Once my belly was full, I got restless. I couldn’t stop thinking one thing: Where was the sapphire dog?
We had taken on the floating storm, and now I was ready for the main event. I also needed to figure out what, if anything, to do about Tattoo, Frail, and the Old Man. They had killed someone to summon a predator, and that memory brought back clean, welcome anger. Someone needed to do something about that group, and I wanted it to be me.
I did my best not to think about Regina, Ursula, Biker, and Kripke. They complicated things and I wanted simplicity. I grabbed another coffee and went to wake Catherine. We needed a strategy session.
She answered the door on the second knock. She had changed into a pair of dark jeans and a black sweatshirt, which fit too well to be charity like mine. Her eyes were red. She’d been asleep, too.
I felt awkward. “Can we talk about what we do next?”
She stepped back to let me in.
Catherine walked to the far side of the bed and started stuffing things into her bag. Her head hung down to hide her face, and her shoulders were hunched. She zipped the bag closed with a sudden, angry swipe of her arm. Then she wiped her face with her hand and sat by the window. She wouldn’t look at me.
I guessed we weren’t going to jump into bed and celebrate last night’s victory.
“I’m leaving now,” she said.
I sat across from her. “We haven’t found the predator yet.”
“I don’t find predators. I don’t kill them, either. I don’t fight sorcerers and I don’t face down gunmen. I’m an investigator. My job is to confirm that something bad is going on, then contact the society. I give them enough information to get started, and I get out of their way. I shouldn’t even have gotten this damn job.”
“You already sent the photos of the license plates?”
“Yes. Even though most of those cars were rented, they’ll still be able to trace them. Pictures of the people would have been better, but that didn’t happen. Now we have a predator on the loose and a sorcerer summoning more. We need a peer to handle this. Maybe more than one.”
My heart skipped a beat. Annalise was a peer. “Is Annalise coming?”
Catherine gave me a careful look. “I don’t know who they’ll send.”
My whole body grew warm. I wanted Annalise here with me. I needed her. She had power and she didn’t falter. Everything was simple for her. She would have dummy-slapped Ursula into next week, and I would have never even heard of a floating storm.
Catherine said: “You should leave, too.”
“What? Why?”
“For a lot of reasons. You’re not trained for this. You have that one spell in your pocket and whatever is all over those tattoos of yours, but that’s it. Hell, we don’t even know what we’re facing.”
“Regina Wilbur said it was a sapphire dog.”
“She did?” Catherine seemed startled. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Because a predator was trying to kill us,” I answered, which didn’t make a damn bit of sense. I should have told her everything in case she made it but I didn’t.
Damn. She had asked me what I’d found out, and I’d answered
“Anything else?”
I took a deep breath and told her everything that happened after we’d split up. When I finished, I asked her: “What’s a sapphire dog?”
“I heard about one once. A … friend of mine said it was a beautiful creature that destroyed anyone who saw it. That’s all I know.”
“Isn’t there a book or website or something? Shouldn’t there be a database or an encyclopedia with pictures and—”
“No,” she answered. “There isn’t one and there never will be one, for good reason. The society doesn’t share information.”
“We could do our job a whole lot better if they did.”
“Information shared is information leaked. Any secrets the society shares with the rest of us would eventually be sold, or be scammed or tortured out of us.”
“Tortured?”
She sighed heavily. I was annoying her and she wanted me to know it. “This isn’t a low-stakes game we’re playing, Ray. Anyone who finds out what we are will want to know everything we know. Everything. And they won’t be gentle about it, either. The more people hear about sapphire dogs and floating storms, the more they’ll want one. That’s when they start searching for spell books.”
I didn’t answer right away. Of course she was right. I’d already heard Professor Solorov and Kripke say that very thing.
And it wasn’t as though this was my first encounter with magic. Both previous times had been bloody and awful. Catherine had a point.
“You said I should leave town for a lot of reasons,” I said. “And you’ve been angry with me since we faced the floating storm. What happened? Should I have used my ghost knife against it?”
She let out an exasperated laugh that turned into another sigh. “I’m not angry with you, Ray. Okay, I was, but
