Page 29

"Hazel, I have called you eight times knowing you won't pick up. Just… ask."

So, I described to him the symbol. Two lines curving off a third, a dot underneath. I told him it wasn't of witch origin and it wasn't Fae. Nobody in the house had ever laid eyes on it, and it belonged to a man who was walking around Cleveland twenty-six years ago and left no magical trace of himself anywhere in the world.

"Twenty-six years," he repeated, as if talking to himself more than me.

"Around then. And Danika searched every coven and every archive and every seer she could bribe or frighten for him. She got nothing out of any of it, and she's been at it my entire life." I pressed the heel of my hand into my eye until I saw colors. "That's why I need you to look somewhere she didn't."

"Where."

"A gas bill."

The pause on the line went on long enough that I pulled the phone away and checked the screen.

"…Say that again." Davon's voice came in a tone that suggested he thought I had finally lost my mind.

"A gas bill, Davon. A lease. A parking ticket. Whatever a man who was living in this city in the nineties would've had to put his name on." My voice broke somewhere in the middle of it and I didn't try to cover it up. "Nobody has ever looked at those. Not once in twenty-six years. Because there's no magic in a gas bill, so nobody with magic ever thought to check that."

The silence stretched longer this time.

"Davon."

"I'm here." Something scraped on the concrete. When he spoke again each word was set down carefully, like he was putting it somewhere it might break. "Are you asking me to find him?"

"Yes."

"Because eleven days ago I was on a floor with tape on my face like a sacrificial lamb because of you, and I had nothing to do with any of that magic mumbo jumbo."

"I know."

"I'm not saying I'm not going to help you." He blew a long breath through his nose again. "I'm saying I want you to know I'm aware of how messed up this whole thing is. That's all. That's the entire thing I wanted to say to you when I kept calling."

"Okay."

"Thank you." He shuffled around, his clothes rustling with the movement. "There's a basement on West Third. Property records, liens, traffic citations, every lease filed in this county since fifty-eight. Half of it's on microfiche and the machine eats quarters. Nobody goes down there but me and a guy called Ernie."

"I don't have a name to give you. I don't have anything."

"You've got a symbol, a year, and a city." A pen clicked. He always clicked a pen rapidly when he was brainstorming. "That's more than I get on most days. Give me the symbol again and go slow, I'm drawing it on an old receipt from Walmart and I'm bad at this."

I kept thinking how messed up it was that Davon was ready to put everything on the line to help me, and how shitty I'd treated him from day one. Digging through the bags of random snacks I pulled out a packet of pretzels and attacked them with gusto. Sasha was awake when I came back out of the pantry, mouth full of garlicky pretzel bites.

Somebody had put her on the long bench by the door with a folded quilt under her head. A bowl of Amber's soup had gone cold beside her with the spoon standing straight up in it, untouched, and she was picking dried blood out of her hairline and flicking it onto the floorboards with her thumbnail.

Two years of running had done something to her face. The bone structure was still the same, unfortunately. She should be as ugly on the outside as she was on the inside. But Hecate didn't roll that way, I guess. Sasha had been the prettiest girl in the entire coven and she'd known it before she could walk. But everything had changed lately for her, and now she had the eyes of a woman who sleeps in twenty-minute increments.

"There's a bowl right there," I said.

"I know."

"You're flicking that dried blood on Amber's floor."

"I'm aware of what I'm doing, Byrne." She didn't stop. If anything she did it more deliberately, which was so exactly the girl I remembered that I had to look at the ceiling for a second or go strangle her where she was lying down. "I got three blankets, did you see? The big guy with the mismatched eyes brought them. Came in twice to check I was breathing, then stood in that doorway about ten minutes doing nothing at all."

"That's Alex."

"Why."

"Why what?"