Surat al-Falaq, one hundred and thirteenth chapter of the Qur’an. The entire box was covered in protective verses.

“He already had the box,” Nitish said. “He needed us for the koftgari.”

Islam protected its followers against the supernatural. Whatever the stranger was going to put into that box, he counted on divine assistance to keep it in there.

“I looked inside the box,” Nitish said. “The inside of it was smooth and looked like bone.”

“Ivory?”

“No. Bone. Like the inside of a skull.”

Better and better.

“Can I see it?”

“He picked it up two days ago. He didn’t even ask about the knife. I don’t think he remembered that he had ordered it.”

•   •   •

I STARED THROUGH the windshield at a chain barring Cutting Edge’s parking lot. The chain secured the parking lot at night. It was almost eleven a.m. It should be lying by one of the posts. Instead here it was, keeping me from driving in.

Derek usually came to Cutting Edge by eight in the morning. Failing that, Curran should have been back from his trip to the Mercenary Guild. He might have gotten held up at the Guild, but it was unlikely. After his response to Bob’s tirade, none of the mercs would screw with him. That errand should’ve taken fifteen minutes. Did he get himself into some sort of trouble at the Guild? My imagination painted the Guild in ruins and my honey-bunny emerging from the wreckage roaring and swinging around the limp bodies of the Four Horsemen.

That would be hilarious.

Okay, this wasn’t the most productive line of thinking.

Talking to Saiman had clearly put me into a foul mood. In my head, my dead aunt murmured, People are fish. They die. You remain. Saiman was right, in a sense. I was tainted, but not because I was doomed. I was tainted because I had power, the kind of power that corrupted and turned people into warped versions of themselves. I was warped enough as it was.

I parked in front of the building and tried the door. It was predictably locked. I unlocked it and walked inside, into a large main room. The shades were still down. I pulled them up, letting the light illuminate the wide room with four desks. There used to be only two desks, one for me and one for Andrea Nash, but now Andrea was busy running Clan Bouda. She was also pregnant. We tried to have lunch every Friday, and the last time we went, she ate four pounds of barbecued ribs by herself. She wanted to eat the rib bones too, but I talked her out of it. Then she pouted and called me a downer.