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"She never searched the human records," he said.

"Nobody ever searches the human records." My heart was going wild like an electric hammer. "There's no magic in a lease agreement. There's no power in a parking ticket or a hospital form or a name in the corner of somebody's file. It's the most boring paperwork in the world and it is the one place my grandmother would never in a hundred years think to look."

The room was very quiet.

Then Sissily said, in a small voice, "Hazel. We don't have anybody who can pull human records."

But the thing is, we did.

We had a man who could pull human records. We'd had him the whole time. A detective with archive access and a filing cabinet full of unsolved cases, who I'd dumped four years ago for telling me to register as human since I didn't have any magic anyway, and who eleven days ago had been dragged into a ritual chamber with his hands tied behind his back and tape across his mouth so a room full of High Priests could use him as leverage to make me behave.

I hadn't called him once.

Not one time in eleven days did I check if he was okay. I hadn't called the hospital, I hadn't called the precinct, and I hadn't let myself sit still long enough to work out why.

I looked down at the blood drying on my fingers.

Lesson number twenty-five: the person you're most afraid to call is usually the exact person you owe a phone call to.

"I need a phone," I told the room at large.

Chapter Five

My phone was in the bottom of my handbag under a hairbrush, two receipts and a lipstick that had been dead since April. The cellphone had been switched off for eleven days, too. I started seeing a significance with that damn number.

I'd like to tell you that was operational security. Alex had asked us to keep them off unless we needed them, something about the coven being able to ping a tower and narrow us down to a square mile. I had nodded along like a good little fugitive because I didn’t care one way or another. But the truth was sitting right there in the dark screen when I fished it out and looked at my own reflection in it. If the phone was off, nobody could call me.

Sissily's candles were still out, so the only light in the room came in through the window, that low orange wash the city throws up onto the underside of the clouds. It made everything in there the color of weak tea. The water stain shaped like Portugal elongated along with the rest of the shadows. The pile of shoes in the corner blended in with the floor. River, sitting on the floor with his back against my dresser and his knees up, watching me the way you'd watch someone clumsy handle a grenade.

The screen lit up my face when I finally held the button down.

It took its time waking up. Then it started buzzing, and it did not stop for fifteen full seconds. I sat there on the edge of the bed where I parked my ass in my search of the device, while a fortnight of the world caught up with me.

“Four voicemails.” I announced it like a death sentence.

"Hazel." Sissily had gone very still on the window seat.

"I'm fine."

"The face you are wearing says otherwise. Believe me, fine does not come close when I look at you right now."

"I've got several faces but this particular one you’re looking at I was born with." I scrolled with my thumb and my stomach dropped through the mattress. "None of the voicemails are from Danika. They're all from Davon."

The oldest one was eight days old. The newest was from that morning, at 6:14 a.m., which is not an hour a man calls anybody unless he's been awake all night.

I put it on speaker because I did not trust myself to be the only one who heard whatever he had to say.

"It's me," Davon’s voice came out of that little speaker sounding like it had been dragged through a hedge. The air in the room went tight it was difficult to breathe, or it could’ve been my guilt choking me. My gaze jumped to River and I couldn’t look away from the intensity there. "for the third time. I'm assuming you're alive because I'd have heard otherwise, I hope… and I'm assuming you're not calling me back because that's a thing you do." A pause, and a rustle, the particular echo of a man sitting in a car with the window down judging by the distant honks coming through. "Look. I'm not calling about that night. I'm not calling to yell at you, and I'm not calling to ask you what any of it was. I'm calling because things are happening in my city, people are going missing or end up dead, and I've got a filing cabinet full of them with nobody to show it to." Another pause, longer this time where all of us could hear him fight with his breath to stay calm. "Call me back, Hazel. Or don't. But if you don't, at least be somewhere you think it’s safe with a thick wall around it. I don’t think any of us are safe anymore."

The voicemail ended.

Nobody said anything. The radiator clanked. Twice.

"I’m a horrible person," I muttered under my breath. My thumb was hovering over his name but not landing on it. "He's been calling me for eight days from his car because he is paranoid thanks to me, and I've been upstairs having a personality crisis about a bread roll instead of checking on him."

"You didn't know," Sissily offered dutifully sounding offended on my behalf. I didn’t deserve her loyalty on best of days.

"I turned my phone off so I wouldn't know. There's a difference and we both know it."