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  His eyes glinted, furious, before he tossed his hands up in a placating gesture. “Fine. Don’t let me help you.”

  She nudged him toward the front door, the muzzle of the gun between his shoulder blades. “Oh, you were trying to help,” she said to his back. “By stealing from me. By destroying most of my home and hurting my roommate?”

  He unlatched the front door and paused before stepping out. Without looking back, he answered, “If I’d wanted to hurt your minotaur, he’d be dead.”

  With that, he disappeared, the shadows in the dark hallway reaching out to swallow him.

  Gisele fumed for the rest of the night.

  She fumed as she righted the overturned couch, fumed while she swept up the broken plates and glass. She steamed while she showered off the day—and the night’s—grime and sweat. Her body ached with anger.

  “Can you believe that jackass?” she called from her bedroom as she toweled dry and dressed in her pjs. The thin, black cotton tank top clung to her damp skin. Loose boxer shorts with cats printed on them hung from her hips. “I don’t care if I never have to see him again. Before I quit, I’m making sure Warrick fires his ass.”

  From the rattling of cupboard doors and the jostling of silverware, she guessed Beast was familiarizing himself with what was left of the kitchen. Earlier, he hadn’t had much to say on the confrontation with Shade aside from a laconic but emphatic, “Beast is not dog.” Now he rumbled a reply meant to communicate more that he was listening than anything else.

  “You sure did a number on him. Thanks for protecting what’s ours.”

  The commotion in the kitchen stopped. After a beat, the minotaur answered her, “Beast gave word. To protect through blood moon.” His voice was deep, thoughtful. “Little dragon had bled much tonight. Came injured. Weak. Was easy to stop. Next time, maybe will not be so weak.”

  She wasn’t sure what he meant. Dragon? Injured? Weak? Was he talking about Shade?

  “Who?” she asked, biting her lip when Beast didn’t answer. Louder, she said, “Sorry, I forgot to bring home groceries.” But that also went ignored.

  She thought about Shade’s bruised knuckles and how his belly had been a red ruin, yet Beast’s white horns had been clean. Maybe the worst of his wounds hadn’t come from Beast after all… But she hated to give him the benefit of the doubt when he’d hardly earned it.

  The bedframe creaked as she flopped onto the mattress, her damp hair soaking a wet patch through the sheets. Her stomach gurgled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten since lunch, but she was too tired to get up, and it wasn’t long before she’d drifted into a half-sleep.

  Beast could fend for himself for dinner.

  The ting-ting-ting of the refrigerator door left open for too long lulled her into a restless dream.

  She dreamed of Shade.

  He was younger and so different from how she knew him now, all smiles with bright, big eyes and white teeth. His thick brown hair ruffled in the breeze, and lush summer grass whipped against his ankles where he stood higher up on the slope of a hill.

  “Now you’ve gotten it in your hair,” he laughed at her, and looking down at herself, she saw that he was right. Grass clippings clung to her bare legs, littered the front of her sundress, and had clumped in the billowing ends of her long, mousy-blond hair. She was a dirty, disheveled child and delighted with herself for having just rolled down a very bumpy hill.

  She beamed up at him.

  In the distance, a wind chime chattered its soft song, a sound like pearls hitting bamboo.

  “I want to make shadows!” She lunged for him, full-bodied and shrieking as he caught her in the air. They collided like two planets pulled by gravity. It felt like a heavy thing. But he took the brunt of her weight, stood against her without toppling. His arms were sinewy but strong. At three years older than herself, he was bigger. Braver.

  “Can we chase the sun?” she pleaded. “Can we, before it’s gone?”

  He bowed his head and bent around her, shoulders flexing. His wings unfurled with the sound of a thick sail cracking. They spread impossibly wide, dark and leathery, but full of blood and life.

  Wind whooshed around them, but offered no cool relief. The breeze was hot, a sigh of summer.

  They were close to taking off.

  His lips touched her ear. “Gigi, you are the sun,” he teased.

  With a push, they were in the air. Shade’s wings beat the rhythm of their ascent. And the wind chime chattered gently in the distance.

