I had briefly contemplated breaking into the Guild and stealing the logs, but I wasn’t sure where Mark had moved them to, since they weren’t in the Clerk’s counter safe. And the Guild was never empty. Unless I could turn myself invisible, pulling off this heist while a dozen mercs watched would be very difficult.

“Then I’ll get the Clerk back,” Curran said.

“You would have to get them to rehire him, and they won’t do it. They didn’t have enough money to keep him on in the first place and I’m not sure the Guild committee would even want him back. They are all set to raid the pension fund and call it quits.”

Curran’s eyes grew distant again. “I’ll take care of it.”

The sun had set by the time I turned onto our street and I saw our house, its windows lit up by the bluish glow of feylanterns inside. The silver in the bars shielding its windows glowed slightly, reacting with magic and moonlight, as if coated in fluorescent paint, matching the glow of the security door.

I had spent the first month after we’d moved in putting up wards all around our five-acre plot, and as I turned into our driveway, the reassuring mild pressure of passing through the defensive spell slid over me, as if the house patted my hair.

My stomach hurt from the lack of food. My shoulder ached with a low gnawing pain. My sides hurt, too. I was tired, starving, and filthy, and I smelled like three-day-old roadkill. The spider ichor had dried to a cementlike substance in my hair. I would’ve killed for a shower.

Across the street, Heather Savell finished speaking with Mrs. Walton and started toward us. Curran locked his teeth. I had no doubt that, in her head, Heather was preparing a speech on behalf of our neighborhood’s nonexistent HOA. She had already kindly pointed out to us that most people hide their trash cans in the garage instead of putting them on the side of the house and that we had a two-foot-wide bald patch in our lawn, where the workers had dug up the ground to get to a burst pipe.