HALF AN HOUR LATER I SAT AT MY DESK, THINKING up a proper amount of money to bill Ghastek for the capture of the vampire. The vamp was now deceased, but it didn't change the fact that I had caught it. The huge shaggy monstrosity that was Grendel sprawled at my feet. When I first found him, his fur had solidified into foul-smelling dreadlocks and the groomer ended up shaving the whole mess off. Now his fur had partially grown out and it looked like a karakul coat I once saw on one of the Guild's upper-class clients: short, curly, and glossy black. He even smelled halfway decent.

Grendel raised his head and licked my hand. I opened the top drawer, took out an oatmeal cookie, and offered it to him. He took it very carefully out of my hand and sucked it in without chewing, as if he hadn't been fed in a thousand years.

Over at the second desk, Andrea rummaged through a giant cardboard box she had dragged down from upstairs.

"There is a loup cage in one of the rooms," she said.

It was the biggest loup cage I'd ever seen too, eight feet wide, eight feet long, seven feet tall. They had to bring it into the office in pieces and assemble it in the room. The steel-andsilver-alloy bars were as thick as my wrist. All Pack offices came equipped with a loup cage. The shapeshifters knew better than anyone how quickly they could snap. But since I was technically a human, Jim kept trying to find some diplomatic name for it. He thought calling it a loup cage would scare off my clients.

"It's not a loup cage, you know," I told her. "It's a holding cell. Or safe room. Or secure room. I don't think Jim ever settled on a term he could live with."

"Aha. It's a loup cage." Andrea cleared her throat. "I touched it with my finger and it hurt. Is that in case of marital problems?"

"Did the Order return your sense of humor as part of the severance package?"

"Oh, burn. Burn!" Andrea hesitated. "Kate ... Are you happy? With Curran, I mean."

"When I can get out of my own way."

She glanced at me. "And the rest of the time?"

"The rest of the time I'm in a state of silent panic. I'm afraid it will end. I'll lose him. Lose Julie. Lose everyone."

"I've done that," Andrea said. "Lost everyone. It's a bitch." No kidding.

Andrea lifted a black firearm, holding it as if it were covered with slime. "This is a Witness 45. It has a molding flaw on the grip right here, see? If you fire it, it will blister your hand."

She picked up another gun. "This is a Raven 25. They haven't made them since the early nineties. I didn't even know they were still around. It's a cheap junk gun. They used to call them Saturday Night Specials. You can't put twenty rounds through it without it jamming, and the way this one looks, I wouldn't even risk loading it. It might blow up in my hand. And this? This is a Hi-Point, otherwise known as a Beemiller."

"Is that supposed to tell me something?"

She stared at me. "It's like the crappiest gun out there. Normal guns cost upward of half a grand. This costs like a hundred bucks. The slide is made out of zinc with aluminum."

I looked at her.

"Look, I can bend it with my hand."

I'd also seen her bend a steel rod with her hand, but now didn't seem the best time to mention it.

Andrea put the Hi-Point on the desk. "Where did you get these again?"

"They're surplus guns from the Pack. Confiscated, from what I understand."

"Confiscated during violent altercations?"

"Yes."

Andrea sagged into her chair. Her blue-tipped hair drooped in defeat. "Kate, if someone used a gun against the shapeshifters and now the shapeshifters have said gun, it wasn't a very good gun, was it?"

"I'm not arguing with you. I didn't have a choice. That's what was here when I moved in."

Andrea extracted a fierce-looking silver handgun from the box. Her eyes widened. She looked at it for a moment and tapped it on the corner of her desk. The gun responded with a dry pop.

She looked at me with an expression of abject despair. "It's plastic."

I spread my arms at her.

Andrea tossed the plastic gun to Grendel. "Here, chew on this."

The poodle sniffed it.

A careful knock echoed through the door.

Grendel surged to his feet and snarled, bouncing up and down. It was probably the PAD come to shut me down. Knock, knock, let us in, we brought a court order and a howitzer ... "Come in!"

