“A rook,” Jem had realized quickly. It gave them, at least, a question to ask—and, given Jack Crow’s proclivity for shady Downworlders and small-time crime, the L.A. Shadow Market seemed the obvious place to ask it. Even in the middle of the night and miles in from the coast, the Market smelled like sunshine and ocean. It was crowded, that night, with suntanned witches selling enchanted hemp bracelets, werewolves peddling elaborate wrought-iron mounting equipment that attached weapons to luxury cars, and booth after booth of artisanal, organic juices, all of which seemed to feature some combination of ancient mystical potion and banana.

“Guaranteed to boost muscles, manhood, and personal magnetism by two hundred percent?” Tessa read skeptically as they walked past a warlock juicer.

“Also an excellent source of vitamin C,” Jem noted, laughing.

They were both trying so hard to seem normal.

It didn’t take very long to find someone who’d heard of a petty criminal by the name of Rook.

“You looking for Johnny Rook?” a grizzled werewolf asked, then spit on the ground. Rook apparently had his own booth in the Market but hadn’t been seen that night. “You tell him Cassius says hello, and that if he ever tries to scam me again, I’ll happily rip his face off with my teeth.”

“We’ll do that,” Tessa said.

They got a similar answer from everyone they spoke to—“Johnny Rook,” it seemed, had torn a swath of bad will through the entire L.A. Downworlder community. “It’s amazing he still has a face to rip off,” Tessa observed, after a pretty, young witch explained in great detail the way she would go about disfiguring him if she ever got her long-awaited chance.

“He’s not very good at this hiding-out thing, is he?” Jem said.

“I don’t think he wants to be very good,” Tessa said, with the faraway look she sometimes got when she was hearing someone else’s inner voice. “After all this time, all these identities, he comes back home, makes a name for himself at the Shadow Market—a name painfully close to the one Rosemary knew him by? He wanted her to come find him.”

“She came back to L.A. too. Maybe she wanted the same thing.”

Tessa sighed, and neither of them said the obvious, that if they’d only loved each other a little less, Rosemary might still be alive, and her son might have a better chance of staying that way.