She handed me the crystal vial without a word. I placed a drop on Lex’s tongue.

“What now?” Potts demanded. “Will you kill me, too? Murder me in front of your poor niece? It won’t help. You can’t hide what you’ve done.”

“How does that feel, Lex?”

She made a face. “Better.”

The nurse stepped closer. I nodded, and she began checking Lex’s vitals.

“You suspected me, but you weren’t certain.” I needed to move, to pace, to do something to suppress the need to physically throw Russel Potts through the window. “You didn’t know how much I’d uncovered. So you cursed my niece, just in case you needed leverage. That was a serious error in judgment.”

I pulled the paperback from my pocket: an old copy of Renfield. “Tell me, Russell. How do you feel about eating bugs for the rest of your life?”

I didn’t turn him, though it was damned tempting to let him live out his days as one of the inhuman creatures he’d helped to persecute. Instead, I turned to a passage describing the Renfield’s ability to influence minds, and used that to put him into a more suggestive, agreeable mood. He sat on the floor and looked up at us, a relaxed, ridiculous smile on his face.

“Who killed Alexander Keeler?” I asked.

“Kiyoko thirteen, and a vampire we hired in D.C. I don’t know the name.”

That didn’t make sense. “His wife and children were incapacitated by libriomancy.”

“By a recording of libriomancy. One of your incident reports talked about Nicola’s ability to incapacitate a man via cellphone, suggesting that magic could be recorded and duplicated electronically, albeit with some loss of power.”

Clever. How many such recordings had they made, and how many times could one be used before it lost its potency? “The sirens. Where are they?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who does?” asked Lena.

“Kiyoko. Lawrence McGinley.”

“Secretary of Homeland Security?” said Angie. “That Lawrence McGinley?”

Potts nodded happily. “The one and only!”

Throughout our questions, the nurse had been dutifully examining Lex. Now she turned to Toby and Angie. “Her heartbeat is steadier and stronger. It may be an hour or two for her fever to come down. That’s normal after most magical healing. It takes time for the body to realize it’s better.”

“But she is better?” asked Angie.

“I think so, yes.” She glanced at me. “Can I go? I have other patients . . .”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Tamika.”

“I see two choices, Tamika. I can adjust your memory of what happened here. That would probably be safest for everyone, especially you. If Potts and the people he’s working with think you’re helping us—”

“What’s the other choice?” She folded her arms and lifted her chin.