She gave me a wavering smile. “It is coming. I can sense it. I am sorry I cannot protect you in what is to come.”

“I’ll summon you back,” I said fiercely. “You can’t get out of this that easily!”

She gave a small nod. “It will take time before I return to my world. But when I do, I will find you. You will not get rid of me so easily, my friend.” Her grip loosened on my wrist, and her arm dropped to her side.

“Stand back, Kara,” Eilahn whispered, then her head sagged to the floor. I looked down to see that the bleeding had stopped, and light was beginning to stream from the two punctures. I retreated a couple of feet, breathing raggedly as the light increased to near-blinding levels. A few seconds later a ripping crack filled the room, and she was gone—even the blood. Nothing left but a smell of sulfur and ozone and a faintly discolored patch on the carpet.

I don’t know how long I stood there, staring at that dark patch, but it was probably only seconds later that Ryan burst in, gun at the ready, gaze sweeping the room.

“He’s gone,” I said. I swallowed. “Eilahn’s gone too.”

A heartbeat later I heard the sound of splintering wood from the back door, and then Zack was there as well. His eyes went to the stain then widened. “Fucking hell.”

“What happened, Kara?” Ryan asked. “Are you all right?”

“What happened to you?” I demanded, rounding on him. “Didn’t you hear us? What happened? He shot her! She’s gone!” I was shouting, and the next thing I knew he’d holstered his gun and had grabbed me by the shoulders.

“We didn’t hear anything,” he said, face twisted in pain. “The signal grew garbled as soon as you went inside. Zack and I were coming up to the house to abort the mission when suddenly there was some kind of…surge that knocked us flat.” His hands squeezed my shoulders. “I’m sorry. We got here as soon as we could.”

I let out a shuddering breath. “He threw a rock…some kind of…fuck, like an arcane grenade. Made me puke, but she could barely move. He said he needed me alive, but not her.” I fell silent, and when I spoke again my voice shook with anger. “He shot her. Didn’t even hesitate.”

I pulled away from him. “And now we’re going to tear this fucking house apart.”

I took out my rage on the walls, smashing through the drywall in the living room with a sledgehammer I’d found in the garage. As much as I wanted to gut the house into a pile of rubble, my strength gave out before my fury did, and after about ten minutes I let the sledgehammer drop while I panted for breath and swiped at my eyes with the back of my hand.

Ryan leaned the sledge against the wall then drew me into a hug. “I’m sorry,” he said, voice low and rough.

“For what?” I muttered, petulant and depressed. I leaned my head against his chest, listened to the steady thump of his heart.

He let out a soft sigh. “I’m sorry you lost Eilahn. I’m sorry you have to go through all this. I’m sorry you seem to be in constant peril. And I’m sorry I can’t fix it all.”

“It’s okay,” I said, then pulled back and swiped at my eyes again. “Thing is, all that shit sucks, but y’know what the worst part is?” I didn’t wait for him to say anything. “The worst part is that I don’t trust my judgment anymore. I’ve been wrong over and over, and I’ve been wasting time and energy chasing down hunches and suspicions. I even thought Roman was a summoner.” And I’d liked Tracy. Jill was wrong—I wasn’t a hunk magnet. I was a men-who-would-fuck-my-life-up magnet. “And now my stupidity got Eilahn shot.”

“You did what you thought was best,” he said, giving me a chiding scowl. “And you’ve made progress. You found out that Tracy was the summoner, yes? Now, are we going to simply tear this place apart, or do we have some sort of idea of what we might be looking for?”

Straightening my shoulders, I did my best to throw off the cloud of despair. “Anything that might give me an edge in finding him and figuring out what this is all about,” I said, gaze sweeping the living room. “I figure that when he ran away he took his grandparents’ notes or books and stuff.”

“Or maybe he came back for all of that after his dad died,” Zack suggested.

I nodded. “Either way, I want to find any notes or papers or anything that we can. If I know what we’re up against, we might stand a chance of being able to stop it.”

“And you don’t think this unknown thing we’re facing is something nice and tame, I assume.” Ryan’s mouth twisted in a sardonic smile.

“Call me a cynic,” I replied.

We started searching again, this time with a touch less rage. First was a quick search through drawers and closets, but, as I’d expected, Tracy hadn’t left any useful information out where anyone could easily find it. But I’d been on enough search warrants to know that there were a lot of places to hide stuff, especially if the stuff was only papers or a notebook. I let the guys bash walls in, and I focused on pulling every one of his books out of the bookshelf and riffling through the pages.

