As we closed Cooper’s front door behind us, Raphael turned to me with a little grin and a spark of what looked suspiciously like mischief in his eye.

“You and I do a very nice good cop, bad cop act. We should do it again sometime.”

“Fuck off,” I said, with my usual tact and grace. “He could have died before you decided to listen to my good cop.” And I still didn’t understand why he had listened.

Raphael dismissed that with a wave. “Did you hear the little noises he was making?” he said with a chuckle.

I curled my lip in a sneer. “You think that’s funny? Why, you despicable—”

Raphael didn’t let me finish, cutting me off with a glare and a growl that made me take an involuntary step backward. He shook his head at me in what looked like disgust, then ducked into his car, pulling the door shut so hard I was surprised the metal didn’t crumple. I caught a glimpse of his face as he slammed the car into reverse and practically flew out of the driveway. He was seriously pissed, and I hoped he wouldn’t plow down any innocent passersby.

I shook my head. “Why is he mad at me?” I asked of no one in particular. “He had to know gloating like that would offend me.”

“He wasn’t gloating,” Adam answered. “He was pointing out that Cooper was making noise, which meant he could breathe. No air, no noise.”

Adam didn’t glance at me after making me realize what an idiot I’d been, and Barbie didn’t either. So much for my efforts to give Raphael the benefit of the doubt. By the time I’d recovered my poise enough to follow, Adam and Barbie were halfway across the street and I had to run to catch up.

The ride back into Center City was a quiet one. Barbie was in too much pain to make conversation, and neither Adam nor I was much into small talk. I still didn’t get why Adam and Raphael had let Cooper live. It seemed so … unlike them.

Any ideas, Lugh? I asked, but apparently we were back to the silent treatment. I didn’t understand what was going on with that, either.

My stomach still wasn’t happy, and I felt the beginnings of a headache stirring behind my eyes, so I let my questions go, for now. I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the headrest, willing the nausea to recede. At least Adam drove with reasonable care, not screaming around any corners or jackrabbiting when lights turned green. He probably just didn’t want me puking in his car.

Our first stop was at Saul’s apartment, where we dropped Barbie off. Saul lived in a small, intimate community. You had to buzz to get in, but there were no doormen, and there was no front desk. No one to see Barbie’s obvious injury before Saul swept her behind closed doors to heal her.

I closed my eyes again as soon as Adam pulled away from the curb. I could hardly wait until Adam dropped me off so I could fall into bed in a dark room and, hopefully, sleep through the remainder of these aftereffects.

“It was really nice of you to offer to heal Barbie,” I found myself saying without having intended to say a word.

I didn’t open my eyes, but I could hear Adam’s shrug. “It seemed like the thing to do at the time. She may have saved my life, after all. At least, my host’s life. Cooper’s demon was not rank and file.”

I’d gathered that from the extra effort it had taken me to toss it out. It didn’t seem like a good sign. If we had to have more demons than usual flooding the Mortal Plain, why couldn’t they all be weaklings like Mary?

“Why did you and Raphael let Cooper live?” I asked, my mouth still running on autopilot. My conscious mind would have preferred I not ask, in case talking about it would make Adam change his mind. But being sick to my stomach lowered my inhibitions, and my mouth asked without permission from my brain.

Again, I could hear Adam’s shrug. “I can’t speak for Raphael. But personally, I didn’t dare kill him. We cleaned up the evidence as best we could, but all it would have taken was one stray hair, or one witness who saw us enter, or who saw the car, to implicate me if we’d left a body behind. And if we didn’t leave the body behind, we’d have to get it out of there somehow, which would have been too risky.”

I cracked one eye open and glanced at Adam’s profile. “So if you thought you could have gotten away with it, you’d have killed him?”

He stopped at a red light, but didn’t turn to face me. “Yes. I’m sorry if that offends your moral code, but leaving Cooper alive is dangerous. He may be frightened enough of Raphael to keep his mouth shut. Then again, he might find his courage when we’re not right there in his face.”

The light turned green. I closed my eye again and didn’t comment. Everything Adam said was true. I didn’t have to like it, or even agree with him. At least I understood him. Raphael’s mercy was much more mysterious, but then I probably never would understand him. His mind was the most complicated maze I’d ever seen, and I would lose my way in a heartbeat trying to solve it.

I suddenly remembered how unhappy Adam had looked when he left Cooper and returned to his host. He hadn’t told us anything that justified the look on his face, though it wasn’t surprising that he’d decided not to talk too much in front of Cooper.

“What else did you learn while you were getting to know Cooper up close and personal?” I asked.

“There was something bothering you.”

Adam’s heavy sigh said he was not happy. “We were right about the recruitment campaign not being restricted to Philly. And Cooper thinks about a hundred new demons—some legal, some not—have come to the Mortal Plain in the last six weeks. And that’s just in Cooper’s region.”

That made me sit up straight and open my eyes. “Shit! That’s a lot of demons.” If we let this go on much longer, Dougal would have a freakin’ army at his disposal.

“Yes, it is,” Adam agreed, but apparently he had nothing more to add. Which was probably just as well.

Worry struck me out of the blue while I was riding the elevator to my apartment. If Cooper was a legal, registered demon host, that meant the Spirit Society had seriously lowered their standards. Unfortunately, Cooper wasn’t the only person I knew who’d had hopes of hosting a demon.

I dove for the phone and called my mom as soon as the door to my apartment closed behind me. We had reached an uneasy truce after my father’s death, but still we hardly ever spoke. I was pretty sure that even the lingering tension between us wouldn’t keep her from calling to let me know if she finally got her wish to become a host, but “pretty sure” wasn’t good enough.

To my surprisingly intense relief, she assured me that she had no plans to host. “That was a young woman’s dream,” she told me wistfully. “But I’m not a young woman anymore.”

I managed to keep my opinion of that “dream” to myself, so it turned out to be one of our most civil conversations ever. Afterward, my head and stomach still feeling less than their best, I decided to make an early night of it. Everything would look rosier tomorrow, after a good night’s sleep, I assured myself.

But I was dead wrong about that.