I squinted, trying to read the faint text of magic. The words darted about like crickets fleeing Smudge, wiggling and squirming too much for me to read, but they felt familiar. I stepped back a few paces. “It looks like the wards extend into the air over the yard, kind of like the setup at New Millennium. They probably cover the roof, too. I can’t tell what exactly they do.”

“There’s no need to find out,” Lena said hastily. “So don’t go poking them.”

“Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“I must have misplaced it in the Atlantic, right around the time two military ships started shooting at me.”

“Right.” I turned my thoughts to happier memories. “I’m going to take a quick peek over that wall.”

I flew up, careful to keep a safe distance from the wards. Inside the walls, a small group of men, women, and children were working to clean an overgrown and mostly barren yard. A girl ran a weed trimmer along the base of the wall. An elderly man gathered broken concrete from the crumbling remnants of an old basketball court. I spotted one guard standing in the shade of the wall by a metal door leading back into the prison. He had no gun; just a metal club or electrical prod of some sort.

He also wore a gleaming badge with a familiar black pearl worked into the center.

“Damn.” That pearl was identical in both appearance and function to the one Babs Palmer wore around her neck. This could be trickier than I’d expected.

As prisons went, I’d seen worse. That didn’t change my growing desire to tear it apart brick by brick.

They’d attacked and kidnapped sirens without provocation. Had the rest of these people been targeted the same way? Locked up for the crime of being different?

I studied the prisoners magically, trying to identify their species. They appeared blurry. I could make out bits of their nature, but most of the text was faded, little more than smears of ink. The effect was similar to the magic-suppressing amulet the guard wore, but more diffused. It appeared to have been implanted or injected inside their bodies.

“What the hell did you do to them?” I whispered. I was fairly certain three were vampires. Another looked like a werewolf, as well as what might have been a selkie, and a confused-looking woman who appeared to be a pretty fresh zombie. I saw no sign of the sirens.

I drifted closer. The wards shifted in response, angry words moving like a swarm of fish splashing to the surface to feed. I pulled away and dropped gently to the ground. I found Deb peering through the glass of the doors, while Lena sat with her hands merged into one of the bushes beside the walk.