Constance’s knock was gentle, but she didn’t need more than that to alert Mari’s Nejeret ears of her presence. “It’s me,” she called quietly. “I have news.”

There was a rusty creak, followed by, “What happened at the meeting?”

Adrenaline flooded my bloodstream at the sound of Mari’s voice, and my whole body hummed with anticipation. She was really here. We’d found her. I might just be able to save Garth.

“You look like hell,” Mari told Constance. “Did the board vote you out?”

“Not exactly,” Constance said. “Let me in, and I’ll explain.”

Nik and I stared at each other as we waited for the sound of a door opening. It seemed to take forever. There was clang after clang as Mari dealt with the door’s locks, and I was starting to get a little lightheaded from holding my breath for so long. But I could hardly let it out now, in a massive exhale. Mari would hear that, for sure.

Finally, the door opened with the faintest of creeks. We waited a few more seconds for Constance to actually get in the doorway, where she could bar the way so Mari wouldn’t be able slam the door as soon as she spotted us, and then I stepped into view.

“Hey, Mars,” I said, raising a hand to wave.

Her familiar, almond-shaped eyes rounded in surprise.

“Been looking for you . . .”

In an explosion of rainbow mist, statuesque Mei appeared behind her adopted daughter and placed her hand on Mari’s shoulder, preparing to teleport them both away to safety.

“Wait,” Nik said as he, too, stepped into view. “Daughter, please, hear us out.”

I blinked, eyeing him for a few seconds before his words finally made sense. It always took me a moment to reconcile the fact that Nik has a daughter—Mei. He’s just so unfatherly in pretty much every way possible. Not that that changed the fact that he had fathered Mei millennia ago. She’d inherited her fair share of the stunning beauty that was so pervasive in her father’s bloodline, though her ancient human mother’s genes had lent her a far more Middle Eastern look. She’d also inherited her sheut from Nik, though her powers were quite different from his.

“We need your help,” Nik said, extending his hand, almost like he was pleading with her. Maybe he was.

For uncounted seconds, the five of us stood there, an ice sculpture of tensions and uncertainty.

Until, finally, Mei nodded. “Very well, Father.” She looked at me, bowed her head in greeting, and murmured, “Katarina.” Then she straightened. “Both of you, please, come in.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

“So,” I said, “will you do it?” I was sitting across from Mari at a farm-style dining table in their surprisingly well-stocked underground kitchen. It turned out that their hideout really was an old bank vault, and that some guy named Billy had set it up as a fallout shelter in the forties, only to leave it abandoned some years later when he died in a car accident. We knew about Billy and how he’d died because he’d been a friend of Mei’s back in the day. It was how she and Mari had known the bunker was down here in the first place.