“The statue?” Nick said, the cuffs jingling again. “That’s why I stayed behind. Let myself get caught. The witch took it along, with the canvas. I lifted it from her before she ran. You won’t believe what she wanted to do with it.”

He’s blaming me for his theft?

“Ran off?” Trent said, and I heard Nick grunt in pain. “Your bug of a pixy dropped a magic-generated pinch on my gatehouse. Thirty-six seconds it took to reboot. Do you know what can happen in thirty-six seconds? Just whose side are you on, Sparagmos?”

“Mine,” he rasped, taking a new breath. “But I know who’s running Cincinnati. Don’t get your wick out of whack. She may have taken it, but I swiped it back.”

There was a creak of plastic, and I couldn’t breathe. Nick was blaming me for his theft, the lie falling from him like a baby’s giggle.

“I figured you’d want it,” Nick was saying, and my eyes warmed as Jenks’s pixy dust sifted onto my fingers, trembling as I held the radio. “So she escaped. So what? You’ll get her, and now you still have your statue. I look like a self-sacrificing hero in her eyes—she gets a worthless picture.”

It was worthless. The painting was worthless. Just like Nick. Angry and hurt, I wiped a hand under my eye. It had all been faked, even down to the kiss and his self-sacrificing drivel.

“Where is it?” Trent’s voice was intent, and I took a breath, holding it.

“In my pocket,” Nick said smugly, and I heard the thunk of someone hitting the floor, followed by Nick cursing softly and the rasping sound of him trying to get up off tile.

“This is a saltshaker,” Trent said, and the scuffling sound redoubled, making it hard to hear Nick, but one thing was abundantly clear. He was not happy.

“No!” Nick exclaimed. “She did it again! The bitch! She did it to me again!”

In a turmoil of betrayal and frustration, I looked up at Ivy—smug, satisfied Ivy with her eyes black and her fangs showing in a savage grin.

Jenks flew to her, and the two exchanged a high five, Ivy using a single digit so as not to send him flying backward. Pierce breathed a heavy sigh of relief. “Got you, you sewer rat,” Jenks said, spilling a clear pixy dust to light Ivy’s belt pack. Inside was the statue.

I took a breath, then another, trying to figure it out. “She didn’t take anything but the painting, did she,” Trent said, pissed. “You took it, and when you couldn’t get through the gate, you came up with this cock-and-bull story about picking it from her.”

Nick grunted in pain, and I heard something scrape on the tile.

“How?” I whispered, and Ivy glanced at me, her eyebrows raised and her smile wide. “When? You never touched it!”