Demonkeepers

had been a serious shock to her system, and she hadn’t had nearly the relationship with Anna that he’d had. Unconsciously, she touched the bulge beneath her shirt made by the skull effigy. She felt a faint hum of power coming from it, but not one that resonated with the way she usually experienced the magic. That confirmed what Anna had said about the skulls being bloodline- and seer-specific. She didn’t think it would affect her magic, or Lucius’s . . . at least, not directly. Indirectly, though, its presence was a heavy weight between them, as was the bare spot on his forearm where the slave mark had been. She didn’t know what Strike and the others were going to think about that. Heck, she didn’t know what she thought about it. All she knew was that her plan of talking to Lucius about the emotional component of the magic on their drive home wasn’t seeming like such a good idea now. He might be standing right next to her, but he’d never seemed farther away.

Hoping he just needed time to work things out in his head, she focused on the task at hand: finding Rabbit. And Lucius had a point on the digs. Although the relative isolation was consistent with Rabbit’s fierce need for distance from everyone but Myrinne, the suburban-USA surroundings and soccer-mom minivan in the driveway didn’t jibe. If they had just been normal students, Jade would have assumed it was a cost thing, but the Nightkeeper Fund had been set up to support an army of hundreds, if not thousands. It was beyond sufficient for the two dozen survivors. Heck, she’d heard Jox urging the kid to just buy a damn house rather than worry about a sublet. Granted, the winikin had followed that by muttering something about getting as much fire insurance as possible, but still.

So why the sublet?

“Can I help you?” A dark-haired woman nudged open the storm door of the main house with one foot. She wore sweats, was jiggling a swaddled baby in one arm, and had a why the hell did I sign up for this? look on her face. In the background, an older kid was screaming something about spaghetti.

Jade took a step toward her, smiling. “We’re friends of Rabbit’s. Are he and Myrinne around, do you know?”

“Sorry, I haven’t got a clue if they’re home. I saw them headed out this morning; don’t know if they came back or not.” The woman tilted her head. “They expecting you?”

“Not specifically.” Though Rabbit had to know Strike wouldn’t put up with being ignored for long, and would have seen her number pop up on caller ID just now.

“You can go up and knock. Be careful on the stairs; a couple of the treads are loose. They’ll be fixed by the end of next week, though.”

“Thanks.” Jade headed toward the garage with Lucius falling in beside her, back in silent mode.

Something—instinct, maybe?—told her that the apartment was empty. She figured it couldn’t hurt to fake a knock. The woman had retreated back into the main house and shut the door, but Jade would’ve bet money she was watching through one of the curtained windows. At least Rabbit seemed to have landed in a decent living situation. The surveillance would, however, limit their options in terms of peeking through windows, trying to figure out what, if anything, he and Myrinne were up to.

On the way up, they discovered more than “a few” loose steps; the whole staircase groaned precariously under Lucius’s weight. “What do you want to bet they’ve been on the fix-it list for ‘the end of next week’ for a while now?” he asked, not seeming particularly worried either way.

“She should ask Rabbit to fix them.” Jade grinned. “Might be interesting to see what he’d come up with.” Though in all fairness, the in-Skywatch buzz said that the young, powerful mage had cleaned up his act in recent months. When they reached the landing, she motioned him to shield her with his body. “Stand there so she can’t see me.”

He obliged. “What’s your plan?”

“Working on it.” She knocked, but wasn’t surprised when she didn’t get an answer. The place felt empty.

“Want me to kick it in?” He paused. “It’d make me feel better.”

She grinned, glad he was thawing a little. Wait a minute . . . thawing. “Be my lookout, will you?

I’ve got an idea that’ll do less damage.” I hope.

The ice magic came quickly, without even a blood sacrifice. Keeping her inner rheostat turned low, she pushed a small quantity of the magic into the dead bolt and regular door lock, where the forming crystals would expand and create pressure inside the mechanisms. She hoped.

Heat poured through her, lighting her up and bringing a prickle of sweat to her forehead and behind her shoulder blades. The locks clicked in one-two sequence, like she’d planned it that way. Holy crap, I did it! She wasted a couple of precious seconds staring at the door as excitement skimmed through her, warming her skin and making her want to dance. She’d actually— finally! —used magic for something practical and tangible, something more than just finding a reference that another mage could use instead of her.

Then, aware they were probably still being watched, she called, “It’s me. Can I come in?”

Pretending she’d gotten an answer from within, she opened up and stepped through. Lucius followed, shaking his hand at the sting from the ice-cold metal doorknob.

“Nice job,” he breathed in her ear, sending shimmers through her. For half a second, the world seemed to shift a few degrees on its axis and the air sparked red-gold.

Steeling herself against the tug of lust—or rather, filing it for a “maybe later”—she lifted a shoulder. “I’m not sure I should be proud of my B-and-E skills when we’re talking about a teammate.”

Still, though, personal space was something of a fluid concept among the magi, who lived a lifestyle that landed somewhere between communal and private, with blurred lines separating the two. Shandi came and went freely from Jade’s suite, and the magi above her in the power structure could, theoretically, invade her space with impunity. The surviving Nightkeepers had tended to stick closer to the human theory of privacy, but there were exceptions. And this was one of them, she assured herself, even though there was a kernel of fear that Rabbit would come home, realize he had company, and fireball first, ask questions later.

On the theory of better safe than sorry, she reached into her pocket for one of the small, portable motion detectors they had used to secure their hotel room the night before, and set it up on the kitchen counter facing the door.

“We’re supposed to make sure he’s not in trouble,” Lucius said, paraphrasing Strike’s order as he scanned the room. “Okay. Where do we start? Or rather, what are the odds that Rabbit and Myrinne, who are both of above-average intelligence and deviousness, would leave something important just lying around?”

“Slim to none,” she agreed. “So let’s think devious.”

The door opened into a kitchen nook that was separated from the main area by a half wall. Doors on the far side of the main room opened into a bedroom on one side, a bathroom on the other. The furniture was upscale box store, the built-in shelves were filled with anatomy and physics texts, and the wall art leaned toward Things I Like to Stare at While I’m Stoned. The few photographs racked on the shelves showed a doughy-looking guy posing with carbon-copy parents and what appeared to be his sister. Or maybe a brother with low testosterone levels? It didn’t take a psych expert to guess the place had come furnished, and little—if any—of what they were looking at belonged to Rabbit or Myrinne.

Leaving the main room to Lucius, Jade moved into the bedroom, feeling seriously uncomfortable to be invading the space of two people she might not consider friends, but who were certainly allies. She found a few fat red candles and some pretty crystals she could easily peg as Myrinne’s. She thought she recognized some of the clothes tossed over a chair in the corner as belonging to Rabbit, and the pair of Dark Tower books on the nightstand could’ve been his. But other than that, there was little for her to go on. It was like the mage and his human girlfriend hadn’t left any mark on the space, even though they’d been living there a few weeks already.

Unless . . . “What about magic?” she murmured to herself. Granted, the mental blocks meant that Rabbit theoretically couldn’t use his powers outside of Skywatch, but he’d already circumvented those strictures at least once, when Myrinne had talked him into using a pseudo-Wiccan ritual in an effort to call a new three-question nahwal. It was possible he’d done something like that again. Or, if she wanted to be cynical about it—which was a good bet when trying to outthink Rabbit—he could’ve left himself a loophole or two when he’d installed his mental filters. Just in case.

Moving to the edge of the sitting room, which put her in the approximate middle of the apartment’s