There were neat slices at the edges of her lips, and dried blood was caked all over. Though Miranda did her best to shrink back into her sweatshirt and shrink back into the cover of night, I could still see purpling fingers of puckered skin under her chin and circling her throat.

“Can you walk? Do we need to get you an ambulance?” I asked.

Miranda shook her head, her hair swinging. “No, thanks,” she said, her voice a near-whisper.

“Let’s get her inside,” Will said before Miranda had a chance to elaborate.

Nina snatched open the door before I had a chance to sink my key into the lock. “Lorraine?” she asked, before her eyes set on Miranda.

“Nina,” I said, steering Miranda and Will around her, “this is Miranda, a student from my class.”

“Here, Miranda.” I led her to the couch and she sat gingerly, wincing. “Would you mind giving us just a second?”

Her dark eyes went from me to Will and finally to Nina before she nodded silently. I pushed Nina toward my room and Will shut the door behind us.

“What happened to her?” Nina wanted to know.

I chewed my bottom lip. “We just found her downstairs like that.”

“We do plan on asking, right?” Will asked.

“Of course. It’s just—” I looked at Nina, who sucked in a breath and patted the air.

“I know, I know. I’m just your normal flesh-and-blood roommate who is not salivating in the least at the overwhelming scent of dried blood.”

“Can you let Vlad know about Miranda before he gets back?” I said.

Nina shrugged. “He never left.” She cocked her head, listening. “And I’m pretty sure he’s already discovered your student.”

“Christ.” I pushed out my door and was momentarily taken aback by Miranda sitting primly on my couch. It was like my two worlds had crashed together.

“Sorry, Miranda. Can I get you anything?”

“You probably could have offered her a glass of water before you disappeared on her,” Vlad said as he appeared from the kitchen, tall, filled glass in his hand.

“Thank you,” she whispered to him, before downing the whole thing.

I sat across from Miranda. “Can you tell us what—or who—did this to you?”

She turned to me and tears began to pour over her lower lashes. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know who it was.”

“She said she—”

I held up a hand. “Vlad, it’s okay. I’d like to hear it from Miranda.”

I’d expected him to growl or grumble something inappropriate before settling back behind his laptop to explode human arteries, but he sat next to Miranda—close to her—body-brushing close.

My heart thumped. He liked her.

Before I could swoon for teenage love and recoil at the vampire-breather consequences, Will quickly sat next to me and addressed Miranda. “I’ve got some paramedic training. What do you say you let me take a look and maybe clean up those injuries?”

Miranda looked around blankly, her eyes wide and heartbreakingly innocent. She pulled herself into her sweatshirt again. “It probably looks worse than it really is.”

I looked at Nina, who was perched on the chair-and-a-half. Even across the room I could see her nostrils twitch. She steeled me with a glance letting me know that the blood she was smelling was not fresh—or flowing—enough to be dangerous.

“Can you tell us what happened, Miranda?” I asked.

Miranda clasped her hands in her lap and stared at them for a bit before she cleared her throat. “I was leaving the school.”

I glanced up at the clock. “Wait. You were just leaving campus now?”

She shook her head. “No. No, I was trying to get on the three o’clock bus. I realized I left my book back in your classroom so I went back for it. But I still had enough time to make it back to the bus stop. Or I should have. Anyway, I went back to the main door. Janitor Bud let me in and I got my book. It’s Wuthering Heights—the one you saw me reading in the cafeteria. But it was weird—the door to your classroom snapped shut while I was in there. Like there was a breeze or something, but there wasn’t. I mean, all the windows were closed. And then . . .” Miranda shook her head and the tears started to fall again. She let them go and I could see Vlad watching as they rolled over Miranda’s nose and fell into her lap.

“It’s okay, Miranda.” I squeezed her hand.

“It’s going to sound crazy. You’re all going to think I’m crazy.”

Will and I exchanged a glance. “You have a long way to go before we would even consider that thought.”

“A long way,” Will added. “Your Ms. L there got locked in the toilet, and I didn’t think any less of her.”

I tried hard not to roll my eyes. “Just tell us what happened.”

“So the door shut, and I tried to open it. But it was like it was locked. I tried to fiddle with the lock, but that didn’t help. And then—all of a sudden—it was dark. Like, pitch black. I couldn’t see anything. Then there was a wind—a howling wind. Everything went floating around me and things were hitting me. It felt like fists—like people were there. Pulling my hair and”—she heaved, then pressed a hand over her bottom lip—“and punching me. There was like, lightning or something cracking and every once in a while that would make it light. There was no one there, Ms. L—no one but me, but I could feel people. And something was written on the board—it looked like, it looked like—”

“Get out?” I offered.

Miranda nodded, her eyes the size of teacups. “How did you know?”

“Just a lucky guess.”

“Then what happened?” Vlad asked her.

“Well, there was a giant crack. I was yanking on the door and as soon as I heard that, everything stopped. The room was normal again, there was nothing on the board, no wind. The door opened right up and I ran. I ran all the way out of the school and to the bus stop. I didn’t even know there was—” Miranda gingerly touched her fingertips to her puffed eye. “I didn’t even know there was anything on my face until the bus driver asked what happened.”

“What made you come here?” Will asked.

Vlad shot him a scathing look. “She was traumatized.”

“I’m just asking.”

“Yeah, what—I mean, I’m glad that you did—but why did you decide to come here?”

Miranda’s lower lip trembled and she looked into her lap again. “My mom works nights. I didn’t want to go home.” She looked up at me, her eyes desperate and imploring. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

“Not to a mate’s or something?” Will asked.

