Felix, the third officer, looked up from his monitor. Dark circles smudged the skin under his eyes, his goatee was muddled from several days without maintenance, and his blond hair was tangled.

My gut clenched with guilt. Felix was Zora’s husband. He probably hadn’t slept properly since she’d been injured.

“Felix,” Ezra said with a frown. “You’re working tonight?”

“Darius offered to take my shifts, but I—I needed a distraction.” He took a long drink from his coffee mug. “What can I help you with?”

“How is Zora?” I asked softly.

A faint smile lightened the exhaustion on his face. “Better. She’s awake on and off now. She asked about you. She was worried.”

“Oh, I’m so glad!” I rushed to his desk. “Can I see her? Can I bring her anything? What can I—”

“She needs a lot of sleep. I’ll let you know when she’s up for visitors.” He sat back. “What do you need?”

Biting my lip, I glanced at Ezra.

“Can you run a Vancouver PD search for us? Missing women under thirty, five and a half feet or shorter, with dark hair.”

Felix jotted that down. “Date range?”

“Last six months.”

“Sure. Give me a few minutes.”

As he typed rapidly on his keyboard, I shifted closer to Ezra and whispered, “You think the sorcerer could be targeting human women?”

“The mythic community is tiny. We don’t sit around when someone goes missing, and a dozen guilds combing the city for a killer makes it really hard to get away with anything. He might’ve switched to easier victims.”

As we waited, I surreptitiously peered from the aeromage to the guild officer and back. I hadn’t noticed it until seeing Felix’s weariness, but Ezra also had an air of exhaustion clinging to him. Though his warm complexion disguised the dark circles under his eyes, he had the look of someone who needed a lot more sleep.

Felix typed for a minute more, then the printer beside his desk whirred to life. A dozen pages spat onto the tray.

“There you go. Let me know if you need anything else.”

“Will do.” Ezra collected the pages. “Get some rest, Felix.”

We returned to our worktable and spread the pages out. Six women. Three had gone missing last year, and the police had clear suspects—a boyfriend, a mother-in-law, and a pimp. The other three …

“Reported missing January third,” I read off the first one. “Reported missing January eleventh. Reported missing January eighteenth.”

“Last Friday,” Ezra murmured.

“No bodies. No suspects. Disappeared on their way home.” I looked up at him. “It must be the sorcerer. He’s killed three times just this month?”

“I suspect that means he only arrived in town this month. If we check the Portland police database, we’ll probably find more cases like this.”

I shuddered. “He needs to be stopped.”

Ezra slid the most recent disappearance in front of me. “This one is our best shot.”

“Our best shot at what?”

“At finding the sorcerer. Are you busy tomorrow?”

“No …”

“Meet me here at nine a.m. and we’ll get started.” He tapped the page. “Her workplace first. We know what this guy looks like, which gives us an advantage the police don’t have. Someone must’ve seen the sorcerer scoping out the girl.”

“Right. Okay.” My brows pinched together. “What about Claude and his printout about you?”

He got to his feet. “Find one and we might find the other. See you tomorrow.”

“Sure.”

Crossing the room, he angled toward the stairs. Just before stepping out of sight, he glanced back. Our gazes met, and I shivered. His eyes were eerily expressionless, hiding his thoughts, but their intensity reminded me of a viper staring down its prey right before it struck.

He disappeared down the stairs, and I let out an explosive breath. Ezra Rowe, the Crow and Hammer mythic I most wanted to avoid, was now helping me find the albino sorcerer. On the plus side, he knew way more about investigating killers than I did.

On the downside, he was likely concealing a secret as dangerous as mine.

Chapter Fourteen

Talking to strangers was exhausting. I’d never had a stronger desire to live in the middle of a forest a thousand miles from another human being.

Bundled in my jacket and a sunshine-yellow scarf, I followed Ezra down the sidewalk. We’d spent the morning impersonating private investigators at the café where Yana Deneva had worked before disappearing a week ago. We’d asked her coworkers, and almost every customer who came in, when they’d last seen her and if they’d noticed an albino man.

Results: nothing. No one had seen the albino man. He must’ve gotten better at scoping his victims—or he hadn’t gone to her workplace.

I puffed out a breath and extended my stride to keep up with Ezra as we ascended the steps of an old four-story building with lots of windows. The lime-green sign above the entrance read, “Vancouver Community College.”

“Tori is taking classes here,” Ezra remarked as he opened the door. “Maybe it’s a good thing she’s away.”

“She’d be safe, though.” I patted the front of my jacket, absently checking for my infernus. “She isn’t the sorcerer’s type.”

“No, but the moment she learned a mythic was kidnapping and murdering young women from her neighborhood, she wouldn’t sleep until she personally kicked him face-first into the ground.”

I could see that. “Have you talked to her since she left?”

“No.” He looked away, speaking so quietly he couldn’t have intended for me to hear his next words. “I don’t want to talk to her.”

A cluster of chatting college students traipsed past, carrying large portfolio bags over their shoulders. Ezra adjusted his black beanie, untidy curls sticking out from beneath its knitted edge, and checked our info sheet on the victim.

“Yana was a theater student.” He looked around. “This way, I think.”

A few minutes later, we found ourselves standing at the back of a black-box theater room with tiered seating for a hundred people. A handful of students sat in the front row, and an older woman with her hair in a messy blond bun—the instructor, I assumed—stood in front of the stage. A young man paced back and forth, speaking passionately in iambic pentameter to his female costar.