But she wasn’t alone. A giant stood over her body. He was on the small side, a few inches short of seven feet tall, but he made up for it by having a ripped, chiseled figure that would have put any bodybuilder to shame. His biceps bulged so big I doubted that he could rest his arms down against his sides. His skin was exceptionally tan, bordering on orange, the sort of fake, unnatural color you got out of a bottle. Everything else about him was pale, though: his hazel eyes, his curly blond hair, even the wispy soul patch that clung to his chin like puffed-up peach fuzz.

But the most interesting thing about him was the fact that he was wearing the dark blue uniform of one of the museum’s security guards—one that didn’t quite fit. The pants legs stopped an inch short of his black socks, and the chest and sleeves of the shirt threatened to split open with every breath he took. It almost looked like he was playing dress-up in someone else’s clothes.

He clutched a silenced gun in his right hand, the weapon trained on Jillian as if he thought she was suddenly going to come back to life with that much of her face missing. Not even Mab could have survived something like that.

For a moment, sorrow washed over me. I hadn’t known a thing about Jillian Delancey, other than that she’d come here with Owen and had been interested in him, but she hadn’t deserved to die like that.

But the real question was, why had the giant killed her? Why here? Why now? All around me, the marble whispered as Jillian’s blood oozed across it and the giant’s ugly, violent actions soaked into it. I’d thought the stones had sounded upset before, but now they practically hummed with tension and whined with worry. Whatever was going down, it was happening now.

Lucky for me, there was a guy standing right outside the door who could tell me exactly what that was—and how I could stop it before anyone else got hurt.

I started to get down from the chair so I could yank open the door and confront the giant when another sound caught my ear—clack-clack-clack-clack. Footsteps, hurrying this way. The giant’s head snapped up, and he moved away from Jillian’s body so the new arrival could see his gruesome handiwork.

The giant waiter who’d entered the bathroom earlier stepped into view. Dropping to one knee beside Jillian, she was careful not to get too close to the blood spreading across the floor. She looked at Jillian—or what was left of her—and shook her head, making her tight curls bounce every which way before they settled back into place.

“What a fucking mess,” she said. “Why the hell did you shoot her in the face so many times?”