my life.”
Love grunted and called me some name in Hawaiian I didn’t understand.
I followed him up the stairs. “I’m not going to let him spy on me,” I said. “Do you know what being tagged would do for my business? People won’t hire me if they think the police are watching me. A girl has to make rent.”
“Thought you had your daddy’s fortune,” Love said.
“Well, don’t believe everything you read.” The fact was I did have some money from his estate, but there were so many legal complications and roadblocks to me actually getting my inheritance, I was still living pretty much month to month. And on top of that, I had some hefty guilt about using money my dad had earned by twisting, manipulating, and destroying lives.
Call me a softy.
“Hard to collect a paycheck when you’re dead,” Payne said quietly behind me.
“Fine.” I stopped walking. Both of them stopped too and looked at me. “Tell me what I’m getting into and convince me it’s worth getting tagged and ruining my reputation.”
Payne crossed her arms over her chest and leaned one shoulder against the wall. “Stotts gets involved in some heavy stuff. Dark magics.”
“Like blood magic?” I asked, resisting the urge to rub at the scars on my left shoulder. Those scars had been the result of some cranked-up gutter trash jumping me with a blood magic spell and a knife a few months ago. “I can handle that.”
She shook her head. “Not just blood and drugs, Allie.”
“How about giving me some specifics?”
She just gave me a hard look and said nothing.
Great.
“I’m a big girl. I know how to take care of myself.”
“Yah, Tita, we know.” Love didn’t sound convinced.
Nice. Where was the love when a girl needed it?
“You have a cell we can reach you at?” He started up the stairs again, and Payne and I fell into step behind him.
“I did,” I said over the echo of our footsteps. “I will. I’m getting it replaced today.”
“That’d be good,” he said. “Make sure you call in and give us the number, okay?”
“Sure.”
“And you have your will in order, right?” he asked.
“Ha-ha. Funny.”
He looked down over his shoulder and gave me a wide smile. “Naw, we won’t let anything happen to you. This job will be a piece of cake. You help Stotts this once, walk away alive, and maybe find some other way to make rent, yah?”
“I like Hounding. It’s what I do best.”
Love reached the top of the stairs and paused before carding open the door. “You can be strong as you like, Tita, be the best Hound there is, and still get your ass kicked in this town.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ll call you when I get a new phone. Promise.”
Love smiled, and it was all sunshine and breezy beaches again. “That’s all we ask.” He slid his card through the reader, unwove the Diversion spell-this one much smaller than the one on the bottom floor-and opened the door for me.
I walked out into the brighter fluorescent-lit hall, the smells of too many people coming in out of the rain, the sounds of too many people in too small a space closing in on me. I needed fresh air. Now would be good.
“See you soon,” I said to Love and Payne.
“Be careful,” Love said.
I intended to do just that. Which meant I needed food and a decent cup of coffee to keep my strength up. I knew the perfect place to get both-Get Mugged.
I pulled my scarf closer around my nose and chin. Time to leave the secret police, magical crimes, and cursed dead Hounds behind me. At least for as long as I could.
Chapter Four
Outside the station, I took a deep breath and got a noseful of diesel, fish cooking in hot grease, and the wet concrete and mold that pervades Portland from October through May. The wind gusted, pushing hard between buildings and bringing me nothing except the smell of rain and cold.
Daylight was making some progress against the cloud cover, washing the sky in steel gray light. In the strange half-light and rain, everyone looked a little surreal and ghostlike, their forms and features lost to the haze.
I headed down the stairs and strode toward the bus stop that would take me nearer the river and my favorite coffee shop, Get Mugged. After a morning like this, I wanted some real coffee, good coffee, dark coffee. Then I’d start looking around for Pike. I made it all the way to the curb before a man stepped up behind me.
“Allie.”
The scent of hickory overtones and soap-not French cologne, just plain soap-rolled on the wind to me, and I knew who it was without even turning. Perfect timing.
“Morning, Pike,” I said. “Want coffee?”
Martin Pike and the guy with him stepped up beside me, and we all crossed the street together. Pike was shorter than me by at least six inches. His gray hair was shaved down to a tight buzz, and the lines etched at his eyes, cheeks, and forehead mapped all the wars he’d served in. Former Marine, I’d always assumed, and a damn good Hound who did a lot of work for the police.
The other man I’d never met. He had a head of black hair and had a pencil-thin mustache beneath a nose that had been broken more than once. He was younger and slighter than Pike, and wore a jacket that reminded me of the gangs out on the east side of town.
“No, thanks,” Pike said, his words carrying a hint of the South, where I thought he’d grown up. “This is Anthony Bell, Hound.”
“Hey,” Anthony said around a piece of gum.
I nodded. He smelled like sweet cherries-which meant blood magic and drugs. For the split second he managed to hold eye contact, I noted his pupils were pinpricks. Raging high.
That was the easiest way to spot a Hound. Nine times out of ten, a Hound was whacked out on painkillers, booze, drugs. Anything to cut the pain of using magic for a living.
“So how’s your granddaughter?” I asked Pike.
“She’s dead.”
I stopped. Turned. Pike stopped too and faced me. Anthony got one step farther down the sidewalk and then glared at us. He shifted from foot to foot like holding still hurt. He swore and then shrugged the hood on his light gray jacket farther over his eyes.
“She committed suicide,” Pike said. “Couldn’t handle life after… that.” His voice was emotionless, but his eyes narrowed in anger or grief-it was hard to tell with him. Pike never let much show. And even though I thought he was a good Hound, there were moments-moments like this-when I wondered if he Hounded for the money or for the killing thrill of the hunt.
I swallowed against a knot of nausea. She had been so young. Strong. I thought she had a chance. People can shake blood magic addiction. People can pull themselves up from abuse. But Lon Trager had done more than abuse her. She’d been tortured. Raped. Broken.