Vlad gritted his teeth. “She said she didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

Miranda started to sniff again—another round of heavy tears.

“Look what you did!” Vlad snapped.

I nudged him away and slung an arm around Miranda, pulling her toward me. “You did the right thing coming here, Miranda. Everything is going to be okay. You’re safe now.”

Will steadied his gaze and I avoided it.

“There’s something else, Ms. L,” Miranda whispered into my hair.

“What is it, honey?”

Miranda pulled back and looked at Will and Vlad, then back at me. “We can go to my room,” I said, taking her hand.

I closed the door behind us, and Miranda started when ChaCha sprang from the covers and growled.

“Oh, don’t worry about her,” I said, snatching her up. “She’s my half-pint attack dog.”

The edges of Miranda’s lips quirked up into the beginning of a smile. “She’s cute.”

“You can pet her,” I offered, swinging ChaCha within arm’s reach. Miranda reached out tentatively, but ChaCha growled again, showing off her Tic Tac–sized bottom teeth.

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t worry about her; she’s very protective of my bed.” I set ChaCha down and the terrifying thing buried her way into my covers, her little butt and stub tail disappearing last.

“Animals always seem to hate me,” Miranda said wistfully. “Even my gerbil ran away.”

We sat in silence for an uncomfortable beat until Miranda sucked in a breath. “I didn’t want to tell them.” She jutted her head toward the living room. “I didn’t want to show them.”

“What?”

She swallowed slowly and I could see her hands tremble as she pulled up her hoodie—slowly, painfully. There were fresh scratches on her hands, the deepest ones across her knuckles where blood had pooled and dried. Miranda dropped her sweatshirt on my floor, then slowly began to unbutton the blouse underneath.

Suddenly, there was no air. Everything pressed against me and the beating of my heart threatened to shatter me, to break me right open.

“Oh, Miranda.”

I couldn’t tear my eyes from the puckered flesh on her abdomen. The skin at the edges of the fresh cuts was turning up, the edges purple and fragile like the torn edges of paper. Everything swirled into a watery mess, and I stepped back, feeling my way to sit back on the bed as bile burned up the back of my throat and my own blood pulsed through my ears.

Miranda’s abdomen pulsed when she breathed, the freshly carved words, you’re next, a ghastly, skin-deep warning that chilled me to my core.

I cleaned Miranda’s wounds and then set her up in a pair of my old sweats. She was now huddled with Vlad behind his laptop, his hand over hers as her brand-new BloodLust avatar sunk its fangs into its first human flesh.

“So your mom was okay that you’re spending the night?”

Miranda looked over the laptop and nodded before breaking into a gale of teenage giggles. “Your hands are freezing!” she murmured to Vlad.

If she only knew the half of it.

“So, what are we going to do about this?” Will jutted his head toward Vlad and Miranda.

“He won’t make any moves on her. Vlad knows the rules.”

“No, I don’t care about that. Unless he starts to floss his teeth with her. I mean about the bippity boppity in the classroom. We going to go check that out?”

“Pssst!” Nina stuck her head through her bedroom door and hissed at me. “A word with you, dear roommate?”

“Speaking of someone about to floss their teeth with—what do they call us? Breathers?” Will’s eyes glittered.

“And you, too, Union Jack.”

He didn’t bother to contain his fear.

We shut ourselves into Nina’s room. Will pressed himself up against the door while I faced Nina down.

“So?” I asked.

Nina narrowed her eyes. “So? So? That’s what you say to me? Sophie Annemarie Lawson. I have tried to be good. I have tried to be malleable.”

“Malleable?” Will asked, brows raised.

“But this!” She threw her arm out dramatically. “This is something else completely. You just can’t bring your work home with you, Sophie.”

“My work? Miranda is a person, Nina. And I didn’t bring her home with me. She came here because she needed help. She needed help and she knew that I would be able to help.”

Nina swung her head. “Fine. She needed help. She’s helped. Send her home.”

“I’m not going to just—”

“Sophie, she’s a breather. With fresh cuts.”

“They weren’t bothering you a half hour ago.”

“A half hour ago they were caked with stale blood.”

Will wrinkled his nose. “Stale?”

“Dried,” I clarified.

“And the smell of Windex or something was pretty much overpowering. Now she smells like you and fresh blood. And you’ve got two vampires in close proximity.”

I felt my nostrils flare. “Aren’t you the one always telling me that vampires can handle themselves with decorum? That you guys have the ability to see breathers as people, not just tasty snacks?”

“Whoa.” I heard Will step back until his shoulders were pressed against the door.

Nina pinched the bridge of her nose. “Look, Sophie. I need to get things done. How am I supposed to get anything done with her out there?”

My gut roiled with white-hot anger. “Are you kidding me? You’re concerned about your stupid project? This is a human being. A young girl! Who was attacked. She needs us, Neens. I’m sorry if you’ve been without a soul too long to feel anything for anyone. But I have a soul and I have feelings and so does that girl out there. This is my apartment too and she’s staying.”

Nina didn’t bother responding to me. She didn’t bother to look at me, either. I heard Will suck in a sharp breath; I heard the muffled voices of Vlad and Miranda in the other room. I didn’t hear Nina when she slipped out the window and down the fire escape.

“Hey, love, you know Nina kind of has a point. There are two vampires—”

I whirled and pinned Will with a glare. “Stay out of it, Will.”

When I walked into the dining room Vlad looked up at me, his coal-black eyes hooded, accusatory. He had heard every word we said. Miranda kept tapping away, blissfully unaware, her avatar cheering when she made the next kill.