  Gisele awoke to the sound of Dinah playing in the bedroom window blinds. Hazy with sleep, she rolled her head to the side and rubbed a hand over her horns. The long, vertical vinyl blinds were swinging back and forth, tapping each other as they moved. Moonlight filtered through the spaces between them, illuminating the small creature that weaved side to side, rubbing against the blinds.

  It wasn’t Dinah.

  It was a howler demon—a four-legged minion from Noir, the Fourth Gate. The realm of nightmares.

  Awareness slammed into Gisele as the grotesque creature turned red eyes on her. It was about the size of a raccoon, but hairless, with black quill-like spikes protruding from its hunched back. A low cackling noise broke from the depths of its throat as it snarled at her. Bared fangs, black as obsidian, glinted in the light of the moon.

  It lunged right for her face.

  She sat bolt upright, choking on a scream—and the creature vanished. Had it been a nightmare? Or some kind of half-sleep hallucination?

  With a deep breath, she checked the room. It was quiet. Still. The lights had been on when she’d fallen asleep, but now the entire apartment was dark. Perhaps Beast had turned them off? The darkness of the room pressed down on her like a weight between her shoulders.

  Where had that little howler gone, if it had ever been in her room at all? It was rare to see one outside of Noir. She must have imagined it. Still, she pictured it scrabbling under the bed, crawling inside the mattress beneath her, and squirmed. She both wanted to reach for the safety of the shotgun under the bed…and didn’t.

  What were the odds she’d hallucinated a black-winged Shade at the circus and now a nightmare demon in her bedroom? Pretty good, if using the Mardoll had permanently fried a part of her brain. Maybe she couldn’t heal from everything. When had she ever tested herself against a magical injury?

  The digital clock on the nightstand blared bright red numbers, stark against the blackness of the room: 3:03 a.m. The Devils’ hour.

  Her bedroom door gaped open, the hallway a block of darkness behind it.

  “Beast?”

  A shadow moved across the hallway. No, not a shadow. It was solid—darkness in the shape of a man, movements jerky and unnatural as it juddered past her open door and continued further into the apartment. She leaped out of bed, her hand slamming into the wall as she fumbled for the light switch. She flipped it several times, fingers trembling, before her room was suddenly awash in bright light.

  “Beast!”

  But he didn’t answer.

  The light should have been comforting. Instead her room felt alien, overbright. She looked up, staring as the bulbs first dimmed, then flared white hot until they sparked and burst. Glass shattered everywhere, and flames shot across the ceiling, lapping at the walls.

  Gisele couldn’t help it—she screamed. Terrified for Dinah and Beast, she barreled down the flaming hallway, then tore through the disheveled kitchen, the lights in the rest of the apartment following suit, flickering on and off or super-charging into a spew of flames.

  Beast motioned to her from the living room, backlit by the inferno that raged in her empty fireplace. In one hand he held the dinged-up old cleaver she’d gotten from the Curators of the Cursed. He lifted his other arm high, so she could see. Dinah hung from his meaty hand. Her fur was sooty from the smoke, but otherwise she looked okay. She mewed indignantly, tail curled between her legs.

  Beast had found her cat so she wouldn’t be left behind. Gisele wa
nted to throw her arms around him in gratitude—but there wasn’t time. “We have a problem,” she said, stating the obvious. Her bare feet were beginning to sweat on the linoleum.

  There was no sign of the shadowy intruder she’d seen in the hallway, but the apartment was becoming engulfed in flames. If they didn’t move fast, they’d risk becoming trapped.

  “Den is under attack.” Beast nodded his understanding.

  The front of the oven burst open, causing the two of them to jump. Black smoke unfurled from inside. The toaster sparked and danced across the countertop.

  The experience was so surreal, Gisele thought she might still be dreaming. But she wasn’t willing to stake any of their lives on it.

  Beast was still wearing the shrunken head around his neck. They didn’t have time to gather up any other belongings. “Let’s go,” she said.

