He winced. “Oh shit, sorry! I didn’t realize you hadn’t met. Shane, Tori was at our Christmas party too, but you might have missed her.”

“I remember you.” Shane picked up the tumbler and sniffed its contents. “However, we didn’t have a chance to speak.”

He remembered me? Must’ve been my dress. I’d looked smokin’.

“So, what’s the job?” Aaron asked eagerly. “I know Vancouver inside and out, so I might be able to steer you in the right direction.”

Shane lifted his glass to his lips, took a sip, and rolled it in his mouth before swallowing. “Are you familiar with the Ghost?”

I froze halfway through pouring rum into the rocks glass. Aaron’s expression blanked and Kai’s gaze snapped from his phone to Shane. Only Ezra’s poker face didn’t flicker.

“Uh … reasonably familiar.” Aaron couldn’t quite suppress the cautious note in his voice. “Every bounty hunter from here to Seattle knows about the Ghost, but it’s always a dead end.”

“Some interesting information has come to my attention, and I’d like to see where it takes me.”

Realizing I’d filled Aaron’s glass halfway with rum, I set the liquor bottle aside and topped his drink with cola. Here’s hoping he wouldn’t choke on his first sip.

“Tagging the Ghost would be wild,” he told Shane, “but recent evidence suggests he’s left the Vancouver area. There haven’t been any sightings of him in months.”

“Deeply entrenched rogues don’t lightly abandon their territories,” the bounty hunter said confidently. “I have several leads to follow. If you’re comfortable tackling a DOA bounty like this one, I’d like to have you on board.”

“I—of course. Not an issue at all. I have no problem with …” As Aaron hurriedly assured the famous bounty hunter that he wasn’t intimidated by any rogue, Ezra murmured quietly, “Kai? What’s wrong?”

I looked over. Kai sat rigid on his stool, staring at his phone. His face had paled, his jaw so tight a vein throbbed in his cheek.

He stood, almost toppling his stool. “I need to go.”

“Kai?” I began anxiously. “What—”

He was already striding away. Ezra was off his seat, a step behind Kai as the electramage made a beeline for the door.

“Excuse me, Shane.” Aaron hardly spared the bounty hunter a glance as he rushed after his friends.

I gritted my teeth. My shift wasn’t over for hours, meaning I was stuck here. If it was urgent, they’d tell me … right? I yanked my phone out of my pocket and hammered out a message: What the hell is going on? Is Kai okay?

“Miss Dawson?” Shane murmured.

“Call me Tori,” I muttered distractedly as I sent the question to our group chat. “Would you like anything else? Appetizer? Dinner?”

“Perhaps I could ask you a few questions.”

My gaze froze on my phone, the chat abandoned except for my lonely question. Raising my head, I looked into Shane’s gray-brown eyes behind those icky round glasses. “What sort of questions?”

“You’re a witch, correct? Discovered as a mythic last August?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“And you’ve worked at the Crow and Hammer for eight months?”

Nervous anger flitted through me. “That’s public info, dude. You don’t need to ask me.”

“Has anyone from the Crow and Hammer ever investigated the Ghost before?”

Even if I’d been born yesterday, I would’ve recognized that for the trick question it was. “What do the MPD records say?”

“The Crow and Hammer has never officially investigated the Ghost, but last summer—June and July, specifically—several members made urgent inquiries to other guilds and MPD offices regarding the Ghost and his suspected whereabouts.”

Shit. The Crow and Hammer had made urgent inquiries because the Ghost had kidnapped me.

“I was just a bartender back then,” I told him.

“Even Darius King was asking interesting questions,” Shane continued as though I hadn’t spoken. “The Crow and Hammer seemed very keen on the Ghost, but they never logged anything in the system.”

“Maybe they never got anywhere so there was nothing to log.”

“Perhaps,” he agreed neutrally, taking a long sip of his vodka. “Around the same time, the MPD questioned several Crow and Hammer members, including Aaron, Kai, and Ezra, concerning a case that involved the disappearance of a teen girl.”

I returned the rum bottle to my well and said flatly, “Did they.”

“You were questioned as well, according to the records, but you were … just a bartender back then?”

“Yeah, I was,” I snapped. “You read the report, right? So you can screw right off with your bullshit questions.”

He sipped his vodka and didn’t budge from his seat. “The human suspects in that case claimed that the red-haired woman who used an illegal artifact to question them was allied with the Ghost.”