Other than navigating from the printed sheet Will handed me, Will and I didn’t speak for the entire car ride over to Bud Hastings’s Fillmore-area apartment. My whole body was humming by the time we entered the vestibule. My mind was on a constant spin cycle trying scenarios and considering locations. Will was energized and as chipper as a robin. He buzzed number seventy-four and we both waited, silently.

No answer.

Another buzz—this time Will mashed his index finger against the buzzer and held it there. Still, no answer.

“Probably because he’s out looking for another girl to attack,” I told him.

Will mashed another button.

“What are you doing?” I hissed.

“Manager.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Centuri, is it? My name is Will Sherman from Scotland Yard and I’m afraid we need to get into apartment seventy-four, currently rented by a gentleman by the name of William ‘Bud’ Hastings?”

Mr. Centuri launched into a significant series of horrible-sounding coughs, further cementing my desire to never, ever take up smoking.

“Scotland Yard?”

“Yes, sir.”

Another cough. “You guys have, uh, what’s that? Jurisdiction out here?”

“I’d be happy to show you my credentials if you’ll just show me into Hastings’s domicile, sir.”

Centuri clicked off the intercom and another series of coughs and labored breathing began, this one coming from the door of the apartment right in front of us. The door snapped open halfway and a squat man built like a fireplug leaned out toward us.

“What’d you say your name was, again?”

“Holmes, Doctor, and this is my associate Mrs. Malaprop.”

Centuri’s beady eyes scanned me suspiciously and I broke into a polite smile and a heavily accented, “Good evening, fine sir.”

Will shot me a look, but it went right over Centuri’s head as he apparently assumed Will’s credentials were in my bra.

“Bud in some kind of trouble?” Centuri asked my tits.

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Will said, his English sharp and clipped.

“He’s a good tenant. Always pays his rent on time, never been no kind of problem. On vacation or something right now.”

“The key, sir?”

“Yeah.” Centuri disappeared into his apartment and reappeared with a single key pinched between forefinger and thumb.

“Aren’t you going to escort us?”

Centuri waved a handful of Vienna sausage fingers through the air. “Eh, you’re cops. Jeopardy’s on. Just lock up after yourself and give a knock when you’re leaving. Drop the key through my mail slot.”

“Brilliant.”

“Pip, pip,” I put in.

“Pip, pip?” Will asked, once Centuri shut his door.

“I was playing a part. Trying to make it believable.”

“Thanks for going to the trouble, but I don’t think our landlord there is going to mull too much over.”

“He could. He asked you your name and about Scotland Yard.”

“And he bought that I was first Will Sherman and then Dr. Holmes and that you were a wily English woman from a Sheridan play.”

“Hence the pip, pip.”

“This one’s seventy-four.”

Will knocked. “Mr. Hastings? This is Dr. Holmes from Scotland Yard. Please open up.”

I crossed my arms and cocked out a hip. “You’re really digging the Scotland Yard thing, aren’t you?”

“Pip, pip,” Will said over her shoulder as he sunk the key into the lock.

I sucked in a sharp breath, feeling my eyes widen. “Oh my God.”

“What? Looks like a regular ol’ place to me.”

I pumped my head. “I know. Regular. No to-the-ceiling collections of doll heads or empty terrariums. There’s a couch and a coffee table and an old television set.”

“I don’t want you to bust through your knickers, but there’s a kitchen table and a refrigerator, too. Even a newspaper.” He swiped the paper from the table and waggled it at me. “Yesterday’s.”

I poked around the living room as Will checked out the kitchen. “So, this guy seems awfully regular. He’s got milk in the fridge. Some take-out that looks like it’s from—” Will reached into and pulled out a Styrofoam carton. He popped it open. “Ugh, 1974. Nothing crazy. No disembodied heads or anything like that. Does that mean he’s not our kidnapper?”

“No, no, not at all. What do people always say when they interview the neighbors of a serial killer?”

“He had a shrunken head in the linen closet?”

I snorted. “No. They say, ‘He was just a regular guy.’” I picked up a magazine and flipped through it. “Or they say, ‘He kept to himself, mostly.’ Find anything interesting?”

Will turned around and handed me a framed photograph.

“Well, I’ll be.”

“The geezer from the front office.”

“Heddy is not a geezer,” I said, pulling the frame open and sliding the picture out. “Nothing special about this picture. Looks like it was taken at school, pretty recently. Not that Heddy changes much.”

“So we’ve got Janitor Bud in an affair with the school secretary. If they weren’t both a thousand years old, it would almost be sexy.”

I rolled my eyes and tapped the glass. “Do you think Heddy knows about Bud’s . . . side activity?”

“Whoa, love, we haven’t found a single thing here that indicts Bud as our kidnapper, other than his incriminating normalness.”

“But, Miranda!”

“But Miranda nothing. We’ve broken into a regular guy’s regular old apartment. Other than a fetish for the office bird, nothing is incriminating. Nothing is even slightly out of the ordinary.”

I put my hands on my hips and swung my head. “No, there’s something here. Something that we’re missing. I can feel it. Look for methods of restraint—duct tape, handcuffs, zip ties.”

Will waggled his brows and grinned. “Ooh, kinky. I didn’t really fancy a shag, but okay, I’ll go with it.”

“I mean things that Bud may have used to restrain the girls, you sicko. Look for anything out of the ordinary.”

I heard Will step into the bathroom and pull open the medicine cabinet. “No knockout drugs or Viagra, nothing like that.”

