Amalia tapped a lone page at the end of the row. Neat, masculine handwriting listed names and addresses, each one boldly crossed out.

“All places Claude has checked,” she said. “Look, this one, that’s a safe house we used three years ago. And that’s my cousin’s house. This one is my language tutor. Claude’s looked everywhere.”

“They’re all scratched out.” A flutter of satisfaction lightened my middle. “Wherever Uncle Jack has gone to ground, he’s outsmarted Claude.”

Amalia grinned ruefully. “Too bad he’s outsmarting us as well. Where the hell could he be?” She ran her finger down the list. “Look here—Katrine Fredericks. Calgary, Alberta. Look what he wrote!”

Beside the Calgary address were five scrawled words: Confirmed decoy. Kathy is alone.

“My stepmom is in Alberta?” Amalia exclaimed. “And Dad isn’t with her? Aunty Katrine is her sister, so I guess that makes sense. Well, at least I know where to find one of them now.” She shuffled through a few more documents, then picked up a stack of photos. “Ha, look at this. I must be, like, four years old.”

I leaned closer to see the photo of a blond girl staring aggressively into the camera. “Is that your mom with you?”

“Yep.” Amalia smiled at the equally blond woman with a similarly intense stare. “She died when I was eight, and Dad married Kathy a year later. I hated him for that for a long time.”

She flipped to the next photo. “That’s my great uncle. Oh, and this one is a fishing buddy of dad’s, but he died two years ago.”

She turned the picture over. “Deceased – illness” was scrawled across the back in red ink.

“Has Claude checked all of these?” she mused as she shuffled through the stack. “He’s been one busy …”

Trailing off, she stared at a snapshot of her dad beside an older man in camouflage and an orange vest, a rifle in one hand. A large, dead moose with a broad rack of antlers crowning its oblong head lay at their feet. Was it legal to hunt moose?

She checked the reverse side, which featured a single question mark in red ink, and whispered, “No way.”

“Drādah!” Zylas barked.

My head snapped up. Red light lit his body, and he dissolved into crimson power that flashed toward me. The human clothes he’d been wearing dropped to the floor in a lumpy puddle of fabric.

The infernus was still vibrating against my chest when the apartment door swung open. I jerked back, expecting Claude to walk through—but it wasn’t the summoner standing in the threshold.

Zora scowled at me, her sword case hanging over her shoulder and her leather jacket zipped up to her throat. Taye stood behind her, dark eyebrows arched high on his dusky face.

“Zora,” I gasped. “How—how did you … find … us?”

“Taye is a telethesian.”

My knees weakened with dismay. Telethesians were psychics with a supernatural ability to track people, especially mythics. Taye was the perfect partner for scoping the tower and searching out the vampires’ new location. Also perfect for tracking a suspicious contractor and her suspicious friend after they’d ditched a restaurant and run off into the downtown streets.

“So,” Zora drawled, hitching her sword case higher on her shoulder, “what’s going on?”

My mind had gone completely, uselessly blank, and I was painfully aware of Zylas’s abandoned clothes behind me. If Zora noticed them—and recognized them as my “friend’s” outfit …

“Uh …” I mumbled.

“You haven’t been part of this guild for long,” she said coolly, “so maybe you don’t know, but when we team up for jobs, we don’t leave our teammates in the dark.”

I blinked.

“Unless this isn’t related to your summoner investigation?”

“Uh, it is,” I stammered, “but it … it isn’t vampire related, so I didn’t think you—”

“It isn’t?” Taye interrupted in his deep, accented voice. “There are vampire traces everywhere. Plus, Zora, you’re glowing.”

“I’m glowing?” she repeated blankly. “Oh!”

She stuck her hand in her jeans pocket, where a faint red glow shone through the fabric, and withdrew a blood-tracker artifact. I gasped fearfully. Vampires were nearby?

“Hmm.” Zora turned in a slow circle. The faint light brightened as she aimed it toward the kitchen nook with Claude’s desk. She strode closer and the glow increased. Taye, Amalia, and I followed cautiously.

Zora raised it higher, then lowered it toward the floor. The glow intensified as it drew level with the desk’s bottom drawer.

“I don’t think there’s a vampire in there,” she said dryly.

She tugged on the drawer and it slid open. Inside was a metal case similar to a safety deposit box. Kneeling beside her, I lifted it out. The latch flipped easily, no lock or spell sealing it shut. Inside, two heavy-duty steel syringes were nestled in a foam insert. A third slot in the foam was empty. Above them were three vials of clear liquid marred by tiny bubbles.

I stared at the syringes, cold recognition flowing through me. I remembered Claude’s demon tossing one to Claude, the needle coated in Zylas’s blood. I remembered Zylas collapsing to his knees, clutching my waist as he struggled to stay upright, and Claude’s quiet, gloating words: A good summoner knows how to safely neutralize a demon.

“What on earth is this?” Zora asked, bewildered.

Amalia reached past me. She lifted a second metal case from the drawer and opened it. Instead of syringes, it held five sealed vials of dark liquid. She wiggled one out of the foam insert and held it up. Light refracted through the thick fluid, revealing its red tone.

Dark, thick blood. Demon blood.

“Zora,” Taye said sharply.

As one, we all looked at the blood tracker she held. The gem-like end was glowing brighter by the second.

For an instant, none of us reacted, then Taye backpedaled toward the center of the room, facing the open door. Zora dropped the blood tracker and grabbed the zipper of her weapon bag. Amalia snapped the case of blood shut and shoved it on top of the desk as she backed away.

I didn’t move, my mind spinning as pieces clicked into place—but the answers I now possessed had created more questions.

“Robin!” Amalia yelled in warning.

I looked up.

Three vampires filled the doorway. Red rings marked their eerie eyes and their fingers had elongated into deadly claws. The two males and a female, reflective sunglasses perched on top of their heads, wore jeans and jackets like every other pedestrian on the streets.

“Looky what we found,” a male crooned.

Zora pulled her sword from its sheath with a slithering rasp. The blade gleamed. “Out in the sunlight, bloodsuckers? How bold.”

The female vampire leered delightedly. “Not a problem … not for us.”

“We were waiting for a summoner.” The creepy male licked his lips. “Not pretty ladies.”

“Taye,” Zora called. “Get out of here. Use the patio.”

The telethesian rushed toward the sliding glass doors. Amalia shot me a questioning look and I nodded. She ran after the psychic and they disappeared outside.