Two hours later there were holes in all the walls, the books were all over the floors, the mattresses had been slashed, and we were still completely empty-handed. And exhausted.

Ryan looked around as we slouched on what remained of the couch, a slight frown pulling at his mouth. “Sure hope he’s not renting this place. If so, I don’t think he’s getting his deposit back.”

I burst out laughing. “Sucks to be him!” Then I stopped and frowned. “He’s not doing his summonings here. So where the hell is he doing them?” I straightened and looked to Zack. “Ask Jill if she can check the property tax rolls to see if Tracy owns any property in the area.”

The blond agent grinned and pulled out his phone. Impatient, I stood and began pacing, though it proved to be difficult with all the crap we’d strewn all over the place.

“Jill says there’s nothing in that name,” Zack said after a brief moment.

I chewed my lower lip as I stepped over detritus. “Have her try Raymond Bergeron, just for giggles.”

“And his dad’s name too,” Ryan suggested.

“Right!” I turned to Zack. “His parents and his grandparents. See if there’s anything current.”

Zack relayed the info, then said, “How about I just put her on speaker phone?” He pushed a button on the phone and set it on the coffee table.”

“I feel like I’ve become the Oracle,” Jill complained.

I gave Zack a puzzled look as he burst out laughing. “It’s from the Batman comics,” he explained to me. “Barbara Gordon—the first Batgirl—was shot by The Joker and paralyzed, and so she became The Oracle, a computer expert and information hacker who provided intelligence to other superheroes.”

“There was more than one Batgirl?” I asked weakly.

Zack heaved a sigh. “You have so much to learn.”

I snorted. “No, I think I’m perfectly fine not knowing how many Batgirls there were.”

“No results for any of those names,” Jill’s voice piped up. “What next?”

“Okay, so who owns this house?” I said. I waited impatiently as the sound of clicking keys came through the speaker.

“Company named Imperium LLC,” she said after a few seconds. “And before you ask, yes, I’m searching the Secretary of State records to see who’s behind that.” A few more seconds. “Oh, good grief,” she muttered. “Corporate name, Posterula Inc. Searching on that now.” A pause. “Crap, it may take a while to dig through all these layers.”

I stopped my semblance of pacing. “Don’t worry about that right now. Are there any other properties in this area owned by Imperium?”

“Hang on. Yeah, two others. A residence in Clearwater Estates and a strip mall on the east end of town on Oakwood Street. I’ll text you the addresses.”

“Any chance either of those are in our ‘hot zone?’ ” I asked.

“Nope. Sorry.”

Nothing about this was going to be easy, obviously. “Okay, thanks a million, Jill. We’re going to go check those two spots out. If you find out anything else, give us a shout.”

“Will do!” came the cheery reply, then she clicked off.

“Okay, kiddos,” I said, “We don’t have much time. I can’t sense wards as long as I have this on, so I’m going to be relying on y’all to point them out to me.”

“You mean Ryan,” Zack said with an easy smile, but there was a glint in his eye. “I can’t see wards.”

“Oh, right,” I said with a laugh. “My mistake.” I held his gaze for another heartbeat. Find a way to warn me if you see something dangerous, I thought, hoping it would come through somehow. I knew perfectly well Zack was capable of seeing and manipulating wards, and with far more skill than Ryan seemed to currently possess. Ryan would hopefully be able to tell if any protections were in place, but I had no way of knowing just how far his demonic lord powers had been throttled back. With the loss of Eilahn, I was relying on Zack’s skill more than ever.

He broke the gaze, but not before giving me an infinitesimal nod. He understood.

“Let’s ditch this joint,” I said, “and hope to hell that we find something useful in one of the other places.”

Chapter 22

Traffic was a fucking bitch, adding to the mounting frustration already plaguing us. Tracy’s threat about finding a way to motivate me haunted me, and I knew I needed to be prepared. I knew without a doubt that he needed me alive only because he intended for me to end up dead or drained or something worse. Personally, I wanted to avoid that sort of fate.

The strip mall ended up being a complete bust, but luckily not one that took too much time to check out. It helped that it stood completely empty, and through all the window fronts we could easily see that there was nothing nefarious going on there. Moreover, Zack gave me the slight shake of his head that told me he couldn’t detect arcane residue of any kind—which would surely be there if Tracy had been summoning anywhere around there.