“I find it’s the only way to have an intelligent conversation around here. And your dog is fat,” she added with the doors safely closed.

The Nightwalker’s car pulled up to the curb seconds after she arrived. If he’d taken a little longer, given her more time to think . . . but he hadn’t, and when he reached across the front seat and opened the passenger door, she folded her umbrella, shook it once, and climbed in. She wouldn’t waste either her time or her strength fighting the Shadowlord, but if the Nightwalker intended to rescue Tony, she had information that might help.

Might.

Might not.

Of course the whole thing would be moot if she died in a fiery car crash before she even got her seat belt done up. Thrown left and then right as the Nightwalker roared back onto the street and then around the corner onto Denman. The thermoses were making it impossible to do up her seat belt, so she pulled them out and set them at her feet—under her feet after a particularly angular lane change cracked one against her ankle.

“What makes you think the shadow-held is taking Tony to the studio?” she asked, finally managing to buckle up.

“He’s being taken somewhere and the only somewhere these things have is the gate.”

“That’s logical enough, I suppose.”

“You suppose? If you have a better idea . . .”

“No. And watch the road!” As he turned his gaze back to traffic, Arra tugged at a plastic fold in her lap. “I won’t face it. I won’t get that close to the shadow-held. Not again.”

“Then why are you here?”

“We used to say, in my world, in my order, that knowledge is power.”

“We say that here as well.”

“Duh.”

A muscle jumped in the Nightwalker’s jaw. “You have knowledge I can use.”

She shrugged, the plastic over her shoulders crinkling. “I have knowledge; whether or not you can use it, that’s up to you. What I know is theory, extrapolated from past experience and the little I’ve observed since this . . . invasion began. The first shadows were scouts with no independence. It was as though the Shadowlord swept dark sponges through the gate and then squeezed out what they’d picked up. A second-generation scout followed us away from the studio on that location shoot and then returned with us. Then he sent through a shadow specifically seeking to know if there were lives here he could use . . . and Nikki Waugh died. He examined her life and decided that, yes, these were lives he could control.”

“How do you know what he decided?”