  The windows in the living room wouldn’t open—it was as if they’d been nailed shut—so Beast shattered the glass panes with his fist. Gisele stuck her head out to peer down the fire escape, careful to avoid the shards of glass jutting from the frame. A squat man leaped from the fire escape to the alley below. He hotfooted it down the street, shoes pounding the pavement. Gisele cursed, and he looked up, their eyes locking for a moment. The bastard grinned.

  A slither of fear snaked up her spine.

  Samuel. The fugitive arsonist was alive. Somehow. But she’d seen him die.

  Before she could question it, Beast shoved her from behind. And then Samuel was gone, around the corner of a building and out into the city.

  Chalk it up to the list of impossible things she’d experienced in the past forty-eight hours.

  “There was a howler in our apartment. And a shadow. Did you know that?” she asked as she shimmied down the fire escape, Beast not far behind.

  Flames exploded out of the window behind them, licking the side of the building before dying—magically contained to her apartment. A blessing and a curse.

  The narrow alley stunk like trash, and Gisele bit her lip as she watched her life’s meager belongings go up in smoke.

  “Not shadow,” Beast answered, handing her cat over when they were both on the ground. “Nightmare that walks in darkness.”

  A night terror was after her, had endangered others around her. Gisele hugged Dinah to her chest, stroked her dirty fur, and tried not to cry.

  6

  Gisele kept a spare set of keys—car, apartment, and work—in her Accord’s glove box. The navy Honda was parked in a monthly lot just down the street, so after a brisk walk and a broken back window, they were on the road to Warrick’s, where she could grab a change of clothes and some cash from her locker in the staff room.

  Air whistled in through the missing window as she drove. Beast hunkered in the back, looking cramped and miserable as he clung to Dinah to keep the cat from escaping.

  The office was in a part of town that consisted of rundown and half-vacant strip malls—the kind that had been in need of repair for the last ten years. The parking lot was empty, and the large glass windows were dark when they arrived. Gisele turned the ignition off and scratched at her crown of horns, painfully aware that she was barefoot and braless, dressed only in a ribbed tank and men’s boxer shorts. She guessed the office cameras had caught worse things on tape.

  “Come on,” she beckoned to Beast. “I’ll make us a pot of coffee.”

  Inside, Beast wanted to help. So with Dinah secured in the utility closet and a minotaur fumbling around the break room, cabinets and drawers rattling as he figured out how to brew their breakfast, Gisele moved on to her next priority—cleaning up. On her way to the shower and locker room, she passed one of the spare offices, home to a small cot and firearms cabinet. The cot didn’t get as much use as the other facilities, but there’d been more than a few runs where it had seemed like a godsend after a particularly exhausting night.

  She eyed the firearms safe with relief—after surrendering her pistol to the police and sacrificing her shotgun to the fire, she was looking forward to being armed again. If the rest of tonight was anything like the past couple of days, she’d need it.

  All in all, she was going to miss Warrick’s. A little. The eight years she’d worked here were the longest she’d ever stayed in one place. In fact, it was the first legal job she’d ever held. She’d learned everything she’d ever known from Warrick—aside from how to win a street fight—but then he’d brought Shade into the mix, and they’d no longer been a happy little family of three. She’d gone from the valued daughter to a fledgling hunter who needed a babysitter. So she’d decided to buy out her contract two years early, to show them she could do this on her own.

  Thus far she was off to a rocky start, but it was a start nonetheless.

  The welcome smell of coffee brewing began to drift down the hall. Gisele showered quickly, then dressed in her spare set of work clothes, folded in a black duffle bag at the bottom of her employee locker. Feeling better now that she was sporting a bra and clean undies, a V-neck tee, jeans, black leather belt, and ass-kicking, lace-up boots, she rolled up to her corner desk’s computer in her five-wheeled chair and began clacking on the late-’90s-era keyboard to unlock the sleeping machine.

  First things first. She checked her email out of habit and glanced around for any sticky notes Warrick might have taped to her desk or monitor. Nothing. It was unusual for him.

  She checked in the top drawer. There was a scribbled note in Shade’s handwriting: Don’t do anything stupid.