The door swung open and a redheaded woman carrying a manila envelope stepped into my office. Tall, lean, and longlimbed, she moved like a fencer, light but sure-footed. You had a feeling that if lightning struck her, she'd lean out of the way and stab it through before it hit the ground. She wore khaki pants, a turtleneck, and a light leather vest. A leather glove hid her left hand. The long rapier on her sword belt and tall boots completed the outfit. I'd seen her before. Her name was Rene and the last time we'd met, she was running security for the Midnight Games, an illegal gladiatorial arena featuring things that went bump in the night.

Behind her two men brought up the rear. Both wore tactical vests and carried enough weapons to take on a small army and win. The man on the right was young, blond, and walked with a light spring in his step that telegraphed a seasoned martial artist. The man on the left was leaner, older, and darker, with a distinct military air and a small scar on his neck. The scar had ragged edges. Something had clawed his neck at some point, but he had lived to fight another day.

Rene's dark gray eyes regarded me.

"I'm sorry, milady," I said. "Athos, Porthos, and Aramis just left."

"They said something about riding to England with d'Artagnan to retrieve some diamonds," Andrea added.

"You two think you're really funny," Rene said.

"We have our moments," I said. "Down, Grendel."

The dog showed Rene his teeth, just in case she decided to try something funny, and lay down to gnaw on his gun.

Rene looked at Grendel. "What in the world is that?"

"That's our mutant attack poodle," I told her.

"Is he chewing on a gun?"

"It's not a real gun," Andrea said.

Rene sighed. "Of course not. That would be irresponsible of you, wouldn't it?"

The older man on Rene's left leaned to her. "This might be a bad idea."

She waved him off.

The blond man on Rene's right squinted at Andrea's desk. "Is that a Hi-Point?"

Andrea turned beet red. I leaned forward. "What can we do for the Midnight Games?"

"The Red Guard no longer works with the Midnight Games." Rene carefully folded her long frame into my client chair. The two guys behind her remained standing. "In the aftermath of recent events, we had to answer a lot of questions and we chose to disengage from the venue."

Translation: you ruined our fun and screwed me out of a job. "I thought you were an independent hire."

She shook her head. "No, I'm Red Guard. Have been for the last twelve years."

Twelve years in the Red Guard was nothing to sneeze at. "In that case, what can we do for the Guard?"

"We would like to hire you."

Come again? "In what capacity?"

Rene folded her hands on her knee. "We've misplaced an item and we need it retrieved."

"Do you know where the item is?"

She grimaced at me. "If we knew who had it, we wouldn't need to hire you, would we?"

"So the item wasn't misplaced, it was stolen."

"Yes."

Right. "Anything you say in this office is confidential, but not privileged, meaning it stays between us unless we're hit with a subpoena. It would save all of us a lot of time if you just lay it out, so we can decide if we'll take the job or not."

Rene opened the envelope and shook the contents into her hand. A photograph slid into her palm. She placed it on the desk.

A man who looked to be in his early fifties stared back at me. Curly brown hair, going gray; a pleasant enough face, neither handsome nor ugly. Deep lines around the mouth. Sad eyes. He looked like he'd been gutted by life and managed to pull himself together, but some part of him hadn't quite made it.

"Adam Kamen," Rene said. "Thirty-eight years old. Brilliant engineer, genius applied-magic theorist. We were hired to guard him while he worked on a valuable project. Adam was financed by three separate investors."

"How well?" I asked.

"Well enough to pay for an elite guard unit."

That was some serious cash. Elite Red Guard units didn't come cheap. "We put Adam into a safe house in the middle of nowhere. The property was protected by two defensive wards: an innerperimeter spell that shielded the house and the workshop and a wider, outer-perimeter spell that protected a quarter-acre area with the house in its center. The house was watched by a crew of twelve people: four per eight-hour shift. I cherry-picked every one of the guards. All of them had passed background checks and showed long records of distinguished service."

Rene leaned back. "Last night Adam and the prototype vanished. His absence and the mutilated body of one of the guards was discovered this morning during a shift change."

Okay. "Mutilated how?"

The line of Rene's mouth hardened. "You would have to see for yourself. I want you to find Adam and retrieve the device."

Figured.

"Which of those two is top priority?

"Obviously my employers would prefer to recover both. The official line says the device has priority; personally, I want Adam saved."

