“Don’t be vague,” Sylvie said. “If you’ve got something bad to say, might as well get it over with.”

“Maudits,” Val said. “Specific enough for you?”

“Fuck,” Sylvie said, closing her eyes. “I thought they’d disbanded, decovened, or whatever sorcerers do when you destroy their leaders.”

“We stopped them,” Val said. “Once. Hardly a final battle. They must have found a new figurehead.”

“Lovely,” Sylvie said. “ ’Cause their last choice was oh so good for the world.” The Maudits were bad news; a cabal of blood-crazed sorcerers could hardly be anything but. Last time Sylvie had run into them, they’d been intent on resurrecting Val’s ex-husband, a voodoo king with one hell of a mean streak. Sylvie doubted their tastes had improved in the time since.

“Sloppy, though,” Val said, looking over the spell, breaking Sylvie’s darkening thoughts. “Far from their usual standards—maybe you’re dealing with a splinter group. Last I’d heard, they had begun to argue their methods—since they were so spectacularly unsuccessful last time. Beaten by two women and a child.” Val’s lips quirked. “Serves them right, those chauvinistic blowhards.”

“Yeah, yeah, we kicked their collective ass. Yay us, moving on,” Sylvie said. “The spell is sloppy? Meaning what exactly?”

Val slipped off her loose jacket, laid it on the concrete, and settled herself on it. “Well, for one thing it’s active, which it shouldn’t be. Not if it’s swallowed its prey.”

“So it is a snatch-and-grab machine,” Sylvie said, toeing the painted curlicues thoughtfully, “not a curse or a kill.”

Val fiddled with the platinum hoop in her ear, a habit Sylvie recognized from high school, from a hundred scenes of Val before a test, before a big date, before lying her ass off to get away with coming home drunk. Sylvie braced herself for trouble.

“Not exactly. It’s an oubliette spell. A magical ambush keyed to a specific person. It sucks the target down the minute they cross it, then it shuts down and disappears. We shouldn’t be able to see it at all. A spell like this is either hidden and active, or triggered and gone. The fact that it’s visible at all tells me it’s triggered, but not complete. Normally, I’d say that its prey got away. God only knows how—we’re not talking a beginner spell here. But you say that Wolf is missing?”

“Vanished,” Sylvie said. “In the space of a heartbeat according to my client.”

“Witnessed it?” Val paused in her fidgeting.

“Felt it,” Sylvie said. “How’s that for proof?”

“Don’t scoff,” Val said mildly. “Talents can feel such things. Is he—”

“Talented? Oh hell yeah,” Sylvie said.

“So we can assume he’s right, and the boy’s gone down.” Val set her earrings to swinging again, stilled them. Noting the nerves, Sylvie was prepared for the hesitation in Val’s words, the softness of her tone. “You know he’s dead, right?”

Quick shock touched her back and cheeks with an internal chill, and a denial so strong she didn’t think it was hers; some bastard leftover of Dunne’s touch or influence. She fisted her hands. “He could—”

“You said weeks. Weeks in an oubliette. No food, no water, no air. An oubliette’s a coffin, Sylvie, for sorcerers who are too impatient to wait for their victims to die.”

“It makes no sense,” Sylvie snapped. “If he’s dead, and the spell’s supposed to be gone, why isn’t it? I think they plan to retrieve him.”

“It’s a one-way deal,” Val said. “You can’t just reach in and pull things out.”

“You can’t. What about the Maudits?”

Val paused in her automatic rebuttal, the idea that they could do something she couldn’t, and actually thought about it. “I—maybe. The original sorcerer could undo the spell, pick it apart layer by layer. That might reverse the effect.” She shook her head. “It’s irrelevant. The time problem still stands. The most that anyone could retrieve is a corpse.”

“That might not matter to Dunne,” Sylvie said, thinking aloud. Dunne seemed confident he could restore the dead to life, given proper jurisdiction, and surely Brandon Wolf, his lover, belonged to him.

“You have the worst clients,” Val said. “First the gun, and now—”

“I didn’t mean that,” Sylvie said. She wished she hadn’t said anything, but wasn’t that an endless source of regret? Her mouth, her best weapon, even against herself.

Val drummed pale, painted nails, waiting. Sylvie sucked in a breath and forced a subject change. “So, if he’s been grabbed, what’s your explanation for the spell still chugging away?”

Question and answer, Sylvie thought, watching Val’s expression shift from peeved to contemplative. Val’s weakness: She couldn’t resist the urge to lecture, to describe the ways of the world to all those less intelligent, less aware. Most of the time that tendency drove Sylvie to eye rolling and backchat. Sylvie hated not being in the know as much as she hated being the object of condescension. But the tendency to lecture was also the reason that Sylvie, who thought all magic-users should be labeled: warning, contents unstable under pressure, could trust Val.

“It’s just too sloppy,” Val said. “Even if someone wanted to try to open the oubliette again—which doesn’t make sense—the spell just doesn’t look right.” She dragged Sylvie closer, gesturing with her free hand toward the first looping coil. “Look at this. That Greek there? It’s the signifier—the identity card, the thing that kept this station from becoming a Bermuda Triangle. But it’s not Wolf’s name. It just says Love, and that’s damn broad.”

“Or it says a lot about how they saw him. No one in his own right, just an appendage to Dunne. Their weapon against him.” Sylvie frowned, liking this less and less. How in hell a onetime mundane cop had made such serious occult enemies . . . ?

Well, that was it, wasn’t it? A onetime mundane cop now bearing a god-quantity of stolen power. That had to make enemies. It sure as hell didn’t make the kind of friends you could trust at your back. Maybe it wasn’t that they wanted anything at all from Dunne. Maybe they just wanted to make him hurt, and Brandon was the tool at hand.

Just another innocent in the line of fire.

“It’s still careless,” Val said. “It’s too open-ended. There’s a physical descriptor here, which would narrow it down some.” Val traced an elegant series of squiggles in the air. “Red hair, hazel eyes; sound like your boy?”

“Yeah,” Sylvie said.

“Then you’ve got some bad news for your client,” Val said. “And I’m done.” She began tucking her tools away, pausing to look up at Sylvie. “If he wants the body, I want no part of it. I don’t deal in necromancy.”

“You think I do? Thanks, Val,” Sylvie snapped. “Maybe all I meant was that there’d be closure for him if there was a body found. You’ve been hanging around bad magic too long. There are other things to do with a corpse than fuck it or use it for spellcraft.”

“Uh-huh,” Val said, “And maybe that’s all bullshit.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Sylvie said. “He’s not dead, according to Dunne. Weren’t you the one saying that Talents could feel these things?”

“Even Talents can fall into wishful thinking,” Val said as she snapped her case shut. “A normal man could not survive—”

“Not all that sure he’s normal,” Sylvie said. Proximity to the Magicus Mundi changed things, changed people. Brandon Wolf lived with a god.

Val raised an eyebrow, tapped the spell circle with her foot. “Human. That’s in the descriptor, too. You like to rub facts in people’s faces. Here’s one for you. Wolf is de—” A sound penetrated the bubble Val had sealed them in, the click-clack of impatient high heels.

“The hell?” Val said, attention diverted, face shifting from anger to wariness. “Someone’s at the spell edge.”

“Guess I’m not the only one who’s a hard sell,” Sylvie said, though her gut was churning. Silly to think she could recognize the quick steps up above. There was only one set of them anyway. Didn’t they run as a pack? Of course, the other two hadn’t worn high heels when she’d seen them that morning; they had moved soundlessly.