We watched her rage, tears welling in her eyes, until she finally let it go, and then Curran and I led her back into the house off the street.

CHAPTER

18

I OPENED MY eyes. I lay in our bed, on my side. Something felt odd. I puzzled over it and realized Curran wasn’t with me.

The blackout curtains had turned our bedroom into a quiet, dark place. I had no idea what time it was. After George had calmed down, Lyc-V finally took its toll and she crashed in one of our spare bedrooms. I tried my best to describe the building I’d seen in the vision to Raphael. He owned a reclamation company that took useful things out of crumbling skyscrapers, and he had files on just about every major ruin in the city. He wrote everything down, but I could tell nothing clicked with him. My description had been too generic. He said he would look through his files and Dali said that she would send a survey team out to the buildings Raphael identified. Curran told me that when he had dropped Derek off at the address the Clerk had given us for the gig Eduardo had turned down, he had recognized the scent permeating the area. It belonged to the man who’d stalked Eduardo. We still didn’t know who he was or why he was obsessing. It was nice that two and two fit together, but so far they still equaled twelve, which didn’t help us.

The djinn spoke English this time and it wasn’t just a single word. He was growing in power. Nobody liked that news.

Finally everyone left. I dragged myself upstairs, took a long shower, and collapsed on the bed. I had woken up when Curran came in and went into the bathroom to wash the blood off. He never came out of the bathroom. I would’ve sensed him moving. Exhausted or not, my instincts still worked.

I slipped out of the bed, walked across the slick wooden floor to the bathroom, and nudged the door with my fingertips. He was sitting in our enormous cast-iron bathtub, leaning back, his eyes closed. The tub was his favorite place aside from our bed. Huge, custom-made to accommodate him even in his lion-form with more than enough room to spare, the tub was heated with electricity during tech and with a magic volcanic rock at other times. Usually his face was relaxed when he soaked, but right now it looked tight. He was almost frowning, his thick eyebrows furrowed, the line of his square jaw hard.

There was something I’d been wanting to do, ever since I woke up in the hospital bed and saw him stalking through my room, worried and angry, all coiled strength and hard will.