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Hazel tapped on the desk. “Messing with the vid would be a tech thing, not a magic thing. Now, if they had left with him and you didn’t see them, that would be magic cloaking or glamour.”

“Kind of like how you two got past me out of the building somehow.” Gladys cocked a hip.

“No.” Daphne’s eyes snapped open in alarm. “The lieutenant’s still on my land somewhere, so he hasn’t left. I can find intruders that way, though I don’t usually bother with so many SHADE members in the building. But everyone has a unique feeling, and his is definitely still here.”

“This doesn’t make sense,” I insisted. “Why would he still be here unless someone…” I stopped, mouth open. “He said the killer was on to him and would set him up. He smelled them at my house last night. What if they got to him somehow? Wait. Julian didn’t want me to follow him or protest anymore. He looked at one of the guards that took him and…and his nostrils flared. I think he scented the killer. He let the killer take him away to protect me.”

I spun toward the elevator. “We have to find them.”

Neither Daphne nor Hazel hesitated to join me, and the moment the doors reopened, we leaped out only to find ourselves in my empty office adjacent to my lab. But the damn thing disappeared again before we so much as turned around.

“Fuck!” I pounded my fist on the wall.

“It left us here for a reason,” Hazel said, circling behind my desk. A bolt of green energy flew from her fingertip into my screen, and the files I’d been going through popped up.

“So much for passwords,” I said, a flair of hope igniting inside of me. I nudged her aside and surfed around for the appropriate list. “We need to see if any of these people are shifters. Whoever did this could be disguised as anyone by now.”

Daphne joined us on my side of the desk, and we began by scratching off anyone we knew couldn’t have those abilities. Hazel cross-referenced files for those unknowns, jotting down anyone marked as a shifter of some kind.

Hours passed as we exhausted the list. But when we’d finished, Hazel held up a single piece of paper triumphantly.

“We have three mimics, one metamorph, one kitsune, and two people with ancestry connected to a skin walker and a pucca respectively. That’s seven suspects.”

“Did you say, kitsune?” I asked, a sudden memory hitting me. “That’s a Japanese fox spirit.”

“True. But they can take any human form with enough tails,” Hazel agreed.

I was sure an anvil had landed on my chest. “A kitsune with multiple tails can shape shift into other humans?”

“Well, yeah. They get more tails as they age, and more power with each.” Hazel tilted her head at me in question.

“The one listed wouldn’t happen to be Jensen, would it?” I already knew the answer before she nodded, and I felt ill. She’d moved from Japan as a baby, sure, but the kicker was I’d seen her tails in shadow and correctly labeled her species—another hint from my abilities that I’d completely dismissed because I hadn’t known enough about them.

“Midori Jensen,” Hazel pulled up her picture on the screen. Such a mousy, petite thing, but only because she chose to appear that way.

“It could be any of these people, though,” Daphne said, snatching the paper with the names.

I shook my head. “My abilities all but showed me the answer, and I was too stupid to pick up on it.” Now Julian might pay the price. Lauren already had.

“Hey! None of that,” Daphne bonked me on the head with the paper. “There’s no time for pity parties. We have to find her and rescue your vampire.”

Swallowing down the urge to once again protest the implication that he belonged to me somehow, I stood and marched forward into the elevator before it had fully formed. Hazel and Daphne joined me, and I straightened my shoulders. Bitch was going down.

Though I’d fully expected to have an argument with the general, when we arrived at the command center, the raised platform where I was used to seeing him was all but empty. The usual worker bees hustled around below, perpetually checking screens and control panels. But spinning on a stool right in front of us was Jensen herself. Or at least the version of Jensen I’d become used to.

And I’d thought we had so much in common.

“Where’s General Fontaine?” Daphne snapped.

“He had an emergency. Seems someone at the vampire estate isn’t happy about the lieutenant’s arrest.” She spun around again in the seat.

I flicked my wrist, and her stool came to a halt, nearly throwing her off. I leaned down over her, noting the furry tails flicking out behind her in shadow.

“Take us to Julian,” I commanded, completely done with her crap.

Jensen’s face fell slack, her eyes glazed over, and she popped up to her feet. We followed her back inside the elevator, Hazel’s fingers sparking with green electricity.

The doors opened on a dark cavernous corridor lit with flickering torches and red lights embedded in the stony floor. Metal bars covered small caves carved out along the sides of the winding hall, each one holding a barren cot and a round metal device that I guessed to be a toilet. None seemed to be occupied until we reached the end of the twisting passageway.