I dropped my gaze and stepped back. “I should go and tell Jaime her problem’s been solved. Thanks for—”

“Anytime. You know that.”

I nodded. “I’m off, then. Check in with you later?”

“Please. Oh, one last thing. When you’re talking to Jaime, I’m sure my name won’t come up…but you might want to make sure that it doesn’t.”

I sighed. “What’d you do to her?”

“It wasn’t me—”

“Let me rephrase that. What did your employees do to her on your orders? Or, on second thought, don’t tell me.” I rolled my eyes. “Guess I should have known—if I’d never done anything to her, you would have. I swear, between the two of us we’ve pissed off ninety-five percent of the supernatural world.”

“And killed the other five.”

“We gotta work on our people skills, Kris.”

“And what would be the fun in that?”

I smiled, shook my head, then transported to Jaime’s apartment.

Chapter 9

9

IF I SUCCEEDED IN GETTING RID OF JAIME’S STALKER-SPOOK, I was supposed to go to her apartment and wait for her there. When I found her apartment, I did indeed wait for her…waited at least a good ten minutes. Then I started hunting for clues to tell me where she’d gone. I found the answer on the calendar—she’d been invited to an event at some city councillor’s place. That didn’t give me much to go on, but I struck it lucky a second time by finding a small stack of invitations on her desk.

Of course, tonight’s wasn’t on the top of the pile. That would be too easy. So I had to drill down through them using my Aspicio powers. That took some work—I could easily have cleared a peephole right through the stack and the desk, but going down layer by layer was much tougher. After about thirty minutes of working at it, I got down to the right invitation. That provided me with an address. Then I had to pop back to my house in Savannah, grab my book of city maps, and find out where that address led. I only knew three travel codes for Chicago, so the closest I could get was six miles away. Could be worse, I guess, but it was still quite a hike.

When I finally arrived at the house, it was past midnight. The street was lined with cars, people spilling from the house, eager enough for fresh air that they were willing to brave the cold—or too drunk to notice it.