“It’s okay,” I said reassuringly. “It’s just a sleep potion.”

“Don’t talk to him,” Kai growled. “Just shoot him.”

I aimed at the agent’s chest, the barrel wavering left and right. “But it’s going to really hurt at point-blank range Where should I—”

“Just do it!”

I cringed. “Sorry, dude.”

The CO2 canister popped as I pulled the trigger, and the shot splatted over the agent’s chest, soaking through his shirt. Pain rippled over his face before it went slack. Hoo boy, that was gonna leave a bruise.

Shoving my gun back into its holster, I snatched up my spent artifacts, stuffed them in my belt pouches, and jumped to my feet. Kai waved at me to follow as he started out from behind the dumpster.

“Wait!” I darted back, snatched up the guy’s food bag, and tucked it beside his limp arm. Rushing to Kai, I whispered, “He deserves his burger after all that.”

Kai’s silent pause was full of commentary he didn’t say aloud.

Together, we faced the street and the building on the other side. It resembled a warehouse more than an office building—and it was hella big. Two overhead doors, large enough for cube vans to drive through with room to spare, dwarfed a single person-sized entrance with a metal door. Long horizontal windows ran along the uppermost level, too high to be used as an illicit point of entry.

It wasn’t a glamorous building, but it was strategic. Surrounded by parking lots on three sides and a street on the fourth, the location wasn’t conducive to stealthy breaking and entering. Discounting the handful of fire exits, we had two choices: the front doors or the back doors.

Guess which one we were using.

We wheeled around the corner and into the largest of the three parking lots around the precinct, ignoring the security cameras mounted high on the walls—we weren’t worrying about those ones. Two more overhead doors faced the lot. Unloading rogues in public was a definite no-go, so when guilds arrived with criminals to book, they unloaded their catches in the privacy of the building’s interior.

Kai and I raced to the small access door beside the large ones. Pulling ahead of him, I slapped our stolen ID card against the nearby black panel. A light blinked green and the latch clicked loudly.

Too easy? That’s what we would’ve thought, but as our poor informant had explained, magical security created a big, ugly pit of complications. What sort of complications, I wasn’t sure, but he’d started a story about one precinct implementing arcane security, only to have all the agents who weren’t sorcerers accidentally lock themselves in or out of rooms all day long.

So, MagiPol relied on mundane tech—which, with an electramage on my team, was better than I could’ve hoped for.

Putting my shoulder against the metal, I cautiously cracked the door open.

Inside was a concrete pad slab large enough for four vehicles to park and open all their doors. A glass wall on my left, reinforced with metal, revealed the intake area—a desk at one end and some uncomfortable seating opposite.

Two obvious challenges awaited us: the two men behind the desk, and the fact that the wall behind them was also glass. Beyond it was the precinct bullpen—dozens of desks, cubicles, and offices bustling with agents and analysts hard at work. Or hard at slacking. Either way, it was a terrifying number of eyeballs that could spot us.

Steeling myself, I leaped through the door and slapped my stolen ID to the next door’s panel. As I burst into the intake area, the two agents looked up and saw my gun aimed at them. I pulled the trigger twice—and the lights went out.

Two dull thuds sounded as the mythics collapsed forward onto their shared desk. Beyond the glass wall, muffled voices exclaimed in shock, and the solid darkness broke as spots of light flared—agents turning on their phone flashlights.

“Keep moving.”

I almost jumped out of my skin at Kai’s whisper right beside me. Scarcely able to see where I was going, I homed in on the three lights glowing on the far wall—the call buttons for a freight elevator and the security panel for the door to the stairwell. Both must be on separate circuits from the one Kai had fried to take out the lights.

With another tap of our stolen ID, we were away from the glass wall and unconscious booking agents. Kai flicked on the light attached to his vest, the muted glow just enough to guide us down the stairs. We trotted to the bottom, every sound echoing, and I pressed the ID to the pad beside the door.

A red light blinked.

“Shit,” I muttered. “That analyst doesn’t have clearance down here? He didn’t say that.”

Kai touched two fingers to the panel and a spark erupted. The red and green lights flickered wildly. He puffed a breath, shoulders tense. Another spark, brighter this time—and the lock clicked.

“You did it!” I whispered gleefully.

He flung the door open. I launched out first, gun clutched in both hands.

