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“That may be so, but he also has no compunction about destroying innocent people who he thinks are in his way!” Camille was pacing the floor. She stopped and whirled to me. “What do you think?”
I looked at the information Carter had sent us. Gulakah sounded like a badass motherfucker, and we were on the end of our tether with regard to Van and Jaycee. The thought of dealing with Trytian was stomach-churning, but the thought of letting the pair of sorcerers go on to cause more havoc was far worse.
“I’m with Vanzir on this one. If Trytian knows about anything at all that will help us catch them, then we need to take advantage of it.”
“What about the computer at the shop? The phone book? Can’t we go through them first to see if we can find anything that would keep us from having to contact him? If we come up empty, fine then…we have Vanzir put in a call and we make a deal with the devil…or daemon, rather. But maybe, if we’re lucky, we won’t need to.” Camille clenched her fists.
“Sounds good to me.” I looked at the others. “Everybody willing to pull a late-nighter? If we divide up, we can check out everything that much quicker and get some sleep in the process.”
They all nodded, including Hanna. “I’ll keep the tea and coffee coming,” she said.
“Then, I guess we take a quick shower break to wash off the soot and smoke, and we knuckle down to combing through all of this crap.”
After making sure Marion and Douglas were comfortable in the parlor, Shade and I trudged up to the bedroom. I stripped and jumped in the shower first, lathering up and—for the first time in a while—I actually enjoyed the feeling of the soap and water on my skin. Climbing out of the shower, I toweled off and climbed into a clean nightshirt and pair of sweatpants.
Shade was sitting on the bed, waiting for his turn in the shower. He stopped me to gently press his lips against mine. I sank into his arms, enjoying the safety of his embrace, feeling weary and sleepy and wanting only to crawl into bed for a nice long nap. Before I realized what I was doing, I was in my Tabby form, staring at him from the floor.
He sat back down on the bed and held out his arms, whistling for me. I leaped up on the bed, crawling onto his knee. He scritched me behind the ears.
“A little stressed, aren’t you, girl?” As he rubbed the fur under my chin, I began to purr and stretched my head for him to reach the sides of my face. It was such a relief to be in my Tabby form. Even though I was still facing the same stressors, when I was in cat form everything seemed muted, like I was wearing earmuffs in the middle of a cacophony.
After a moment, I began to relax. I hopped off Shade’s lap and saw my favorite squeaky mouse. Batting it, I felt my blood race at the sound of squeak. I picked it up by the tail and raced out of the room, down the stairs to the second floor where Camille was just coming out of her room. I dropped the mouse at her feet and looked up, twitching my tail.
Camille laughed gently and reached down to scoop me up. “Feeling a little out of sorts, Kitten? Thank you, thank you for the toy. And thank you for making me smile.” She buried her face in my fur and kissed me soundly. “But, Delilah, we have a lot of ground to cover tonight. We need you, as a woman. Your reading skills aren’t all that developed when you’re in Tabby form.”
I let out a little mew and then, licking her quickly on the face, I jumped down and moved to the side. She was right. I didn’t have time to play with the mouse, or to curl up for a catnip. Resigned and a little sad, I transformed back.
As I shook my head, coming out of the shift, Camille helped me to my feet. I noticed she was wearing a floor-length terry-cloth robe over a loose babydoll. Smoky, Trillian, and Morio were already downstairs.
I took Camille’s hand in mine. “Thank you. Sometimes, I still need my big sister…though I think I’m finally growing up.”
Camille squeezed my fingers. “Kitten, we all need to grow up. But you’ll always be Kitten, and you’ll always have the playful kitty inside. We need that part of you—it keeps us all hopeful. Just like Maggie keeps us innocent. Menolly can never have that innocence again. I will never be able to trust anybody fully again. But you…we need your joy. Please, don’t ever lose it.”
I misted over. “I’m trying not to. I don’t think I’d like myself if I did.”
I took the store laptop while Camille started flipping through the day planner and the guys divided up the address book. Settling on the sofa, with a bowl of Cheetos to my right and a big glass of milk to my left, I opened the lid of the laptop. Before we left, I’d made sure that the battery had enough life left to make it home where I could plug it in. I’d been careful not to close the lid so it wouldn’t go to sleep. It was still running, so I didn’t need the password.
Before I started doing anything, I plugged in an external hard drive and began to download everything on the laptop. That way, if something happened, we’d have a backup of all the files. I examined the programs. The computer had only a handful of programs on it. I guess Tregarts weren’t prone to playing games or writing long documents. I opened the mail and waited for it to download.
Five incoming e-mails. I opened the first and it asked for a return receipt when opened, but I closed the request without answering. No use letting Van and Jaycee know we had the computer. Yet.
It was a simple two-line message asking for the daily report, and giving a heads up that “MV” had not perished yet, with a stern warning that they’d better take care of the matter for once and all.
“You think this group torched Marion’s house?” I stuffed a handful of Cheetos in my mouth and swallowed a gulp of milk.
“Doesn’t have to be all of them. There were plenty there to play at arson while the others waited at the store.” Morio was thumbing through his part of the phone book. He and Vanzir were using the household laptop as well as mine to do a reverse lookup on the phone numbers. We didn’t want to call them at this point. Hang-ups would give us away.
“Any luck on finding out who those numbers belong to?”
“Some are listed—dealers, companies, services…everything you’d expect for a sex toy business. But there are three I’ve been unable to trace so far, and two that I came up with names for. One connects to a fortune-teller’s shop in the Industrial District. Future Glimpses. I looked them up on the Net and they sell spell components, they advertise spells, and they read the cards. But it says they’re closed for business until the first of the month.”
“Bingo. Sounds like Van and Jaycee’s last shop.” Camille looked up from across the room, where she was meticulously going through the day planner, jotting down notes. “Who does the other number belong to?”
Morio leaned back. “It leads us right back to the Energy Exchange club.”
I stopped. “Right. I knew they were involved and this proves it. Which means they’re probably into both the Wolf Briar business as well as magical weaponry.”
During our last interaction with the Koyanni, we’d encountered a weapon that we’d been pretty sure was fashioned at the Energy Exchange. It was like a magical stun gun. While Camille and Morio were able to charge it up, to some degree, the exact spell for empowering it with charges still eluded them.