“Keep looking. Bud can’t be that smart. We should also be looking for any evidence of a secondary hiding place. There’s no way he could be keeping Alyssa in here without his neighbors knowing about it. She’s got to be somewhere else. See if you can find a storage container receipt or hotel matches or something. Bud’s our guy, Will, I can feel it. We’ll gather everything we can here and send Alex and the PD in for the kill.”

“You mean, if we can find Bud.”

“We will.”

My chest was feeling light and the blood pulsing through my veins shot a new, hopeful energy through me. We were going to track Bud down. We were going to find Alyssa. And, God as my witness, we were going to find her alive.

I found Bud’s bedroom at the back of the apartment. It was a simple as the rest of the place—a full-sized bed, a bureau, a television set that was probably brand new in 1957, and a single shelf lined with books.

“Bingo.”

Will came up over my left shoulder. “Bingo, what?”

I pointed to the shelf.

“Mystery buff.” A pause. “Oh. That’s different.” He reached over and slid a slim volume from the shelf. “The History of Witchcraft.”

I slid the rest of the questionable books into my hand. “Coven and Craft. The Twenty-first Century Witch. Incantations and Spells.” I paused, holding the last book up. “And the coup de grace.”

“The book of protection spells.”

“Still don’t think Bud is our man?”

“All right, all right.” Will nodded. “I don’t think the books are definitive, but it certainly puts ol’ Bud in the running.” He sat down on the edge of the bed. “So, ol’ Bud lures the girls into his car, brings them—somewhere—strangles them, does the carving and reads from his little spell books here? What was he trying to accomplish?”

“Well, let’s see.” I pulled Incantations and Spells book from the stack and began thumbing through it.

“Hm.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Just thought that a spell book for a guy like Bud would be a bit more worn, is all.”

I turned the book over in my hand, checking the spine, then flipping a few more pristine pages. “Well, Lorraine said we were dealing with someone very powerful. Maybe he didn’t use this much because he didn’t need it. It does seem pretty simple for someone so advanced.”

“So our guy is an all-powerful wizard?”

“No, a wizard is something totally separate.”

“Ah, warlock then.”

“No!” I shook my head in a panic, then dropped my voice as though Janitor-Witch Bud would suddenly materialize and turn us into toads or Kardashians. “No, male witches are just called witches. The whole warlock thing? Bad form. It’s an insult. Literally means ‘oath breaker.’”

Will nodded, impressed. “You know a lot about it.”

“You tend to learn quickly when you call Lorraine’s Christmas party date a warlock and he repeatedly dunks you in the punch bowl.”

“Sounds like a lovely fellow.”

“I had a piece of pineapple lodged in my ear until New Year’s. Come on, let’s see what else we can find.”

We worked in companionable silence until Will pulled out the bottom drawer of Bud’s bureau. “I suppose there could be some truth to your theory.”

I rushed over and gawked. Will had last year’s yearbook spread out on his lap. The spine was broken down the center from heavy use, the book flopping open to a photograph of Cathy Ledwith. The smiling, black and white photo was circled in black, but there was a heavy red slash through it. A date was written in the same black ink.

“Oh.” My hackles went up and fear, like an icy breeze, shot down my spine. “That’s the day Cathy went missing.”

“You mean the day she was found.”

“No. When she went missing.”

Will turned a page; two newspaper clippings were carefully folded and pinched in the crease. I didn’t need to open them to know they were from the day Cathy disappeared and the day she was found.

“Trophies?” Will said grimly.

“Could be. What about these?”

Four loose photos were tucked in the back of the book. They were each the standard, posed picture-day photos—bright smiles, heads cocked, fuzzy blue background, Mercy uniforms pressed and impeccable. “Fallon, Alyssa, Kayleigh, Miranda,” I said, as I flipped through each shot. “It’s like a roadmap.”

“Or a catalog.” Will took the photos from me and laid Alyssa’s and Kayleigh’s out on the bed. “He’s got these two.” He picked up Fallon’s photo and eyed me. “Still think they’re partners?”

I swallowed hard. “I—I don’t know.”

Will placed the photo next to Miranda’s. “Then I guess we need to figure out which one of these he is after now.”

I could feel Nina’s eyes on me, and when I turned she had her arms crossed in front of her chest, one hip cocked, and an expression on her face that meant she was about to shake up the world. “You’re not planning on taking any kind of nap, are you?”

“Oh, so you’ve met me before.”

She grinned. “Okay, out with it. I need to know what harebrained scheme I’m going to have to pull you out of. You’re my commodity, you know.”

“Is this about my underwear again?”

Nina rolled her eyes and straightened her directorial beret. “No, this is about you being my star for the UDA commercial.”

I gave her a once-over, for the first time that night taking in her knee boots, jodhpurs, and the enormous ecru scarf knotted around her neck. “Nice outfit.”

“You’ve got to dress the part to be the part,” she said with a slick, fang-bearing grin. “Or fake it ’til you make it.”

I wrapped a piece of hair around my finger. “Fake it ’til I make it, huh? Yeah, yeah, Neens, you’re totally right. I don’t need to wait for Will. I don’t need to take a nap. And I sure as hell don’t need Alex. All I need are his files.”

Nina picked up the stack heaped on the dining room table. “These are the ones Vlad printed out for you.”

“These are the official files. They were good enough, but I need more. Alex keeps his notes—handwritten ones, stacked with info—in his office. But now that I don’t have him to rely on, I need to get a hold of those notes.”

Nina’s eyes lit up like a campfire, her heart-shaped mouth curving up, showing off her fangs. “Field trip?”

I took in my breathless, weightless, fingerprint-less best friend. “Absolutely.”

Nina’s face fell as quickly as it lit up. “Oh. Should we get Vlad?”

