I stared at him.

“I mean, I think he would have, if I’d actually, you know, tried him. Which I absolutely wouldn’t—”

Marco clapped a hand down on his shoulder and he shut up. “Just don’t, all right?” he told me.

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” I said impatiently. “You mean it’s possible to tap into a person’s magic?”

“That’s the idea. You pawn part of your magic for a set time in return for a fee. You never heard of it? ’Cause people do it all the time. The mages do, I mean.”

“I thought only dark mages steal magic.”

“They do. They drain somebody every chance they get. But this doesn’t take all of someone’s magic. Just a small percentage. And since they gotta agree to it, it’s legal. Just really stupid.”

“Who buys it? And for what?”

Marco shrugged. “You want details, you gotta talk to a mage. All I know is, it’s supposed to stay within the maximum agreed on and to end at a specified time. Only sometimes, that don’t happen. Like I warned you, it’s dangerous. The Circle usually keeps an eye on that kind of thing, but with the war on—”

“I get it.” I knew for a fact that the Circle didn’t have enough war mages to go around, not when most of them had been recruited for combat duty. A lot of little things were likely to slip through the cracks, including mundane police work like checking on pawnshop owners.

“And damn, girl, it’s not like you need it!” Marco continued. “Lord Mircea could set you up with an allowance—”

“No, he couldn’t,” I said emphatically.

“He isn’t known for being cheap, and you are his—”

“If you say property, I swear—”

Marco’s cell phone went off, interrupting the conversation. “Sorry. Can’t help you,” he told it abruptly, and hung up.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.”

“It sounded like Casanova.”

The phone continued to ring, sounding shriller by the second. He finally got it back out and switched it off. “It wasn’t,” he said, meeting my eyes easily. Which meant absolutely nothing.

Vampires are great liars. They don’t blush, fidget, perspire or have any of the other tells a human might when under pressure. But I knew how much could be concealed by a calm facade. Usually, the more expressionless they were, the more they were hiding. And Marco was looking pretty damn blank.

“Marco—” I didn’t have time to call him on the lie, because Billy Joe streamed in.

“The Circle just grabbed a bunch of the kids,” he told me without preamble. “I don’t know how many. They were dragging them out when I left. Casanova tried to call you, but he couldn’t get through.”

I grabbed Marco’s phone out of his pocket and hit redial. “Hey!”

“Don’t start,” I told him, glaring. I’d have said a few other things, but Casanova picked up on the first ring.

“What is going on?” I demanded.

“It’s those damn kids again—” he began, before the phone was ripped out of his hand. I didn’t have to wonder who was on the other end. Even if I hadn’t heard the voice in the background, I didn’t know too many people who would attack a vampire with so little compunction. The fact that she was all of five foot three and human made the fact that much more impressive.

“Jesse’s gone,” Tami informed me quickly. “The Circle grabbed him and a bunch of the other kids a couple minutes ago. Casanova says he’s not allowed to attack the mages because of the treaty, but I didn’t sign any damn treaty, and I swear if they hurt Jesse, I’ll make them pay. They think they got a war now? They’ll know they’ve been at war when I finish—”

“Where did they go?”

“I don’t know!” She was crying, I could hear it in her voice, but she held it together. “They took off down the Strip in a couple limos.”

The Strip was a block from here, and if it had its usual traffic snarl, we might be able to catch them. “It’s okay, Tami. We’re going to—”

“How is this okay?”

“Because we’re going to get them back. You have my word.”

There was a telling silence on the other end of the phone. I couldn’t blame her. I’d given her my word before, when I promised that the kids would be safe at Dante’s. And look how that had turned out.

What the Circle wanted with a handful of runaways in the middle of a war I didn’t know, but I could figure it out later. Right now, we had to get them back. “I’ll call you as soon as I know anything,” I told her, and handed the phone back to Marco. “Let’s go.”

I started out the door only to have him grab me by the back of the collar. “Where are you going?”

“To get Jesse.”

“And how do you expect to do that?”

“You drive,” I told him, “and I navigate.”