  What, like try to get his sorry ass fired—again? She crumpled the note and tossed it in the trash bin under her desk.

  She’d been planning to give Susanna and Warrick a piece of her mind regarding Shade’s little B&E stunt from the previous night, but now she had bigger problems.

  Someone had burned her fucking apartment down. Someone who was supposed to be dead.

  Beast brought her a steaming mug of joe, and she thanked him before he wandered off again. It was bitter with not nearly enough sugar, but she drank deeply, needing to steady her nerves. The more time that passed, the more it started to settle in that someone had torched her apartment—with her in it.

  Thinking over the events of the past few days, it seemed clear enough. Someone either wanted her dead or to back the hell off. But backing off wasn’t something she was particularly good at.

  Instead, she set the Little Miss Naughty mug—her favorite—on her desk and clacked into the local PD’s live investigations database. No updates on the case file from yesterday. Body was backlogged in the morgue. Detectives were verifying the authenticity of some anonymous tips.

  Hmm. That was usually bullshit office lingo for ‘doing a fat lot of nothing.’ She should go down to the station later and follow up on the coroner’s report—verify that there still was a body in the morgue. But first she needed to reissue her bankcard and get a replacement driver’s license. The fake IDs she had stashed in her desk drawers were fine for some of her less legal needs, but wouldn’t work for an official business visit. Come to think of it, she’d need food and a litter box for the cat. And more clothes for Beast and herself.

  They couldn’t exactly live in the office. Trying to explain Beast to Warrick was going to be a nightmare.

  But she had started the paperwork for the historic place yesterday morning. Maybe she could speed it up.

  She took another sip of coffee and logged into her online bank account—then spit all over her keyboard and choked on her remaining swallow, shakily setting the cup to one side. Before her last gig, she’d had $2,089.63 to her name. The down payment for locating and acquiring the shrunken head was a cool fifty thousand—all of which she’d planned to use breaking her contract with Warrick and securing a new place of business.

  Her account now totaled $15,002,089.63.

  “Oh my God,” she breathed, the soft fuzziness of shock tingling in the back of her skull, white noise buzzing in her ears. “Sweet Lucifer.”

  Fumbling, she unlocked an
d ripped open her lower right desk drawer. She dug through the files inside and slammed a fat stack of papers on her coffee-splattered keyboard, rifling through the pages with growing horror.

  No, no, no—this was NOT the contract she’d signed. The names and amounts were all wrong, the stipulations about the Mardoll were much more detailed—there was an extra forty pages to the document, for Satan’s sake—and her client, oh saints alive, her client had changed. But if Marcel Haywood, the First Gate fencer who’d approached her weeks ago in The Fainting Goat, had been a front man, then who the hell was her real client? She flipped through the pages of initials until she found a full name. Felicitisia Gwendolyn Luciferes. It was a woman’s name, but she didn’t recognize it at all.

  No wonder she hadn’t heard from that cheeky bastard. He’d been breathing down her neck every five minutes up until the night she’d gotten the curio…and opened a portal to Hell. Whoops.

  Now he’d gone underground—literally.

  She was getting a massive headache and it wasn’t even five a.m. yet.

  She spent the next half-hour scouring through the contract line by line. Thankfully there was nothing about selling her soul or forfeiting her bodily life in the legalese. But if she failed to deliver the Mardoll in person to her client in Hell, she was subject to immediate summons to the Sixth Gate’s courts for arbitration. She assumed the punishment for a breach of contract was to be decided then.

  How the hell had they done it? She tried to think back to the night she’d signed the contract with Marcel, but the memories were swimming in a fog. How many drinks had she had? She only remembered one.

  Thumb trembling, Gisele dialed Marcel’s number—a burner cell he was using for the duration of the job.

  He picked up on the fourth ring, breath hitching as he said, “You’ve got the curio.”

  For a beat, she didn’t respond, just listened to the ragged intake of his breathing. Was he out on a run? Pumping iron? Dismembering a body? The list ran on in her overactive imagination.