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“No.” He looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Who do you think you are, some side-job detective?”

“Miloš, I need money. Marcus is offering one hundred thousand for finding Julian. I need this.”

“You know there are people you could just ASK for money.”

“And what? Become someone’s slave? No, thank you.”

He stares at me for a long moment, then exhales through his nose like I personally exhaust him. “I’ll take you. After that, I’ll drop you in the city center. To be sure you leave.”

We drive to the old train tracks with two of Miloš’s bodyguards in front. The Southside gets uglier away from the casino. The neighborhood is falling apart, cracked roads, dead factories, broken fences and addicts moving through alleys like ghosts with bad teeth. They take whatever they can get here. Not stardust, not nightrush, not even decent human coke. Death sludge, bone ash, rotten blood, things scraped from the wrong side of necromancy and sold to people with nothing left to lose. The junkies watch us in a way that makes my skin crawl.

It’s all pretty and cool when you’re doing a purple line of stardust in a velvet booth. The fantasy ends when you’re sitting in a ditch, injecting rotten death blood into your veins. But addiction is addiction. I just have more class.

Miloš leads me behind an abandoned building and points to a ditch near the tracks.

“Ghouls dumped them here. Sloppy. I think some junkies scared them off before they finished the job.”

“Ghouls?”

“Yeah. We found footage. Later, when we caught them, their brains were fried.”

Fucking ghouls. There is nothing I hate more. Walking, rotting death. Ugh.

I crouch in the ditch and look around. Nothing obvious. No body parts. No ritual markings. No blood trail. Just dirt, old trash, cigarette butts, and the stale stink of death magic.

“The bodies?” I ask.

“We burned them.”

Of course.

I walk in circles, turning the same useless thoughts over and over. Everything I find leads me to more problems or dead ends.

Then something changes. A faint tingling crawls over my fingertips as I pass one spot. It’s like a static shock from a sweater in winter. I immediately stop and brush dirt aside with the toe of my boot. There is something there. Kneeling down, I notice something glinting beneath the dirt. A flash of silver.

An invitation.

The masquerade.

The same silver card from the party I attended last week. And on it, a red stain. Must be Julian’s blood. Powerful enough for me to feel it.

Miloš leans closer. “You know what that is?”

“Yeah.” I wipe dirt from the card and try to keep my voice casual. “Just some party from last week.”

Maybe I wasn’t the last person that saw Julian that night. What did the Silver witches want from him? I slip the invitation into my pocket.

On the way back, Miloš drops me near a hotel in the center. “What are you going to do?”

“Keep asking questions.”

“You know curiosity is the first step to hell.”

“I’m already there.”

I get out and cross toward Sava’s BMW waiting by the curb. As I open the door, a strange feeling of pressure crawls across the back of my neck. I pause with one hand on the frame and scan the street. People move everywhere. Hotel guests, drivers, tourists, businessmen, women with shopping bags, someone smoking under the awning. Nothing obvious. Nobody watching too long.

Still, I feel it.