“Isn’t he with Miranda?”

“I guess they’re still together. She was dragging him out of here by the arm, but that was a couple of hours ago. He hasn’t called or anything.”

I shrugged. “We’ll leave a note. This is an all-girl mission. Besides, he’s big and burly and hard to hide.”

Nina cracked a grin. “And you’re so stealthy?”

I narrowed my eyes and poked her cold, hard chest. “Don’t cross me.” I grabbed my jacket and keys.

“Okay,” Nina said, following me out the front door. “But we’re running lines in between heists.”

Everything hurt—my eyes, my face, my stomach, my hips. My hair hurt.

“There she is.”

I blinked, the effort causing a painful spasm that reverberated through my skull. “Will?” My throat was parched and my lips felt dry and cracked. I tried to touch them with my fingertips, but a piece of tape pulled at my skin. “I can’t move. Why can’t I move?”

Will’s face came into focus. His eyes were kind, but his brows dipped down into deep Vs. “You’re in hospital.”

“You had an accident.”

I tried to sit up, tried to angle my gaze toward the other male voice. “Alex?”

“We’re all here,” Nina said, lacing her cold fingers through mine. “Will, Alex, and me.”

I looked around at my friends, a brief, warm sense of comfort washing over me. As soon as the calm feeling settled, it was chased away by a bitter cold and I sat up. “Bud! Miranda!”

Alex came over to my left side and very gently guided me back toward the pillows. “We followed up on Bud, Lawson.”

“And?”

Alex pressed his lips together, the muscle in his jaw jumping slightly. “He’s dead.”

“What?”

Alex slipped his leather notebook from his pocket and flipped it open, his ice-blue eyes going over the pages. “We found him at Battery Townsley. Someone called in an anonymous tip—they heard a gunshot.”

“But who—?”

“We’re thinking self-inflicted.”

My stomach roiled and had I been attached to a heart monitor, it would have flat lined. My eyes went from Alex to Will. “The girls?”

Will avoided my gaze. Alex swallowed hard. “We had Fallon in protective custody. She doesn’t know anything about Bud. And while we were securing the crime scene, we found Alyssa—alive—wandering in the parking lot. She was badly beaten and so far, hasn’t said a word.”

“She’s catatonic,” Will said. “They have her in the trauma ward upstairs. She didn’t even react when her parents came.”

I licked my lips. “Kayleigh?”

Alex looked down, studying the pattern on my blanket. “We haven’t found her yet. We’ve got men at Bud’s place. We’re going over it with a fine-toothed comb, trying to find the secondary location.”

I looked to Will, hopefully. “But Miranda’s okay, right? He let her go?”

Will hung his head but didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

“We failed.” A sob lodged in my throat. “We failed all of them, Will.”

I sunk into my pillow as Will reached under the blanket, his hand finding mine and giving it a tight squeeze.

“We did the best we could.”

I snatched my hand back. “No. That’s not good enough.”

He fisted his hands, his eyes going from Alex to me. “I’m going to get you a cup of tea, okay?”

I lolled my head on the pillow, avoiding him. Nina popped off the bed. “I’ll go with you.”

Alex waited until the door closed behind them.

“I can’t believe that Kayleigh is still out there—somewhere. And maybe Miranda.”

Alex cleared his throat. “We’re not going to let this go. We’re still working,” he said. “We brought in the yearbooks you had in the back of your car.” His smile was tight. “As well as the box of files that went mysteriously missing from my office.”

I threw myself back on my pillow, tossing an arm across my forehead. “Oh! The pain!” I watched beneath lowered lashes while Alex rolled his eyes.

“Right. Anyway, I was hoping you could go through them and let me know of any other girls you think may have gone missing.”

I screwed up my brow. “You suddenly want my help? What happened to distancing yourself?” The anger was simmering in my gut, and I was mad at Alex for his continuous flip-flop behavior, at myself for not finding Bud—and Kayleigh—sooner.

“Lawson, you don’t understand.”

“No, Alex,” I said, swinging my head. “I don’t understand. Why don’t you explain it to me?”

His eyes raked over me and I could see immediately that the clear crystal blue was marred and flat. He still looked exhausted and pale. He opened his mouth and then closed it, as if thinking better of it. “This isn’t the right time.”

I was seething.

“I’d like to be alone now.”

Alex closed his notebook and shifted his weight. He paused for an uncomfortable beat before patting my leg awkwardly over the blanket.

“Take care of yourself, Lawson.”

Alex met the nurse in the doorway. She poked her head in. “Visiting hours are over.”

Nina edged her way past the nurse and perched herself at the end of my bed, her weightless body leaving no indentation. “I’m family.”

Will blinked at me, but I turned from him, too. I heard him sigh.

“Hey, angel boy, can I catch a ride? The bird decimated my Nigella.”

Nina ruffled my hair when the room was emptied out. I closed my eyes and sunk into my pillows. “I really screwed this one up, didn’t I, Neens?”

“You can’t save them all, Soph.”

I swallowed hard, my throat aching. Tears pricked at the back of my eyes and I let them fall. “I don’t know what made me think I could do this. It just doesn’t make sense, though. If this was all Bud, why the pentagram at Fallon’s house? Why the burned-up uniforms? Something is not adding up. If he wanted the girls for sacrifice, why would he just let one go? I mean, the spell books, the candles? Someone had to be keeping the girls. Someone had to be helping him.”

“Why? Men kidnap girls all the time.”

“Men who are in their sixties? He could have taken down each girl on her own, but how was he keeping them? And Alyssa was alive—and with him—when he took Kayleigh. How does a sixty-year-old man manage that?”

