Without waiting for an invitation, I took the guest chair. “Do what?”

She pulled her chair up and leaned across her desk blotter. “How do you not work here and still manage to make my life miserable?”

I tried an apologetic smile. “It’s a knack?”

She glared. “I’m not amused.”

“Why don’t you clue me in to the problem?”

Her eyes flicked to the door for a fraction of a second. “Dylan macBain.”

I shrugged. “I’m not responsible for him.”

She rubbed her neck in frustration. “If I have to hear one more story about what great fun it was working with you ‘back in the city,’ which I assume he means that slab of concrete and garbage on the Hudson River, I will not be responsible for the removal of his tongue.”

I exaggerated looking up in pleasant memory. “Yeah, it was fun working with me back then.”

She growled. “You must have used up all the fun part before you came here.”

“So, I’m guessing you’re not happy with the current job share?”

She huffed and turned back to the window. “It’s only procedural. It’ll be cleared up in another day or two, and Mr. Wonderful will be on his way back to the city.” She used her fingers to make air quotation marks when she said “the city.”

I leaned back. “He’s just doing his job, Keev. He’s good at it. Like you said, he’ll be gone soon.”

She didn’t move. “How’d you like me to sign off on that visa request?”

I had been banned from entering Germany. For more than six months, I had been trying to persuade Keeva to let me have a diplomatic visa from the Guild to go there and hunt down Bergin Vize. The Germans weren’t pursuing him, and I wanted to see him face justice. Besides being responsible for my loss of abilities, he had a litany of terrorist crimes to his name. Keeva had denied my request every time I asked, so I decided not to sound enthusiastic. “Sure.”

Keeva whirled back to her desk with a sarcastic smile. “Sorry, my signing privileges have been revoked.”

I disappointed her by chuckling. “At least you made me laugh this time. I thought you were going to bribe me to do something.”

She narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips. “Hmm. Interesting. Let me get back to you on that.”

“Come on, Keeva. It can’t be that bad.”

She sighed. “Not only does he talk about you incessantly; he shadows me on everything I do, which is very little.”

I had sympathy pangs for her. I knew what it was like to be sidelined by the Guild for reasons beyond my control. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s fair you’re on suspension. It wasn’t your fault.”

“I know that. I don’t understand why Ceridwen’s being such an ass about it.”

Keeva is always careful about appearances and her political gamesmanship. “Oh, my, my! Did I just hear you insult a queen?”

She gave me a smug smile. “Even if you do tell her I said that, I doubt she’d listen. She’s not exactly on your list of admirers at the moment.”

“Word travels fast.”

“All joking aside, Connor. You should be careful. She is a queen. If you must annoy her, please leave me out of it.”

That was the Keeva I knew, always watching her own back. “I’ll keep that in mind. Anyway, I have something you can do without permission. I need a copy of a Guild file.”

Keeva’s expression brushed up against a sneer. “Why don’t you ask your little friend in the basement?”

Meryl wasn’t one of Keeva’s favorite people, precisely because Keeva didn’t impress her. I didn’t rise to her bait on that. “Because I thought you could give me a little insight on the case. The Boston P.D. file says you were the agent in charge.” Appealing to Keeva’s vanity tended to work like a charm, and Murdock did say I should charm her.

“Which one?”

“Olivia Merced.”

Keeva considered, then nodded as she remembered. “I know the name. She was part of the Ardman case. Liddell Viten.”

Typical of the Guild to name the case after the fey victim and not the human one. “Merced is dead. So is a guy named Josef Kaspar.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Murder-suicide?”

I frowned. “No. Why would you say that?”

“He was her fiancé before Viten showed up. Never got over it. I think he was homeless. In fact, he figured out Viten was fey and turned him in to the Guild hoping Merced would go back to him. That woman annoyed the heck out of me with her constant calls about him. I told her to call Boston P.D.”

Once again, the Guild took a case only to screw over the human-normal element. Merced never got her justice. I ran down the basic details of the current case. “They were ritually murdered the same way. You probably have the report from Murdock here somewhere.”

“If that’s an ogham curse, I’ve never heard it.”

“Well, you’ve connected the two murders. We definitely should look at the file.”

She sighed. “I’ll send the report to Murdock. I’m so depressed, it wouldn’t be any fun to say no.”

Keeva glanced out the window. “Boston wasn’t the only place Liddell Viten scammed women. He had a partner in New York named Rhonda Powell. He killed her for some reason. When we were transferring him there for a court hearing, he overpowered his guards and escaped into the storerooms. He seriously injured three people before he was taken down.”

“You took him out?”

She shook her head, a curious and smug gleam in her eye. “She didn’t tell you? Meryl Dian killed him.”

Meryl wasn’t in her office. Given our conversation in my apartment, I was surprised she hadn’t mentioned Viten. I searched the subbasement, but the storerooms were all closed. I called her cell. She still wasn’t answering. I kept pulling my cell phone out to check the ringer volume, but it was fine. She wasn’t calling. Yet. I hoped “yet.” No one I ran into at the Guildhouse had seen her. I tried searching the building, but security spotted me and showed me the door.

I wondered why Meryl hadn’t told me about Viten. Everybody has at least one thing they don’t share. Briallen hinted about dark things in her own past, things she didn’t want to talk about. I kept repeating that to myself. There were things in my own past I hadn’t told Meryl. But I did tell her the worst thing I ever did. She had to know that. I had to shake off the feeling she didn’t trust me. Maybe after Forest Hills, she didn’t think anything else needed to be said.

Which brought me to huddling in the Guildhouse garage bay to see if I could catch her leaving the building. The security guards down on the ramp checked on me at irregular intervals. At some point, they decided I wasn’t a threat, but they still kept tabs on my movements around the garage door. The weather had turned cold, enough to threaten frost in some places around the city. The wind made it feel colder, so I used the building to protect myself as much as I could, which wasn’t much. I was cold.

The evening exodus of Guild employees had passed by at least an hour. Car after car had driven up from the deep basement garage. Drivers eyed me like the security guards had, probably wondering who was the nut with the too-thin leather coat who was bouncing on his heels. Someone handed me a dollar, which was nice.

A high-pitched engine whine echoed up from the garage, and Meryl’s black MINI Cooper appeared. I stepped in the travel lane when the car hit the bottom of the ramp. Meryl’s orange hair was hard to miss in the lurid glare of vapor lights. The car engine revved, then the car surged upward. Meryl’s face was expressionless as she sped toward me. Instinctively, my pointless body shields flashed on as the car neared the top. Meryl slammed on the brakes and stopped within inches of my knees. She waved.

I ignored my racing heart as I walked around to her window. “If I pay, will you go for a drink?”

She grinned. “Get in.”

Meryl kept her car immaculate. She didn’t say anything, but I knew she checked out my shoes as I got in to make sure I wasn’t tracking in dirt. She turned into traffic through Park Square, tore around the monument in the center, and parked in the loading zone in front of the Craic House, an old pub that attracted a lot of Guild employees. We got out of the car, and Meryl tossed her keys to a guy who looked like a bouncer.