“I think you know way too much about me,” I complained after we made the turn to head back to the house. “Obviously, I whine about my life too much.”

She chuckled. “Or I’m simply a nosy bitch.”

“Yeah, well, I’m going to start doing the nosy bitch routine with you,” I gave her a mock glare. “You keep dropping these little snippets of enticing info.”

“I’m boring,” she insisted.

I rolled my eyes, and tried to resist the urge to actually be a nosy bitch. Jill had once revealed to me that she was a widow, but hadn’t said anything more other than that it had been a short marriage and a long story. I could respect that some memories could be painful, but it shamed me that I knew very little about her in general. What kind of friend was I? Did I spend too much time whining about my own issues?

Yes, I decided glumly. I was overly preoccupied with myself and my own problems.

“Well, are you seeing anyone?” I asked. “Hot dates? Cold dates?”

She shrugged, but there was a small smile on her face. “A date here and there. Nothing much.”

I’d been a detective long enough to know that she was hiding something from me. “Anyone I know?” I pressed.

She kept her eyes on the road and shrugged again. “Um, well it’s a small town, so anything’s possible.” She abruptly veered to the right to take a side street, forcing me to quicken my pace to catch up with her. “Let’s cut through here and run along the lakefront, okay?”

“Sure,” I muttered, fairly sure that the change in direction was an excuse to change the subject as well.

“There’s a five-K race next month,” she said next, confirming my suspicion that she wanted to talk about something else.

Okay, so maybe she’s simply a really private person. Or maybe she thinks I’d be upset if I knew who she’d been dating? The only possible way I’d be upset was if she was dating Ryan, but even though the jealous third grader in me wanted to rear its pigtailed head, I simply couldn’t see the two of them dating. And why would she be encouraging me to make a move on him if that were the case?

Right?

I scowled and slapped my inner third grader down as we finally made the turn to head back to her house. I had enough drama in my life. I didn’t need to fabricate any more.

I showered and changed into my work clothes at Jill’s house—a far more convenient option than making the thirty-minute drive back to my house to do so, where I would then have to make another thirty-minute drive to get to the station. My cell phone rang as I was toweling off after my shower, but since I recognized Ryan’s ringtone, I finished drying off and getting dressed first. It felt a bit weird to think about talking to him on the phone when I was naked. Yes, I was that stupid.

“I figured you’d have called earlier,” I said after I called him back.

“Don’t you go running in the mornings with Jill now?”

I frowned. Had I told him about that? I couldn’t remember. Not that it was a big secret or anything. “Yeah, my twice weekly dose of ‘let’s hang out with someone who makes me feel like an out-of-shape slob.’”

He laughed. “You’re far from a slob.”

“I notice you didn’t say that I’m far from out of shape,” I pointed out.

“You’re far from a slob,” he repeated.

“Asshole,” I grumbled, but I was smiling.

“Don’t compare yourself to Jill, fer crissakes. She was nearly an Olympian.”

“Huh?”

“Didn’t you know? She was a hotshot gymnast—expected to nail the trials and go to the Olympics ... um, ten years ago or so. Then she had a bad fall, hit her head, and dropped out of competition.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling oddly hot and cold at the same time. “No, I didn’t know that.” And how do you? I’m supposed to be her best friend, and yet you know these things?

“Find anything in your research?” he asked, pulling me out of my stupid little pity spiral.

My lips twitched. This was his way of asking if I’d found out anything from Rhyzkahl, but I knew he had no intention of mentioning the demonic lord. “Nope. Yesterday was pretty much a bust for getting any sort of useful info.” There. That covered the summoning, without saying it outright.

He muttered a curse. “Which means we’re pretty much at a standstill with this now. Any other cases at work that you can sink your teeth into?”

“Not really. Things are pretty slow right now.” Then I cringed.

There was a pause. “I can’t believe you said that,” Ryan said, voice low and ominous.

I laughed. “Me neither. Holy shit, I just totally jinxed myself.”

“Dork,” he said with a chuckle. “Okay, give me a call later on.”

“I’ll try to squeeze you into my busy schedule,” I promised.

The biggest drawback to starting my shift at ten was a distinct lack of parking places in the detectives’ parking lot. I scowled and circled the small lot twice in the misguided hope that a free space would magically appear, but my arcane powers failed me in spectacular fashion by refusing to vaporize any of the other vehicles in the lot and thus saving me the walk from the side parking lot.

Oh, whoopee. I could summon demons, but I couldn’t get a parking space.

I grudgingly drove around to the side parking lot and walked the extra hundred feet, refusing to feel any sort of shame for being all grudgingly about the walk. I’d gone running that morning. I should be exempt from any sort of additional exertion. Right?

I paused before entering the bureau, my eyes drawn to a blackened patch about fifty feet away, in the detective’s parking lot. That’s where the lightning struck the other day. My fingers prickled, an odd sense of familiarity tugging at me unpleasantly as I started slowly toward the spot. It wasn’t just a storm, the thought whispered through my head. I shifted into othersight as I reached it, even though I had a feeling I already knew what I would see.

I crouched, mouth dry as I looked at the star-shaped scar in the concrete and struggled to understand how my othersight could be showing me what were unmistakably arcane wards.

The lightning wasn’t random. But, why on earth was part of the parking lot warded? That didn’t make any sense. I wiped my sweating palms on the front of my pants as I deepened my sensing as far as I was able. A faint twinge of relief stole through me as I studied the wards. They were old and nothing I’d ever seen before, but the fact that they weren’t recently placed made it slightly less ominous. There was no way I was going to start poking at them, but my assessment revealed something important. The parking lot wasn’t warded. The lightning had broken through to the ground below the parking lot. That’s what was warded.

Confusion and unease tightened my gut. Why would the ground there have wards? And how long ago had they been placed? And had that lightning strike been directed, or had these wards somehow drawn it, like a lightning rod? And what did—

“Hey, Gillian, you lookin’ for your lost virginity?” An unpleasant nasal voice jerked me out of my careening thoughts. I gritted my teeth and stood, then plastered a pleasant smile onto my face as I pivoted to see Boudreaux regarding me with a snide smirk, Pellini standing beside him with his thumbs tucked into his belt. Not that I could see his belt since his belly extended well over it, but that’s where I assumed his thumbs were tucked. I didn’t want to consider any other possibilities. Boudreaux didn’t have to worry about large guts—he was about my height and so scrawny I had a suspicion I outweighed him. He looked like a meth-head to me, and I had a feeling that the only reason the Narcs didn’t use him for undercover work was because they didn’t trust him to not screw up.

“Hi, Boudreaux,” I replied in an overly sweet tone. “Were you offering to help me look? Or were you going to loan me yours, since you still have it?” I grinned, then turned to walk inside, more than a little surprised to hear a guffaw of laughter from Pellini. The two detectives had always been somewhat annoying, though there’d been a time not too long ago that annoying had been more along the lines of obnoxious, unpleasant, and insulting. Until Ryan had done ... something. I still wasn’t quite sure what, and I had zero proof that he had, but the two detectives had undergone an unbelievable change of attitude toward me in the span of a few minutes, going from openly hostile to warm and welcoming.