Nina popped off the bed and paced, her fangs straining against her lower lip. I straightened. “There’s something you’re not telling me. Oh, God—is there another girl? Did Bud take another girl? I’m telling you, it can’t just be him.”

Nina batted at the air. “It’s nothing. It’s just that I called Vlad like, sixteen times. He never even called back.”

I harrumphed and poked at the bowl of green Jell-O sitting on my bedside tray. “He’s sixteen years old. Does he ever call back?”

Nina puckered her cherry red lips, her perfect façade unmarred. I briefly wondered what it would be like to look perfect all the time or be eternally sixteen.

“I told him you were at the hospital. He still didn’t call.”

I frowned, stung. “Sixteen,” I said again.

Something nagged at me.

“Heddy.”

“What?” Nina asked, pausing her pace.

“Heddy’s not a geezer. Hey, Neens, pass me one of those yearbooks.”

Nina did as she was told and pulled one out for herself, curling up next to me in my bed. She flopped open the book, her face immediately breaking into a grin. “Ah, the seventies. Everyone looked horrible.”

“Look up Heddy Gaines.”

Nina went to the index, her finger going down the line of names. I did the same, and we both flipped our books open to Heddy’s smiling mug at the exact same time.

And it was the exact same picture.

“Wow, she hasn’t changed a bit,” Nina said.

“No, she hasn’t changed at all from 1971 to 1994.” I grabbed another book. “Exactly the same in 2010.” I pulled it closer, studying it. Finally, I flipped to the other indexed page. “Heddy Gaines, Lock and Key Club advisor.”

My heart started to thump. “Heddy hasn’t aged in thirty years.”

“A lot of women look good for their ages. Look at me.” Nina modeled her perfect mug.

“You don’t age, Nina.” I yanked another book—this one from ’63—and flipped it to show Nina. “Neither does Heddy. Not at all.”

Nina blinked, not quite absorbing.

“You know who else doesn’t age? Kale or Lorraine.”

Nina’s eyes went saucer-wide. “Heddy’s the witch.”

“She’s the faculty advisor for the Lock and Key Club. She was handpicking her victims.”

“So what about the dead janitor guy?”

“Maybe it was too much for him to handle. Maybe the guilt got to him. She’s got to do the spell tonight—the seventh night. We’ve got to get to them, Neens. She’s got Kayleigh and whatever she’s going to do to her is going to happen tonight.”

I kicked the covers off my legs and yanked the tape from my hand, wincing as I removed the IV.

“What are you doing?” Nina wanted to know.

“I’m getting dressed. Um, where are my clothes?”

Nina bit her bottom lip, the blood she had just drunk just barely coloring her cheeks. “I took your clothes home by mistake.”

“What? How do you take someone’s clothes by mistake?”

“Will put them in your shoulder bag and told me to take them home. He figured you’d stay in the hospital until the doctor let you go if you had no clothes.”

“Some mistake.” I put my hands on my hips and paced for a half a minute before I pointed at Nina. “Go. Downstairs. Go to your car and get me something to wear.”

Nina opened her mouth to protest, but I pinned her with a glare. It was widely known that any free space that Nina had or could find was stuffed with emergency couture. Her UDA file cabinets were stocked with high-end shoes and intricate bustiers. Her earthquake kit held Band-Aids, a ham radio, and a selection of gowns from Carlos Miele’s winter collection—and the trunk of her car was nothing less than a closet on wheels.

“Get. Me. Something.”

Nina held up her hands. “Okay. Okay! But most of what I have are gowns or dressy.”

I gritted my teeth. “Find me something to wear.”

She skittered out the door without another word.

I dialed Will and paced while it rang. “Will? Will! Answer the phone! Fine. I need you to meet me at Battery Townsley. Bud wasn’t working alone. I think he was just the fall guy. Call me when you get this.”

Nina came back through the door, lugging a log-shaped Louis Vuitton with one hand and pressing a pair of stiletto-heeled black boots against her side with the other. “I brought everything I had in the mobile armoire. But I’m warning you—there are none of your things in there. Lexus and poly-cotton blends don’t mix.”

I rolled my eyes and took the bag from her, dumping its contents onto the bed. A heap of black leather, hot pink lace, and tiny skirts or possibly large belts flopped out. I looked skeptically at the pile and briefly wondered if I could possibly kick butt while mine was hanging out. I picked up the hot pink hunk of tulle. “You don’t have anything any little more authoritative looking?”

Without saying a word, Nina dove into the pile and fished out the black leather pants. One more shot and a matching shirt-possibly-headband came out.

“You can’t expect me to wear that.”

“Look, you asked for clothes and I got you clothes. You asked for authoritative and I got you authoritative. If you’d rather hunt down that crazy caught-in-time witch in your hospital gown, be my guest.”

I sucked in a deep breath and stepped into the pants. “You didn’t happen to bring in a can of Pam, did you?”

It took a tremendous amount of pleading, squirming and bending myself into angles that I’m not wholly proud of, but the leather pants were on. The top was, too, mostly, and now Nina was behind me working on the complicated lace-up detailing. I looked at myself in the mirror.

I wore slick black leather in my mind. I wielded a sword, kicked serious ass, and did it all without mussing my mid-back-length flowing red hair. Tonight, my legs looked a mile long in the leather boot-leather pant combination and a little pouch of chocolate pinwheel belly bubbled over the waistband. Nina had hoisted my boobs to my chin with the little strap-up apparatus and my cheeks were flushed—not exactly with the strength and confidence of a superhero—more like the angst of squeezing into the getup. But still, I looked reasonably badassed even if my hair was neither mid-back-length nor flowy.