The lights down here must have been on a different circuit too, because the room was brightly illuminated. A security desk blocked our way forward, and two agents sat behind it, staring at their computer monitors. Their heads snapped up as I flew into the room, gun waving.

“Don’t move!” I commanded.

Kai was right behind me, one hand already thrust out, and electricity burst over both men simultaneously. Discorporate ignition of his magic—without a switch. Kai was a serious badass.

As the two men crumpled, I fired a shot of sleep potion into each of them. They went limp.

Kai swung his hand toward the security camera in the corner. A crackle rushed across its metal body and smoke boiled out of it. He jumped the desk and crouched between the agents, then rose again with a new ID card and a fat set of keys.

Behind the desk was a heavy-duty door. With a touch of the card, the light blinked green. He opened the door.

A long hall stretched away, the concrete floor and walls painted a plain white that had faded over the years. On one side were open doors to interrogation rooms, currently empty. Across from them were two long stretches of bars: the group holding cells for short-term inmates.

At our appearance, the dozen mythics—eight men in one cell, four women in the other—stirred to alertness. I could feel their eyes on us as Kai zapped two more cameras. We sped to the end of the hall, where four more doors on heavy sliding tracks waited. The solitary holding cells.

Our informant hadn’t known which cell the mysterious druid was in, so Kai and I split up to peer through the tinted, barred windows. The first one was empty. I checked the second one on my side—empty too—then Kai and I swung toward the final door.

I pressed my nose to the glass.

A man sat on the bench-like bed attached to the wall, the only furniture in the cell aside from a steel toilet in the corner. His arms were folded, back against the cinder blocks, tense and glaring at the blank wall across from him. The tinted window was too dim to see more than that—a privacy thing for inmates?—but I recognized that tall, fit, menacing build easily.

We’d found the Ghost.

Chapter Six

I nodded to Kai and he shook out the keys. Only a few matched the bright, shiny steel of the bolt, and Kai slid one into the keyhole. It turned with a loud clack. I grabbed the door and slid it open with a dramatic flourish.

Zak looked up—and a lash of fear hit me so hard I almost stepped back.

He hadn’t changed much in the four months since I’d last seen him. His dark hair had grown long enough to look shaggy—except, being an Adonis-level hunk, he just looked tousled and extra sexy. His jaw was dark with stubble, suggesting he’d gone several days without a razor. Lallakai’s feather tattoos were missing from his muscular arms, bared by his sleeveless shirt, but the druid tattoos on his inner forearms were dark and bold, the intricate circles filled with colorful fae runes.

His appearance wasn’t what had triggered cold adrenaline in my veins—even with the scuffs, scrapes, splattered blood, and generous coating of dust that adorned him. No, it was his green eyes. They weren’t bright and inhuman with Lallakai’s power.

They were dark and inhuman with blood-chilling hatred.

Frozen in the doorway, I didn’t move as he glanced up and down me as though deciding how best to skin me alive, no recognition in his expression. Then I remembered.

“Oh!” I grabbed the bottom of my ski mask and pushed it up to reveal my face. “I’m Luke Skywalker. I’m here to rescue you.”

He blinked, shock dousing the fiery loathing in his eyes. He blinked again—and his mouth fell open in a very non-deadly-rogue way. “Tori?”

“No names,” Kai barked from behind me. “Let’s move.”

Zak pushed to his feet, and I noticed the heavy cuffs chaining his wrists together, the wide bands carved with hundreds of runes. Pulling my mask back into place, I zipped out the door and followed Kai down the hall, Zak right behind me.

A low whistle brought me up short. The mythics in the two large holding cells were crowded against the bars, watching us pass.

“You gonna let us out too?” one asked in a slow drawl.

“Yeah,” Kai said, striding past. “Wait a minute while we get ready.”

The convicts exchanged confused looks.

“Is he serious?” a woman muttered to her cellmate as we reentered the security vestibule where the two guards were out cold behind the desk.

Kai rifled through the keys and slid several off the ring—ones that matched the bolts on the large holding cells. He tossed me the leftovers and I sorted through them for a handcuffy-looking one. According to our informant, Zak’s cuffs were anti-magic artifacts—meaning we needed them off him ASAP.

As I searched, I flicked a glance at the druid standing in front of me, waiting to be freed. “Hey, so, long time no see. How’ve you been?”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Glad to hear you’re enjoying your SoCal vacay.” I pulled his hands toward me and tried to insert a small key. “Weather’s nice, isn’t it?”