The purr of a car engine rolled through the neighborhood. A Pack Jeep pulled up to our driveway. George jumped out.

“Did you find out anything?” Curran asked.

She shook her head. “Did you find him? Did you—”

“We know the ghouls took him,” I said. “He was alive when they got him. We don’t know why.”

Her face was a pale mask, her teeth clenched, her eyes feverish. “Ghouls? What?”

“Come inside,” I told her. “We’ll explain everything.”

CHAPTER

9

CUDDLES CLOPPED DOWN the street at a jerky trot. She galloped like a champ and was comfortable to ride at a walk or a canter, but her trot was rattling teeth in my skull. I slowed her down a couple of times, but she felt like trotting this morning and once she got something into her head, no force on Earth could change her mind. I’d taken her because the magic waves had been coming in short bursts lately, and an enchanted engine took forever to warm up. Also because a couple of weeks ago Buckhead had experienced an invisible hailstorm. You didn’t see the hail, but you saw the impact. It didn’t cause that much damage—most of Buckhead was in ruins anyway—but it turned the roads into an obstacle course of potholes.

“You’re trying to kill me, is that it?” I shifted in the saddle, trying to find a spot where my back didn’t hurt.

Cuddles ignored me and kept trotting.

This morning when I woke up, my body let me know just how displeased it was that I wasn’t spending the day in bed. I dragged myself up, we made breakfast, and then I went one way and Curran and Julie went the other. Maybe I should have taken a car. I needed to make progress today and Saiman was my best bet.

Saiman made his lair in the posh luxury of a Champion Heights penthouse. The building was impossible to miss. It was just about the only high-rise still left standing in Buckhead. Its owners had sunk an obscene amount of power into its wards, tricking magic into thinking the building was a very large natural rock. During the magic waves parts of it looked like a granite crag, but right now it was a fifteen-floor building, shrouded in morning fog and backlit by the rays of the rising sun like some mystical spire of an evil overlord.

Cuddles snorted.

“I don’t like it either,” I told her. “But you’ll love their stable. It’s to die for.”