“The thing?” I asked slowly, watching Caim jump up from his chair. He strode over to a wall where a thick black curtain hung over the windows. Only…when he pulled the curtain back, I saw it didn’t block windows at all. It covered a massive map. Like, twice as tall as me both ways. Manhattan’s famous grid stretched out across it, drowning in scribbles. String connected multicolored pins to each other. It kind of looked like something a serial killer would have in his dungeon.

“Meet the map,” Caim said proudly as he gestured at it.

“That’s deranged.” Still, I popped up from the chair and trailed over to it. The pins obviously represented the murders. I didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out. But not all of them made sense. I pointed at a few pins clustered together in the Lower East Side. “What are these for? I thought he only killed here in Hell’s Kitchen.”

“There have been some other murders downtown,” Az said quietly. “Over in Queens, too. The cops haven’t linked them, but we have. There are plenty of similarities. Every single victim has been a supernatural.”

“This is…” I quickly counted the pins and whirled toward him, my heart hammering my ribs. “At least a hundred deaths. How long has this been going on?”

“Over a year,” Valac said through gritted teeth as he joined us at the map. “We’ve tried dozens of times to catch this guy, but he’s like butter through our fingers. He always vanishes into thin air.”

“That’s what he did tonight,” I breathed. “As soon as he heard the sirens, he just…disappeared. Poof. He was gone. I thought maybe I was imagining things.”

Az spoke up from the table. “You didn’t imagine anything. He can hide himself somehow. We don’t know if he’s travelling through shadows, cloaking himself, or something else entirely. Either way, he’s proven impossible to catch.”

I jerked toward him. “He said you’ve never gone after him before.”

“Usually, we are much more discrete. We don’t want him to know what we’re doing in here. Tonight was the first time we came face-to-face.”

Valac edged closer, his hollow, silver-white eyes staring at the map. “We cannot be as bold as we’d like, most of the time. Lucifer would not want us stopping this killer.”

I nodded. There was still so much I didn’t understand, but it felt like I’d been invited into a secret club. One that hunted killers. If this whole thing wasn’t seriously dangerous, it might be a little exciting. Of course, it was also probably illegal. I had no doubt what these demons would do with the murderer once they caught him. Would they give him up to the human cops for a fair and honest trial? Not a chance in hell.