Getting Sarah situated in her room was relatively easy, made easier by bringing Crow across the hall and dropping him onto her bed, where he curled up, stuck his head back under his wing, and went to sleep. Sarah sat down next to the “kitty” with her math workbook open in her lap, happily starting to fill in fractions with a number two pencil. I stayed long enough to see that her answers were almost entirely wrong, and then left the room, shutting the door behind myself.

She was getting better all the time. She was still a long, long way from being well.

I returned to my room, shutting the door behind myself, and fished my cell phone out of my pocket. Grandma’s specific non-threat—“we won’t kill her and dump her body in the nearest ravine”—had been a coded instruction to do something I really didn’t want to do right now. She wanted me to call my sister.

Verity had left New York after defeating the Covenant field team that had been sent to begin the Manhattan purge. She felt staying in the city would be tempting fate, and she was ready to go home. Of course, flying is hard when you carry an arsenal on your person at all times, and it’s harder when you have your own private colony of talking mice. So she’d packed her belongings, her mice, and her (ex-Covenant) boyfriend into a U-Haul and set off for Oregon the long way. She called it a road trip. I called it an exercise in self-indulgence.

Then again, Verity had survived being shot in the stomach and helped save untold cryptid lives when she and Sarah convinced the Covenant that the denizens of New York were not the droids they were looking for. I guess she’d earned a little self-indulgence.

The phone rang twice before Verity’s voice came on, informing me with sugary sweetness, “This is an unlisted number. Now hang up before I call the police.”

“Hello to you, too, Very,” I responded. “Where are you?”

“Alex?” She sounded puzzled, trending into pleased. “Is that you?”

“In the thankfully unpetrified flesh. Do you have a minute?”

“Sure! We’re just rolling into New Orleans to check out a party that Rose told us about, but I can always make time for you.”

I paused. “Rose as in Rose Marshall, the hitchhiking ghost?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Very . . .”

“It’s a dead man’s party. Don’t worry about it. Everybody’s welcome.”

I swallowed the urge to groan. My sister was a grownup. She could take care of herself. “Okay, well, try to keep your soul inside your body, I don’t feel like going wandering around the afterlife trying to put you back together. Is Dominic there?”

“What?” Verity’s tone turned suspicious. “What do you want Dominic for?”

“I need to ask him a question, okay? Now can you put Dominic on the phone?”

“What—”

“The girl I’ve been sort of dating is in the kitchen right now, and she says she’s with the Thirty-Six Society. Since I don’t have any contacts in the Society right now, I just need to confirm that she’s not Covenant. So please, can you put Dominic on the phone?”

“Oh, um, sure. One sec.” I heard Verity put her hand over the phone, followed by the muffled sound of her voice as she relayed the situation. There was a louder scuffing noise before Dominic’s voice came on the line, briskly saying, “Hello?”

“Dominic, hey. It’s Alex.”

“Yes, Verity told me,” he said, his faint Italian accent growing stronger as he started to get impatient. “What did you need to discuss with me?”

“Do you know of any Australian Covenant agents currently on assignment in North America?”

There was a pause before Dominic said, sounding bemused, “No, because there are no Australian Covenant agents. Not unless they’ve managed to recruit an expatriate—and that would be unusual enough that I would have heard about it if it had happened before I quit the Covenant. Since I didn’t hear about it, any Australian recruits would have to have joined quite recently, and would not have completed training, much less been given field assignments. Why?”

“My girlfriend, Shelby Tanner. She says she’s with the Thirty-Six Society. I don’t have a way of confirming that for sure.”

“Well, I can assure you she’s not one of o—one of theirs.” He stumbled a little as he finished the sentence. I felt bad for him. Dominic’s resignation from the Covenant was still recent. Maybe sometimes, he even managed to forget that he’d turned his back on the only life he’d ever known. “Miss Tanner may not be who she claims, but she is not Covenant.”

“Couldn’t they be trying some sort of double agent scenario? Train a British operative to act Australian and send her here to . . .” I stalled out. I was reaching, and I could tell.

So could Dominic. He chuckled. “If the Covenant knew you were there, you would have more than a lone pseudo-Australian agent to contend with, and if they were going to try something so complicated, they would have sent her to Australia, not to the middle of nowhere.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“It is only the truth. She cannot be one of the Covenant’s agents. It makes no sense.”

“Good to know. Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome. Now, if you will excuse me, a dead woman is trying to convince me to drink something that comes in layers.” Dominic sniffed. “I expect to be carrying your sister back to the motel.”

“Thanks for not adding the ‘again’ on that sentence,” I said dryly. “Love to Verity, ongoing tolerance to you.” I hung up. Phone manners have never been a big thing in my family.

So Shelby wasn’t likely to be working for the Covenant. That was a little bit of a comfort. Now I just had to hope that she was still among the living.

I trotted down the stairs, half eager to get back to the gathering in the kitchen and half afraid of what I was going to find when I got there. I didn’t think they could fit an entire human body in the garbage disposal. Maybe more importantly, I didn’t want them to kill Shelby for the crime of wanting to protect me from a deadly predator. It wasn’t her fault she’d decided to protect me from the one Johrlac in the world who truly wouldn’t hurt a fly if she had any choice in the matter.

“Is everything all right in here?” I asked, pushing open the kitchen door.