She sketched the circle and its patterns on the back of one of the police reports—Greek for sure, wasn’t that rounded w omega?—being careful not to close the loops completely on her sketch.

To work spells required talent and intent, but magic was tricky. A spell could look inert and be active. Sylvie had seen men killed with a simple talisman held the wrong way; a spell that vanished a young man beyond the reach of a god was best treated like toxic waste. She needed a witch.

Luckily for her, she knew one, and one who owed her favors. Sylvie left the underground and rejoined the sky, tugging her cell from her pocket. Val Cassavetes was due a phone call; Sylvie just hoped she didn’t check her caller ID. Val might owe her favors, but that didn’t mean she liked doing them.

Sylvie scrolled through the stored numbers and swore. Idiot, she cursed herself. So busy trying to end her connections to the supernatural world, the first thing she’d done, even before packing the office, was purge her phone of all non-real-world contacts—Val Cassavetes included.

She punched in another number before she could think about it, one memorized in her fingertips. She hadn’t wanted to, and God, Alex was going to gloat. Going to laugh and say I told you so, and don’t you regret taking my key? If Alex even spoke to her.

The phone picked up, and Alex answered, a little breathless; lost track of her cell phone for the millionth time, Sylvie thought.

“Syl? God, are you okay? Where the hell are you?”

“Chicago.” Sylvie answered the only real question in the lot, her voice strangely rough. “I need Val’s number. Can you get it?” Straight to business, in and out, disconnect, and go back to shutting her out. The only safe way.

“No sweat,” Alex said. There were faint background noises that Sylvie recognized, the sounds of surf and traffic, and a conch-fritter vendor in full dinnertime patter.

“Where are—”

“The office, duh,” Alex said. “I’ve been waiting. Worried sick, if you care. Do you even have a clue how worried I was—you’ve been running on empty since the satanists—” Her voice caught, but continued, growing in strength. “You shut me out, pack up all your stuff, and then . . . then you just disappear!” There was no sound for a moment but Alex’s breath, panting with anger and fear.

“Alex—” Sylvie said, meaning to say something, to apologize somehow. “How’d you get in?”

Alex laughed, a bark of unamused sound. “I’m quicker than you give me credit for, Syl. I stole the key back. Fast fingers, remember? You should call your sister, she’s worried, too.”

“You called Zoe?” Sylvie asked. What the hell—

“Well, yeah,” Alex said. “Called your parents, too, but they were out of town. I thought you were having a melt-down. I thought—” Her breath caught, and Sylvie understood.

“You thought I might do something terminally stupid. Sorry, Alex. You should know better. Other people die. Not me.” Sylvie kept one eye on the dwindling crowd, wanting to be back downstairs looking at the spell

“No,” Alex said. “You’re too mean to die.”

“Damn straight,” Sylvie said. “You got the number or what?”

“Had to unpack a few unlabeled boxes,” Alex said. “But I got it.”

Sylvie waited. And waited. A gust of warm air rolled up from the railway entrance as a train passed through and rose clattering over the street.

“What are you doing in Chicago, Sylvie?”

Sylvie thought about throwing the cell phone to the street in a satisfying shatter of plastic and walking off. If she could recall even a glimmer of Val’s damn number—

“Sylvie—” Alex singsonged into the receiver.

“Missing person,” Sylvie gave in, pitching her voice lower as a group of teens walked by.

“Weird, obviously, or you wouldn’t be using Val. How weird?”

“The weirdest,” Sylvie said, biting her lip. She shouldn’t, she knew she shouldn’t. Keep her safe, she thought. Safe meant away from all of this. But Alex was her researcher, and so damn useful. “Ever hear of a family named Eumenides?”

“Eumenides?”

“Yeah, three sisters. Not good with friendly, and not scared of guns. Shifty, scary, savage kind of girls.”

“Hellascary girls,” Alex breathed. “Jesus, Syl. They are . . . You . . . Why are you asking?”

Sylvie could hear it, the thing she’d been hearing in Alex’s voice more and more frequently, beneath the brashness, a tendril of fear as she was pitchforked into one dangerous situation after another.

“Met ’em, didn’t like ’em. Now I’m working for someone who owns them.”

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” Alex chanted. “They’re not real—I mean, I never thought they were real. They’re myths.”

“Greek myths?” Sylvie said. I am the god of Justice. Greek lettering in the spell circle. The Olympus group.

“Yeah,” Alex said. “You think they’re the real deal? Not just sorcerers with a shtick?”

Sylvie remembered the bone-chilling paralysis she’d felt under their eyes, the small-rodent urge to curl up and die or run. With shape-shifters, the fear was always physical, that atavistic dread of being eaten alive; the sisters made her feel more than that. In their presence, Sylvie was aware of the fragility of her soul. “Yeah,” she whispered.

“Do you know how dangerous they are?”

“No,” Sylvie snapped, taking refuge in anger. “That’s why I’m asking.”

“They’re called the Kindly Ones, the Erinyes, sort of in a talismanic hope that respect will keep them off your back. But they’re also called the Furies.”

Sylvie twitched. That name she knew. Her blood cooled in her veins, raising goose bumps beneath her long sleeves. “A human could control them?”

“Hell no,” Alex said. “No one controls them. Not really. They’re punishers. Classically, they drive men mad for their sins, though I’ve heard they kill as well, or even destroy souls, depending on how much they want their victim to suffer. They’re family-obsessed in a way even the moral majority would shrink from—most of the sins they punish are crimes inflicted by a child upon parents. They’re unstoppable. They respect few gods, and obey only one.”

“The god of Justice,” Sylvie said.

“God? There is no god of Justice in the Greek pantheon, Syl. You gotta read more. There’s goddesses, weak things, Themis, Dike, but no god. If the Furies listen to any god, it’s Hera, who’s as mad as they are.”

“Doesn’t make sense,” Sylvie said. She kicked at a dropped cigarette butt, sending a faint red spark across the sidewalk. “They’re working for a man now. Kevin Dunne, proclaims himself the god of Justice. They cower before him, fawn on him. Hunt murderers for him, like some vigilante team of cops.”

“Oh that’s so not right,” Alex said. “He’s pulling something. There is no god of Justice. You want me to snoop into Dunne’s life?”

“Absolutely not,” Sylvie said, though she desperately wanted more information on Dunne. Knowing who she was working for had always been top of the list important to her, second only to the ultimate goal of a case.

Normally, she set Alex on every client’s bio, knowing that they always lied about something. Alex, who made nice with people, made even nicer with computers. Not this time. She’d have to piece his history together herself and hope she beat the clock.

“Sure?” Alex asked.

“Absolutely sure. Besides, I’ve got a suspicion someone’s already been doing that. It’s his boyfriend who’s missing.”

“Ransom? Blackmail?”

“Not yet,” Sylvie said. “And probably not; it’s been two weeks.”

“Cold trail,” Alex said. “If you don’t find a missing person within—”

“Yeah, yeah, we all watch TV. But it’s a little messier than that. The ISI’s involved,” Sylvie said. “It looks like one of the reasons we haven’t seen Demalion sniffing around at home is ’cause he’s here. Or at least, he was here the night Bran Wolf disappeared.”