“I’m assuming Devina will dispose of it. She’ll have to fairly soon.”

“So every time that bitch has to leave her place, she kills?”

“The seals last for a period of time or until someone other than her breaks them. That’s the other reason I didn’t want you going through that door.”

Great. Now he had yet another death on his conscience—because sure as shit she was going to have to protect that space again.

Jim shifted the bottle to his mouth and took a long draw. After he swallowed, he said, “What’s the big deal about that bathroom, though? There was nothing in it.”

“Nothing you saw, thank fuck.”

Eddie started pacing around. Most of the pictures and the books had been put back into some semblance of order, proof that Vin or his maid had been doing some cleanup. But nothing looked right, and Jim supposed it was kind of like some woman who’d had her salon hairdo busted apart by a stiff wind: No matter what she did to fix it, it wasn’t going to go back to the way it had been.

Eddie evened out the spines of a collection of books, his big hands precise and gentle in their movements. “The bathroom is where she keeps her mirror, which is her way in and out of this world. It’s also how she clothes herself and changes her appearance. It’s the source of everything she is, the seat of her power.”

“Why didn’t we just break the mofo, then,” Jim demanded, sitting upright. “Fuck that, you guys are so tough, why didn’t you do that years ago?”

“You break it, it owns you.” Eddie’s voice got tight. “It can capture you if you look into it, but even if you were to walk up to it blindfolded with a hammer, the instant it shattered, the shards would splinter into a thousand portals and suck you in in pieces whether or not you can see the thing.”

Abruptly, Eddie moved to a different section of the bookcase and went back to work lining more things up. “She’s going to be livid that we broke the seal and pissed off at Adrian for rifling through her shit. More than that, though, she’s going to need a change of address. She won’t want to leave that mirror in a compromised space.”

“But why would she be worried about where it was? If we can’t break the damn thing, why does it matter?”

“Well, we can bust it up—it’s just that the one who does it sacrifices himself. Permanently. The afterlife he gets is not part of what you saw when you went over to meet the bosses. We axed Devina’s predecessor that way—at considerable loss to the team.”

Suicide mission. Fantasic. “So what power do we have?”