Once a bodyguard, always a bodyguard. Rene had been hired to guard Kamen, and she took her job personally.

Rene braided her long fingers on her knee. "Right now only four people besides the guards and those of us in this room are aware of this issue. Three of those four are Adam's investors, and the fourth is my direct superior. It's essential that no information is leaked. The damage to the Red Guard's reputation would be catastrophic."

Lovely. We would have to look for him without making any noise. My investigative technique mostly consisted of going through the list of interested parties and making as much noise as possible, until the culprit lost his patience and tried to shut me up.

Rene focused on me. "Being subtle is very important in this case."

"We can do subtle," I assured her.

"It's our middle name," Andrea added.

For some odd reason Rene didn't look convinced.

I took out a pad of paper and a pen. "What was the nature of the device?"

Rene shook her head. "We weren't privy to that information. To my knowledge, it was never successfully tested."

Okay. "I need the inventor's full name, address, family, and known associates." "His name is Adam Kamen. We know that he is thirty-eight, a widower. His wife had diabetes and was undergoing dialysis for kidney failure. Eventually, the disease killed her. Adam was severely traumatized by her death. His work is connected to that event, but I can't tell you how. He spoke without an accent, he didn't seem religious, and he expressed no strong political views."

"How long have you had him?" Andrea wrote a note on her own pad.

"Ninety-six days. He had no visitors while in our custody. Beyond that, we know nothing: no address, no known relatives, no information about enemies or friends." Rene picked up another piece of paper. "This is the latest image of the device in question."

On the picture a metal cylinder stood level with a worktable, approximately three feet tall and probably a foot in diameter. Odd patterns covered the gray metal, some pale, almost white, some with a familiar yellow sheen of gold, others a dozen shades of silver and blue. They twisted and overlapped one another, some so elaborate it must've taken hours of work and jewelers' tools to create them.

I glanced at Rene. "The main cylinder is iron?"

"Iridium. The squiggles on it are gold, platinum, cobalt, and lead. He has half of the periodic table in that thing."

Hmm, all metals, all rare, all expensive, and all took enchantment extremely well, except for lead. Lead was magically inert: magic bounced off it like dry peas from a wall. Why build a magic device and add lead to it? "Any idea at all what it was supposed to do?"

Rene shook her head.

"Do you have any thoughts as to who might have wanted to steal him or his device?" Andrea asked.

"No."

I tapped the paper. "Can you give me the names of the three investors?"

"No."

Andrea frowned. " `No' as in you don't know who they are, or `no' as in you won't tell us?"

"Both."

I tapped the paper with my pen. "Rene, you want us to find you-don't-know-who and to retrieve his you-don't-know-what for you-won't-tell-me-whom?"

Rene shrugged. "You will have full access to his workshop, the safe house, and the body. You can interview the guards and you will have our full cooperation. I'll give you a code and advise the master sergeant that you'll be coming. The investors' identities are confidential by contract--if they want to approach you, they can, but we can't force them to do it, so my hands are tied there. As to Adam, we were hired to guard his body and his work, not interview him about his family history." "I heard background checks are a standard requirement for the Red Guard." I tapped my paper with my pencil.

"They are."

"So why didn't you do them?"

"Because the client gave us a truckload of money." Rene smiled, a controlled sharp baring of teeth. Some unsettling emotion flickered in her eyes and vanished. "We aren't investigators. We're bodyguards. We need a professional to resolve this situation. Hiring the Mercenary Guild is out of the question: they don't know how to be discreet. Hiring the Order isn't an option either: I don't want their fingers in our pie, because they'll try to claim ownership of the whole thing. That leaves us with a private firm. I know you, I've seen you work, and I know you will do it cheaper than anybody else in town, because you have no choice. You opened up shop a month ago and you have no clients. You need a significant case to put your name back on the map, or you'll go out of business. If you succeed in assisting us, the Red Guard will publicly endorse you."

Rene nodded to the guy on her left. He set a small duffel bag on the table. Rene pulled it open. Five stacks of bills looked back at me.

"Ten grand now and ten grand plus expenses when Adam and/or the device are returned to us. Twenty grand if Mr. Kamen is alive and free of life-threatening injuries."