“Oh damn.” I laid the sarcasm on thick as I glared at him. “Then that must’ve been me, because there couldn’t possibly be more than one red-haired woman in the greater Vancouver area.”

“A red-haired woman in the company of Aaron, Kai, and Ezra?”

Ignoring the panicked racing of my heart, I planted my hands on the bar and leaned forward, putting myself eye to eye with the bounty hunter. “A little pointer, Shane. You won’t be the first asshole with an agenda I’ve thrown out of my bar, and you won’t be the last.”

Shane didn’t flinch at my arctic glare. Without breaking eye contact, he lifted his briefcase onto the bar and popped it open. Plastic rustled as he reached inside it.

He closed his briefcase and set a clear plastic bag on top of it. “Evidence” was stamped across it in red, and shielded inside was a pair of women’s runners with an ugly black stain discoloring the sides.

My face went cold, the blood draining from my head, but I couldn’t stop my visceral reaction to the sight of those shoes.

“These,” Shane murmured, “belong to you.”

It wasn’t a question, and I didn’t bother denying it. My shoes. I remembered staggering up a flight of stairs, drunk from dragon blood exposure. I remembered kicking those runners away as I stripped off my clothes to get in the shower.

I’d left my shoes behind. I’d forgotten them in Zak’s bathroom, in his private upper-floor suite, in his farmhouse in the hidden valley that was his only refuge.

“Miss Dawson,” the bounty hunter said quietly, “let’s talk about where you were last summer from June thirtieth to July fourteenth.”

He was a psychometric, able to read an object’s past with a touch. What had he learned from my shoes? How much did he know? Knees weak, I took a stumbling step backward—and thumped against someone. A hand closed around my shoulder, squeezing gently, and a familiar voice spoke above my head.

“What an honor to have a renowned bounty hunter in my guild. A pleasure to encounter you again, Shane.”

The evidence bag was already back in Shane’s briefcase as he rose to his feet, gaining a few precious inches of height as he looked up at the man beside me.

“Darius,” Shane said coldly. “I would say the pleasure is all yours.”

“Oh, most certainly.” Darius settled his arm over my shoulders. “What brings you to my humble bar?”

“I asked the Sinclair boy if he was available to assist me on a case, though perhaps I should’ve considered how much your influence may have corrupted him over the years.”

“I prefer to think my influence is all to the positive.”

“I doubt that very much.” Shane slid his briefcase off the counter. “I hope you’re enjoying retirement, Darius. You’re very lucky it’s here and not in a prison cell.”

“I do enjoy my creature comforts.” A mocking, steely note slid into Darius’s voice. “But luck has nothing to do with it, Mr. Davila. Have fun with your case.”

Dismissed, just like that. I squashed my grin.

Shane picked up his glass, tossed back the last of his vodka, and replaced the tumbler on the counter. His gaze turned to me, and with a faint smile, he crossed the pub. The bell jingled as the door closed behind him.

I let out a shaky breath and tipped my head back to bring the guild master into view. His gray eyes were bright with amusement as he looked down at me.

“So … Shane doesn’t like you,” I guessed.

Dropping his arm from my shoulders, Darius scooped up Shane’s glass and added it to my stack of used dishes. “Not at all.”

“How come?”

Deep satisfaction flashed over his face, and he rubbed his short salt-and-pepper beard as though to erase the expression. “I belong to a small and very exclusive club that Shane would likely call The Ones Who Got Away.”

I arched an eyebrow. “Are you admitting to being a rogue?”

“Roguish, maybe,” he replied with a wink. “Now, Tori, I believe Clara is heading out in a few minutes. Why don’t you call it a night and let her drive you home?”

“But my shift isn’t over.”

“Ramsey and I will cover for you. I would hate for any impolitely persistent individuals to inconvenience you on your way home.”

Ah. Now we were on the same page. “You got it.”

I packed up my things, and ten minutes later, Clara was dropping me off outside my place. I waved as she drove away, her sedan’s taillights retreating up the quiet street. Anxiously tugging my coat shut against the frigid January wind, I hurried through the gate and into the backyard. I unlocked the outer door, then the second door that led into my basement apartment.

“Twiggy?” I called as I descended the stairs. “I’m home!”

I paused a few steps from the bottom to squint at my phone. Ezra had responded to my anxious questions with a message that the three of them were home and nothing crazy had happened. Shortly after, Aaron had confirmed that Kai was locked in his room and didn’t want to talk to anyone. Aaron and Ezra would keep an eye on the electramage and update me in the morning.