“Okay,” I said.

Nina hiked up her shoulder bag. “I’m coming with you.”

I put a hand on her shoulder and shook my head. “I’m not letting anyone else get involved or get hurt. I can do this.”

She silently handed me her keys.

It only took twenty-four hours for things to go back to normal. Kayleigh was back to reigning with Fallon, the other girls were in counseling, and no one, conveniently, wanted to know where Heddy Gaines or Miranda Shepperd were. I had my shoulder bag hiked up and was ready to go back to work at the Underworld Detection Agency when I opened my front door and caught Will standing there, mid-knock.

“Good morning,” I said with a smile. “Did you forget we’re not working at the school anymore?”

“No,” he said, handing me a paper cup that percolated with the aroma of hazelnuts and whipped cream. “But I thought I could walk you, just for old time’s sake. And also because you totaled my car.”

I bit my bottom lip. “Yeah, Will, I’m really, really sorry about that. The thing is—”

“You don’t have insurance?”

“I have insurance. Not American insurance.”

He rolled his eyes, but there was still a hint of playful smile behind his coffee cup. “The thing is, I actually want to talk to you about something.”

He stepped aside and opened the vestibule door for me. I tugged my jacket tighter around my shoulders. “Let me guess—you’re really digging the supernatural crime fighting and want to come on board officially? UDA offers great dental.”

Will stopped on the sidewalk and faced me. “Sophie, I’m serious. This whole Guardian thing. It ends, you know?”

I took a step back. “No, I don’t know. Aren’t you going to be here, guarding me?”

“As long as you’re the Vessel of Souls.”

I frowned. “And if I’m not?”

He shrugged. “Then I get reassigned.”

I had never wanted Will in my life, but now I couldn’t imagine my life without him.

“Why are you telling me this, Will? Why are you telling me this now?”

He sucked in a deep breath and looked down at me, his eyes the color of honey and warm. “Look, I know you’ve got a thing with Alex—”

“No.” I held up a hand. “I don’t have a thing with Alex.”

At least I was pretty sure I didn’t.

Will looked at his feet, then up at me again. “Well, that’s good, because I lov—”

His voice was drowned out by the sound of horns honking as a woman zigzagged her way across the street, making a direct path through the cars for Will and me. She grinned when she crested the curb in front of me, a wide, thrilled smile that cut across her wrinkled face and pushed up her ruddy cheeks. She reached out and wound her fingers through my hair, still smiling.

Everything inside me told me to bolt, to put distance between this crazy woman and me, but I couldn’t. My legs were leaden and I was rooted. Her eyes raked over me and finally locked on mine—hers a filmy, water blue.

“He’s been looking for you for a long time, Sophie. He’s been looking and he’s so happy that he’s finally found you. It’s only a matter of time, now.”

I pulled back, stunned. “Who’s found me? Who are you?”

Immediately, the smile dropped from the woman’s lips and they went to a tight purse. She stepped back from me as if I had burned her and yanked her hand out of my hair, breaking a few strands as she did so.

“Get away from me,” she said, her voice sour, her eyes frightened. “I don’t know you. Get away from me!”

She reeled backward, then was swallowed up by the crowd. She was gone, but her voice kept swirling in my head: He’s been looking for you for a long time, Sophie. He’s been looking and he’s so happy that he’s finally found you. It’s only a matter of time, now. Only a matter of time . . .

I could feel the cold stripe of fear going up my spine-like icy fingers walking slowly up vertebra after vertebra.

“Is she dead?” The voice was a faint whisper but it throbbed through my head, singeing the ache that was already there.

“Maybe we should go.”

I hoped that they would. I prayed that they would. I remained as still as possible, breath barely trembling through my body, willing my heart to thrum silently because I knew that vampires can hear everything. Every little whisper, every little thought. Please go, please go, I pleaded silently.

And then the icy breath was at my ear. “Sophie!”

Now the voice was incredibly loud and I jumped straight up until the tops of my thighs mashed against the underside of my desk. I missed the chair coming back down and flopped unceremoniously onto my ass.

“What do you want?” I glowered, rubbing my tailbone and seeing Nina and Kale through narrowed dagger-eyes.

“Were you asleep?” Kale asked, cocking her head so that her newly pink hair brushed against her cheek.

I pressed the pads of my fingertips against my temples, making small circles. My head kept aching. “I was trying to. I have a headache.”

Nina rolled her eyes and hopped up onto the corner of my desk, her tiny butt and weightless body not making a sound. “Are you still trying to claim PTSD for the whole back to school thing? It’s over, all right? You closed up the hell mouth or whatever, and never even had to wear the school uniform.”

“What do you guys want?”

Nina whipped out a nail file from I-don’t-know-where and began working on her right hand. She blew a bubble from the wad of gum she was chewing and after twelve years with Nina LaShay as my co-worker, roommate, and best friend, I’ll never get comfortable seeing a vampire blow purple Hubba Bubba bubbles. It just looks weird.

“I’m hiding out from Vlad. He’s got an all-fangs-on-deck VERM meeting and I have much better things to do than sit in a stuffy conference room with a bunch of dead guys talking about ascots and their graveyard dirt and glory days.”

I grinned despite the nap interruption. The Vampire Empowerment and Restoration Movement (or VERM, for short), was Vlad’s baby. Vlad, Nina’s 16-slash-113-year-old nephew, my boss, Kale’s paramour, and the roommate who would never leave, pushed the movement that sought to restore vampires back to their broody, Count Dracula countenance and insisted its adherents wear fashions that Nina couldn’t abide by. She was a member by virtue of being a vampire and being Vlad’s aunt, but she studiously avoided their meetings.