“I was told to keep you safe, not to go on some daredevil rescue. Those kids are not my problem. You are. And deliberately taking you into the path of the Circle is not in the game plan.”

“It is now.”

Dark eyes narrowed to slits. “I don’t think so.”

“Then let me put it another way. I’m going after the kids, whether you like it or not.”

“You aren’t going anywhere.”

Francoise held up something behind Marco’s head that caught the light. Car keys. I didn’t pause to wonder how she’d managed to pick a vampire’s pocket without him noticing. I lunged for the door.

Marco jerked me back, but Billy had figured out what was happening and decided to help. He knocked the cabinet of magical weapons over. It hit a nearby display case, listed to the left, and teetered there for a long moment. Then it crashed to the floor, its deadly contents spilling everywhere.

Some of the items remained inert, sliding or rolling to a stop after a short distance. But a set of shackles slithered across the floor like a metal snake, making tracks in the dust as it headed straight for Marco’s buddy. He danced back, but it pursued him with ominous intent behind a counter. He gave a sudden yelp and disappeared from view.

Marco glared at me. “How did you do that?”

The salesman hurried up before I could answer and then suddenly turned white and started backing away, fast. I glanced behind Marco’s head to see what looked like a swarm of black insects swirling up from a shattered vial. One of them flew into the overhead light, and one of the bulbs went out.

It took me a second to realize that it hadn’t blown; it just wasn’t there anymore. Another spot floated down onto a bottle on the counter, which winked out of existence like it had fallen down a well. Or a small black hole, which is what the things were starting to look like.

All around the shop, items were disappearing, or parts of them, in the case of those too large to fit down the holes. The little black menaces came in different sizes, but unlike the Shroud, they didn’t appear to be expandable. The ceiling fan overhead lost a chunk from one blade, an old mirror was spotted with empty, black circles and the floor was missing half a dozen round chunks of concrete. I stared down at a teacup-sized one near my foot and didn’t see anything on the other end—no foundation, no dirt, nothing.

Marco carted me back toward the door to the front of the shop, while his buddy reappeared, being dragged across the floor by the shackles, which had attached themselves to his ankles. One of the smaller holes floated down onto his wildly waving left hand, and just like the other items, it was suddenly gone. There was no blood, but there was no more hand, either. Just raw, red flesh and pale bone, sliced clean through like a demented cookie cutter had taken a bite out of him.

Marco let go of me to grab the salesman, who was trying to squeeze out the door ahead of us. “What the hell is happening?” he growled as several more holes appeared in his now hysterical friend.

“He’ll be all right,” the salesman babbled. “His hand isn’t gone; it’s simply misplaced.”

“Misplaced?”

“Y-yes. It’s rather like quarantine, in a way; it’s being stored.”

“Where?”

“That’s a little complicated,” the salesman muttered, grabbing a magazine to use as a fan to push a couple of small holes away from us. The air current acted on them like they were made of tissue paper, sending them tumbling over each other back into the middle of the room—where they came to rest right on top of the other vamp.

He was cut off midshriek as one of them landed on his face, leaving a perfectly round space where his mouth had been. A few gleaming molars could still be seen, one with a gold cap, above the gaping wound. Another took out part of his chest, missing the heart but leaving a baseball-sized hole through his torso. I could see part of what might have been a rib and a rapidly fluttering thing that was probably a lung. There was no spurting blood, no seeping fluids. It was as if part of him was simply somewhere else and his body didn’t realize it.

It didn’t appear to be pleasant, though. He stared at us, his eyes huge, as the shackles succeeded in dragging him into the cabinet. The door shut behind him on its own with a final-sounding thump.

Marco released me, grabbed the magazine and the salesman, and started towing him back into the room. “Let me explain what’s going to happen here,” he said, batting at any holes that came near. “You are going to get him back. Right now. Or I am going to round these things up and force-feed them to you! Are we clear?”

“Of course. Naturally, there will be a small retrieval fee—” The door clicked shut on Marco’s reply to that, which had included a few suggestions that I doubted were anatomically possible. I couldn’t do much for Marco’s partner except hope that the salesman could do what he said. But I could help the kids. Francoise pressed the keys into my hand and we ran.