Twenty grand and an endorsement from the best bodyguard outfit in the city or sitting on my ass, drinking motor oil coffee. Let me think ...

Rene watched me. There it was again, an odd flicker of distress in her eyes. This time I was ready for it and I caught it--fear. The woman who used to run security for Midnight Games was scared out of her wits, and she was trying her best to hide it.

I glanced at the two men behind her. "Can we speak in private?"

Rene waved her hand, and the twin walking arsenals departed.

I leaned forward. "There are several experienced PI firms in the city that would be happy to take care of this for twenty grand. The Pinkertons, John Bishop, Annamarie and her White Magnolia, any of them would take that paycheck and say thank you. But you came here."

Rene crossed her arms on her chest. "Are you trying to talk me out of hiring you? A peculiar business strategy."

"No, I'm stating a fact. We both know that my reputation is now shit, because Ted Moynohan told anyone who would listen that I was the stray rock in the gears of his great plan."

On the right Andrea's jawline hardened--she'd clenched her teeth.

"Moynohan says a lot of things," Rene said. "He's damaged goods, and nobody likes excuses." "I have no formal investigative training and my r?sum? is short. My point is, if I had lost a valuable object and my career were riding on retrieving it, I wouldn't hire me. I might hire Andrea, because she has both experience and formal training. She can tell you the height of the attacker from the trigonometry of the blood spatter, while I'm fuzzy on what trigonometry is. Hiring us because of Andrea would make sense, but you had no idea she worked here until you walked through the door. The only time you've seen me do my thing was in the Pit." Where I killed things with much bloodshed.

Rene gave me a flat look. "Go on."

"You didn't come here looking for a detective. You came here looking for a hired killer. So why don't you level with me. Why do you need me?"

A strained silence hung between us. A second passed. Another.

"I don't know what Adam was building," Rene said, her voice barely above a whisper. "I know that when I told my direct supervisor that Adam and the device were missing, he called his family and told his wife to pack the children, throw the bare essentials into the car, leave for North Carolina, and not come back until he called them."

"He told his family to get out of town?" Andrea blinked.

Rene nodded. "My brother is bedridden. He can't be moved. I can't take him out of the city. I'm stuck in Atlanta." She leaned forward, her face grim. "You care about your friends, Daniels. Enough to jump on a sword for them. You have a lot to lose and if you get worried enough, you'll strong-arm the Pack into helping you, which is a lot more manpower than I can muster. Find Adam and find his device for me. Before the thief turns it on and does something we both will regret."

THE DOOR SHUT BEHIND RENE. ANDREA ROSE AND moved to the narrow window, watching her and her goons cross the parking lot to their vehicle. "I've been hired for two hours and we already have a client and a job from hell."

I took five thousand dollars out of the bag. Andrea moved away from the window, and I handed the duffel with the rest of the money to her.

"What for?"

"Gun budget."

Andrea ran her thumb, riffing through the stack of twenty-dollar bills. "Cool. We need ammo."

"Did she look scared to you?" I asked.

Andrea grimaced. "She is a cold bitch and she masks it well, but I spent my entire childhood reading faces so I'd know where the next punch was coming from. And I'm a predator. I lock onto fear, because it signals prey. She's really rattled. We're probably going to regret this." "Maybe we should take the other offer. Oh wait. We don't have another offer."

"You are so witty, Miss Daniels. Or is it Mrs. Curran?"

I gave her my hard stare. She barked a short laugh.

I set my bag on my desk and unzipped it to check the contents. Dead bodies had the annoying tendency to decay. The sooner we got to the scene, the better.

Andrea checked her guns. "So Ted told everyone you ruined his parade?"

"Pretty much."

"One day I'll kill him, you know."

I glanced at her. She was deadly serious. Killing Ted would unleash a storm of catastrophic proportions. He was the head of the Atlanta Chapter of the Order. Every knight in the country would hunt us down to their last breath. Of course, Andrea knew all that.

"I'm over it." I swiped my backpack off the desk. "Ready to go?"

"I was born ready. Where is this workshop anyway?"

I checked the directions Rene had given me. "Sibley Forest."

Andrea swore.