“And I came in to tell you that Sampson wants to see you.”

I straightened, my heart dropping into my stomach. Pete Sampson, resident werewolf and head of the Underworld Detection Agency, wanting to see me could only mean one of two things: I was fired, or yet another mysterious, gory, and seemingly supernatural murder had happened within San Francisco’s seven square miles.

I would much prefer the former.

I’d like to say Sampson called on me for those cases because I could sniff out bad guys like a mouse sniffs out cheese, but that wouldn’t be quite right. I find the bad guys all right, but usually just seconds before they try to bleed me dry, blow me up, or stake me through the heart. That last one is particularly bad since I am not a vampire. Or a werewolf. I’m just me, Sophie Lawson, sole breather in the Underworld Detection Agency, runner of the Fallen Angels Division, Sub-Par Napper.

I headed down the hall toward Sampson’s office, holding my breath as I passed the break room where the VERM meeting was in full swing, then avoided the sweet, sparkly little pixie who made a cut-throat motion when I glanced up at her.

Pixies can be total bitches.

I went to make my usual shimmy around the hole in the floor where a senile wizard blew himself up—like everyone else, the UDA was low on funds so the hole was last on the fix-it list—but stopped dead, my mouth dropping open.

“What’s this?”

There was actually a piece of “caution” tape up, jerry-rigged to a couple of folding chairs to make a work zone. A guy in a hardhat was up to his knees in the hole, diligently sawing away at one jagged edge.

He looked up and I could see from his gaunt, slightly green face and the hard cleft in his pointed chin that he was a goblin. From what I heard, they were brilliant at precision work.

“We’re fixing the hole,” he told me, his gray-green eyes widening as he took me in. I flushed, sudden embarrassment burning the tops of my ears and, I was certain, turning my pale skin an unattractive lobster red.

“So, it’s true.” The goblin pushed back his hardhat and scratched at the little tuft of hair on his head. “The San Francisco branch really does have a breather on staff.”

The Underworld Detection Agency is like the clearinghouse for everything that goes bump in the night or bursts into flames during the day. We service everyone from Abatwas (teeny, tiny little buggers who could unhinge their jaw and swallow you whole) to zombies (who most often leave a hunk of their jaw while trying to eat a Twix in the lunchroom). What we don’t serve, however, are humans. As a matter of fact, the UDA—and all of its clients—are relatively unknown to the human world. I know what you’re thinking—how do people miss a three-foot troll walking down Market Street? The answer is a thin, mystical veil that prevents humans from registering what they see in terms of the para-not-normal. You see little person, I see troll. You see a homeless guy pushing a shopping cart full of cans, I see zombie pushing a shopping cart full of zombie body parts (seriously, they drop their stuff everywhere).

So what makes me so different? I can see through the veil. And in case you’re thinking I’m some medium or Carol Ann or ghost whisperer, let me tell you that I am not. I’m a one-hundred-percent normal breather who is immune to magic: I can’t do it, it can’t be done to me.

Okay, so maybe I’m only ninety-nine percent normal.

“Ah, Sophie!” Sampson looked up when I walked into his office. He grinned widely, tugging at the collar of his button-down shirt. He’s a werewolf, but only after business hours. Right now he was regular old Sampson, close cropped, salt and pepper hair, sparkling eyes that crinkled at the sides when he smiled, pristine dark suit.

I sat down with a nervous smile pasted on my face.

“You okay?”

I nodded, fairly certain that if I opened my mouth the words, “who’s dead now?” would come springing out.

Sampson went immediately business-y. “So I was going over your third quarter performance review and I have to say—”

I felt my spine go immediately rigid. Vlad was my boss at the office, but I screamed at him to pick up his socks at home. He may be one hundred and thirteen chronologically, but he would always be a sloppy, leaves crap all over the house, sixteen-year old boy in looks and at heart (if he had one). Weren’t teens revenge seekers?

“Uh, sir,” I said, toeing a line in the carpet and working up a viable explanation.

“—I have to say that I am really impressed with your progress. Not just in the community, but in the office, and personally as well.”

I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding and every bone in my body seemed to turn to liquid. “Really?” I grinned.

“Of course. You’ve worked on cases diligently and successfully, you’ve got glowing reviews from two of your clients which is especially good because—”

“I know,” I wrinkled my nose. “Because most of our clients give me a wide berth, thinking that I bring death and destruction to creatures of the Underworld.”

I had a very hard time convincing my previous clients that I didn’t bring death so much as it followed me around, like I had some sort of hell-fury GPS tracker shoved in my gut.

“So, taking all that into account, I’d like to congratulate you on another successful year.”

I gaped. “That’s it?” The words tumbled out of my mouth before my brain had a chance to examine them or reel them back in.

Sampson’s eyebrows went up. “Uh . . .”

“No, no!” I jumped up. “I didn’t mean that, Sampson, like, that’s it how about a raise. I meant, that’s it? You know, every other time you’ve called me in here someone was dead or I ended up back in high school.”

Sampson shot me a relaxed smile. “That’s true. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off since I terrified you, and I’ll see what I can do about that raise?”

I was stunned. “Really? Really, Sampson?”

“Yeah, take a long weekend.”

No sea of death, murder weapons, or crazed schoolgirls and a long weekend? My eyes went to the ceiling.

“What are you doing?” Sampson wanted to know.

“This can’t be right,” I told him. “I’m looking for the piano that’s going to fall on my head.”