“A friend.” I stand up, fighting a wave of dizziness as my heartrate jackrabbits for a second before calming down. Between the poison, the stab wound, having my car blown up behind me and doing moving car gymnastics, I think maybe I need to take a nap. Like that’s gonna happen.

“I really can’t convince you to let me put surveillance on you?” she says.

“No. But you’ll try anyway. So, know this. If I find anybody tailing me I’ll assume they’re trying to kill me. Don’t let it be one of your people.”

Chapter 11

Sometimes you have to take a moment to take stock. Look around, get clear on the things you have, the things you don’t, for good or ill.

Things I have: a gun, a straight razor, a messenger bag holding the accouterments of my craft, a leather-bound ledger that has more secrets in it than I know what to do with, an assassin in league with a pissed off wind god, a shit-ton of corpses, mages who want to put me into the ground, a stab wound in my shoulder, and the lingering effects of a really nasty poison in my system.

Things I don’t have: a lead.

I don’t know where Sastre is, I don’t know where she’s going to strike next, I don’t know which mages want my head on a stick, and I don’t know when this fucking poison making my heart play bongos in my chest is going to finally run its course.

And I don’t have my Cadillac. Pieces of it are sitting in a Catholic school basketball court, or being sent to storage for the police to comb over. I wonder what they’ll find out about it.

Of all the shit that’s happened today, that’s the thing that pisses me off the most. I really liked that car. Now I’m stuck in this shitty Honda that whines every time it shifts gears. Sure, the Cadillac wasn’t mine to begin with, but I murdered a mage in Texas for it.

Okay, that sounds bad, but he was eating the souls of young Loa, Voodoo spirits, children really, and he had it coming.

Finding Sastre is my next step, but the question is how? I could summon some Wanderers, ask if they’ve seen anything, but that could take hours and might not get me anywhere. I doubt Gabriela’s going to be much help on that front. She has informants and lackeys and some decent divination, but her street cred is in the shitter right now and she doesn’t have the eyes and ears she used to, not to mention Q fucking with the divination airwaves.