"Wipe your mouth, Brigid," Cassandra snapped. "No one here is impressed."

"I thought I heard harping," Brigid said, gliding into the center of the room. "I should have known it was the queen bitch-" A tiny smile. "Whoops, I meant queen bee."

"We know what you meant, Brigid. Have the guts to admit it."

Cassandra's gaze slid from Brigid and riveted to a young man following Brigid so closely that he was almost hidden behind the statuesque vampire. He was no more than my age, slightly built and pretty, with huge brown eyes fixed in a look of bovine befuddlement. Blood dribbled down the side of his neck, but he seemed not to notice, and stood there, gaze fixed on the back of Brigid's head, lips curved in an inane little smile.

"Get him out of here," Cassandra said.

"You don't give me orders, Cassandra," Brigid said.

"I do if you're fool enough to need them. Send him home."

"Oh, but he is home." She reached down and stroked his crotch. "He likes it here."

"Don't be boorish," Cassandra said. "Find another dupe to charm when I'm gone."

"I don't need to charm him," Brigid said, hand still on the young man's crotch. He closed his eyes and began rocking. "He stays because he wants to stay."

Cassandra thrust the young man toward Ronald. "Get him out of here."

Brigid grabbed Cassandra's arm. When Cassandra glared at her, she dropped it and stepped away, lips drawn back. She saw me and her eyes glimmered. I tensed, binding spell at the ready.

"You bring your human along and I can't bring mine?" Brigid said, eyes fixed on mine.

"She's not human, which you'll discover if you continue what you're doing."

Brigid's blue eyes gleamed brighter. Charming me, or trying to. The power rarely worked on other supernaturals, but to be sure, I took the opportunity to field-test yet another of my new spells: an anticharm incantation. Brigid yelped.

"Stings, doesn't it?" Cassandra said. "Leave the girl alone or she'll move onto something even less comfortable."

Brigid turned to Cassandra. "What do you want, bitch?"

Cassandra smiled. "Undisguised hate. We're making progress. I want John."

"He's not here."

"That's not what your bouncer said."

Brigid flipped her hair off her shoulder. "Well, he's wrong. Hans isn't here."

Cassandra turned on Ronald, who backed up against the wall.

"He was in the back room, with Brigid and the boy," Ronald said.

"Let me guess," Cassandra said to Brigid. "He told you to come out here and create a diversion while he slipped out the back door. Come on then, Paige. Time to hunt a coward."

The back door of the Rampart opened into an alley.

"What about Ronald and Brigid?" I said, hovering in the doorway. "They might know something, and the moment we're out of sight, they're going to bolt, too. Two birds in the hand are definitely worth more than one in the bush."

Cassandra shook her head, gaze traveling along the alley. "They'd never betray John. Without him, they wouldn't survive." She turned left. "This way."

"You picked up his trail?"

"No, but I'd go this way."

We looped behind a body shop and came out into a warren of dilapidated row houses that looked as if they'd been boarded up since I was in grade school. At the end of the lane, Cassandra stopped and studied the houses. A bottle clinked. I jumped.

"If you hear someone, it's not him," she said.

"Someone else is out here?"

"Lots of someones, Paige. Abandoned doesn't mean empty."

As if to underscore this, a woman's laugh floated down the street. A bottle sailed from a second-story window and smashed on the road, adding to a puddle of broken glass.

Cassandra walked to the far sidewalk and traversed the row of houses, with me at her heels. I felt silly tagging along after her and, worse yet, useless, but there was nothing else I could do. My sensing spell wouldn't work for finding a vampire, and if he wasn't going to give himself away by making noise, there was no use searching on my own.

Two houses from the end, Cassandra peered up at the building. She grabbed the rusted railing and started climbing the steps to the front door. Halfway up, she stopped. She looked at the door, tilted her head, then wheeled. I ducked out of her way, but she stayed on the step and gazed out into the street. After a moment, she turned back to the house, studied it, then shook her head and marched down. At the road, she passed the last house with only the briefest glance and crossed the road. I jogged after her.

"Is there anything I can do?" I asked.

"Yes. Stay out of my way."

I threw up my hands, and walked back to the house she'd first approached.

"I didn't say wander off," she called after me.

"I'm not wandering. Something about this house caught your attention, so I'm checking it out while you search the others."

"He's not in there."

"Good. Then it won't hurt for me to check."

"The last thing I need is to be worrying about you stepping on someone's dirty needle."

"I'm not a child, Cassandra. If I do step on a needle or get mugged, I preabsolve you of all responsibility. You search that side of the road while I double-check your hunch back here."

Cassandra huffed something under her breath and stalked off. I climbed the steps to the row house. The front door was boarded over, but someone had kicked a large hole at the bottom. I crouched and crawled through.

The smell hit me first, triggering memories of a stint volunteering in a homeless shelter. Inhaling through my mouth, I looked around. I was in a front hall. Peeling wallpaper hung from the walls, mingling with strips of flypaper polka-dotted with mummified bug bodies. I cast a light spell and shone it along the hallway floor. The carpet had long since been torn up, leaving bare underlay. As I moved forward, I pushed the trash out of the way with my foot. Though there were no needles, there was enough broken glass and rat droppings to make me glad I'd changed out of my open-toed sandals before leaving Miami.

From the hall, I had three destination choices: upstairs, the living room, or the door at the end, which presumably led into the kitchen. I cast a sensing spell from the foot of the stairs. It might not work on vampires, but in a place like this, the living were of equal concern. When the spell came back negative, I headed for the living room. No sign of a vampire there, or anything large enough to hide one. Same with the combined dining/kitchen area. Even the closets were bare, all doors and shelves having been stripped off, presumably to feed the fire pit in the middle of the living-room floor.

As I headed for the stairs, something whispered across the upstairs floor. The sound was too soft for footsteps… unless the feet belonged to the large furry rodents who'd left their calling cards in the debris below. I walked halfway up the stairs and launched my sensing spell. It came back negative. Now that I thought about it, that was strange. Recent rat droppings meant recent rats, and my spell should have picked them up. I suspected I knew the reason for the sudden out-flux. Rats don't just flee a sinking ship-they flee stronger predators, too.

I prepped a knock-back spell and climbed to the top landing. The house was still and silent. Too still. Too silent. The preternatural stillness reminded me of earlier that day, when I'd thought the killer had been stalking me in the parking lot.

From the top of the stairs, I could see into all four rooms. I wanted to be at the front of the house, which narrowed my choices to two, one of which was the bathroom-too small for what I had in mind. I peeked in the front bedroom, making sure it was empty, then stepped inside and cast a perimeter spell across the doorway. Problem was, I'd never tried this spell with a vampire, so I couldn't rely on it now. When this was over, I'd have to test my whole array of sensory spells on Cassandra. Not that she'd ever offer herself up as a guinea pig, but there were ways around that.