"No," I said, annoyed, and settled onto a chair at the table. "I got drafted."

"Holy crap," Thomas said again.

"I don't get it," Butters said.

"Harry's joined the wizard secret police!" Bob burbled. "He gets to convict on suspicion and take justice into his own hands! How cool is that!"

Thomas looked at me steadily and then at the door behind me. Then back to me.

"I'm alone," I said quietly. "Relax."

He nodded. "What happened?"

"A lot," I said. "There isn't time to cover it all now. But the Wardens are in town, and I'm not so worried about them crawling all over and finding out everyone's secrets."

"Why not?" Thomas asked.

"Because at the moment all five of them are at a hotel downtown, getting showers and changing bandages while I try to come up with more information about the heirs of Kemmler."

Thomas blinked slowly. " All five… and they have wounded?"

I nodded, my lips pressed hard together.

"Wow," Thomas said quietly. "How bad is it?"

"They drafted me," I said.

"That's bad, all right," Bob said cheerfully.

I looked at the scattered papers and books on the table. "Tell me you guys came up with something."

Butters blinked a few times and then started fumbling at the papers on the table, peering at them in the candlelight. "Uh, well, there's good news and bad news."

"Bad first," I said. "I'm going to need the pick-me-up afterward."

"We've got nothing on those numbers," Butters said. "I mean, they aren't a code. They're too short. They could be an address or an account number, but none of the banks we could get on the phone use that number of digits." He coughed apologetically. "If I could have gotten on the Net I could have gotten you a lot more, but…" He gestured uselessly around the room. "We couldn't get one call in fifty to go through, and at most of the places we called, no one answered. And in the past hour the phones have gone out altogether."

I shook my head. "Yeah. City's going insane, too. There were two fires between here and McAnally's. Some kind of riot going in Buck-town, I heard on a police radio."

"The governor has asked for help from the National Guard," Thomas said quietly. "They're sending troops in to keep order on the streets."

I blinked. "How did you find that out?"

"I called my sister," he said.

I frowned. "I thought Lara wasn't speaking with you."

Thomas's voice went dry. "Just because she cut me off from the family's money, kicked me out of any of our holdings, made it clear that I no longer have their protection, and she's holding the woman I love as a virtual prisoner, don't think she doesn't still like me, personally."

"So she did you a little favor," I said.

"Technically," Thomas said, "she did you a little favor."

"Why did she do that?" I asked.