She didn’t return my smile. “You be careful, child. I do what I can to protect my own here.” She waved one floury hand in the direction of the door. “There’s naught I can do out there.”

Hopping down from the stool, I kissed her wizened cheek. “I know, Mrs. B. Thank you. If you hear something out back in a few minutes, it’s just me.”

She huffed again, flapping her hand at me. “Go on with ye, then.”

With Mogwai trotting at my heels, I went upstairs to fetch my flashlight, then back downstairs to have a look around.

There was a dent in the plastic lid of the bakery’s Dumpster. Scanning the ground beneath it with the beam of my flashlight, I made out the faint impression of a footprint in the dusty patch between the alley and the Dumpster. It was facing away from, not toward, the disposal unit.

Someone had climbed onto the Dumpster, then jumped down and run away, scared off by Mogwai’s caterwauling and Mrs. Browne’s wrath.

My tail twitched with nervous energy.

Fishing my phone out of my pocket, I glanced at the time. A quarter hour short of three o’clock in the morning. That meant it could have been nothing, an energetic drunk meandering home unusually late from the bar, hopped up on vodka and Red Bull and bent on idle mayhem. I squatted lower and studied the footprint, measuring it against my own. It definitely belonged to either a man, or a woman with unfortunately large feet. Given the odds, I’d bet on the former. The imprint had been left by a sturdy industrial tread, maybe a work boot.

Or a motorcycle boot.

Oh, crap.

I knocked on the back door of the bakery kitchen before poking my head inside. “Mrs. Browne?”

“Eh?” She cocked her head at me.

“You said you thought it was a mortal,” I said. “Any chance it could have been a ghoul?”

I was hoping she would say no.

Instead, she looked thoughtful. “Well, now, that would depend on its diet, Daisy, lass. Those what exist on pure emotion, more often than not they reek of misery. But there’s ghouls that walk among us and pass for ordinary folk. They can eat and drink like mortals; it’s only that they take no sustenance from it. One of those . . .” She shrugged. “Aye, one of those might have fooled my nose.”

I sighed.

Her expression hardened. “Don’t tell me you’re mixed up with the likes o’ them, Daisy Johanssen!”

“No, no.” I willed away a quick vision of Stefan Ludovic and his disturbingly patient ice-blue gaze. “Just checking.”

Back outside, I stood uncertainly before the Dumpster, thumbing through the contact list on my phone.

I wanted to call Cody.