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For about a second and a half, he looked tired.

"The same thing your Alpha wants and your grandmother pretends not to. I want to know who's paying everyone." He said it flatly. "Every creature I have trusted for sixty years has started taking money from someone, and I am apparently the last one at the table nobody has approached. Which leaves two possibilities. Either I'm not worth the price, or everything they've bought so far was bought to use against me."

"And you don't know which."

"I don't know which, and after Thursday it may stop mattering." He inclined his head at the shock I couldn't mask fast enough. "Knowing what this city intends to do before it does it is the whole of my function, Miss Byrne. It's the only reason anything in it has stayed quiet for sixty years. At the moment I am being kept in the dark in my own territory, and I find I don't care for it."

He stepped back off the threshold, but the gray behind him didn't touch him at all.

"One more thing, and then I'll leave you to your box." He said it without looking at the tin, which told me he'd been looking at nothing else. "You've been carrying a piece of paper since you crossed into my territory. About the size of a receipt. Older than anything that has any business being in Ohio."

Every hair on my body stood up.

"I haven't seen it," Destin said pleasantly. "I don't want to. I'm nine hundred and forty years old and I've spent most of that learning what not to look at." He straightened his cuff. "But I can feel it from this porch. So whoever warned you off my kind was right, and I'd think carefully about what they were protecting when they did it. It wasn't you."

He was down the steps and past the green railing and gone into the ordinary Wednesday morning before I got my mouth open.

I stood in a hallway that smelled like other people's laundry, holding a warm tin box, with my mother's handwriting in a library book under my arm.

"Hazel," River said. "We need to go."

"Yeah."

"Right now, Hazel."

"I know, I know." I looked down at the box and allowed him to drag me out of the apartment. "But we're opening this in the truck."

Chapter Fourteen

We made it four blocks before I told River to pull over. I'd spent those four blocks trying to convince myself we should wait until we were somewhere safer, preferably somewhere farther from my grandmother, an ancient vampire, and whatever else had noticed us the second we rolled into downtown Cleveland. It was the sensible thing to do, which probably explained why I lasted less than five minutes.

The tin wasn't helping. It had been warm when Destin appeared at the house, but with every turn River made, the metal seemed to grow hotter against my palms. Not enough to burn, just enough that I could no longer pretend it was absorbing heat from my hands.

"Pull over."

River glanced at me. "Here?"

"Unless you want me opening this while you're driving." That got him looking for an empty spot to pull over immediately.

He turned into a parking lot behind a hardware store on Lorain without another word and parked far enough from the building that anyone looking through the back windows would have to actually work to be interested in us. He left the engine running, the heater blowing steadily through the vents while the wipers dragged across the windshield every twenty seconds.

Neither of us spoke while I sat there with the box in my lap.

After everything my mother had done to hide it, the wards, the library book sealed inside a wall, the note directing me beneath the stairs…I'd expected something more impressive. Instead, I had a cheap cash box, the kind you bought for a handful of dollars and kept in a drawer with rubber bands, spare keys, and receipts you were never going to need again. Gray enamel covered most of it, chipped down to bare metal at the corners, and the little lock on the front had been pried open sometime long ago but was closed again badly enough to leave the lid crooked.

Someone had opened it before me.

That realization sat uneasily beside all the others.

"Firefly."

"I'm getting there, Blackman, give me a second."

"Take your time."

"Don't be that understanding with me. It's not helping."

I worked my thumbnail beneath the crooked edge of the lid. After all the years, hidden wards, an impossible flower and a vampire waiting on the porch, I suppose some part of me expected thunder. Or at least lightning.