“No, Jonah,” I growled. “I don’t have time to wait, and I especially don’t have the time, patience, or energy for you to try to work your weaselly wiles on me. You might know some dirty little details about Tucker from seeing him with Mab, but you drew a complete blank when I first mentioned the Circle, which means that you don’t know anything about them at all.”

   He opened his mouth to protest, but I cut him off before he could get started.

   “I’ll admit that torturing you for what little information you might have would be fun, a nice diversion after the shitty couple of weeks that I’ve had, but I couldn’t trust anything you would scream out. And frankly, I have better things to do than getting your blood on my clothes tonight.”

   He wet his lips again, his eyes darting left and right, as if he expected more assassins to suddenly appear out of the icy drizzle. “And what about me? What do I do now?”

   “For all I care, you can stay right here in your mansion, stewing in your own juices just like you have been for months now. Although it won’t be long before Fedora realizes that you’re not nearly as dead as she wants you to be.” I stared him down. “What do you think will happen then?”

   I slashed my knife through the air right in front of his throat, just in case he didn’t get the point.

   He gasped and staggered back. “She’ll come back.”

   I nodded. “That she will, and I imagine that next time, she’ll make sure that you’re good and dead before she leaves.”

   His face paled, making him look even more skeletal than before, as that horrifying fact slowly sank in. Dead man walking in more ways than one.

   “Enjoy your life, Jonah,” I snarled. “What little is left of it, anyway.”

   I gave him a mock salute with my knife, then turned and stalked off into the night.

   * * *

   Once again, Phillip followed me, although we hadn’t taken five steps before McAllister started hissing at me.

   “Blanco!” he said, his sharp voice dissolving into a bitter wail. “You can’t do this! You can’t leave me here! Not again! I can’t take it! Not again!”

   I kept right on walking.

   Phillip glanced over his shoulder. “You should be happy,” he murmured. “McAllister is leaning against the doorframe and clutching his chest like he’s about to have a heart attack.”

   I snorted. “He’d have to have a heart first.”

   Phillip grinned, but he kept looking at me out of the corner of his eye. “I know why you told him no,” he said. “But don’t make this about me. McAllister’s not the one who shot me.”

   “No, but he set up the whole art heist, and you got hurt as a result of his plan. Not to mention the innocent people who died just because he wanted to hide the fact that he was embezzling from Mab’s estate and didn’t want Madeline to find out about it. That makes him responsible for the whole shebang. And now he wants a get-out-of-Ashland-free card for all of that? For some tenuous information about Tucker that probably won’t tell me anything that I don’t already know about the vampire? No—no way.”

   Phillip didn’t say anything else as we crossed the lawn, and the only sound was the crunching of the ice-coated grass under our boots. After the warmth and light of Mc­Allister’s office, the night seemed colder and blacker than before. The drizzle picked up again, turning into more of a steady, icy rain, and our breaths hovered around us in chilly clouds. Or maybe it was just my own sense of failure that made everything feel dark, dreary, and desolate.

   Phillip had shot through the lock on the iron gate and shoved it open on his way into the mansion, so we stopped at the entrance and looked up and down the street. But there was no sign of Fedora, the giants, or the SUV, and all the neighboring houses were still dark. No one had heard the gunshots or seen us skulking around. Good. One less headache to deal with tonight.

   Phillip and I hurried down the street and slid inside my van. I cranked the engine, turning the heat up as hot as it would go, but the warm air did little to dispel the frigid despair and weariness that filled my body.

   “So now what?” Phillip asked. “You’re not really going to leave McAllister out here all by himself, are you?”

   I looked over at Phillip.

   He held up his gloved hands.“Don’t get me wrong. Being murdered in his own home couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Frankly, I’d like to strangle him to death with my bare hands for what he put Eva, Owen, and everyone else through that night at Briartop.”

   “But?”

   “But I know how important finding out about this Circle is to you, and especially learning the truth about what your mom was involved in. I would feel the same way, if it were me.” Phillip drew in a breath and slowly let it out. “I’ve always felt the same way about my own parents. I looked for them for years, but never got anywhere. It took me a long time to accept the fact that they were probably dead. Or just didn’t care enough to try to find me themselves.”

   He growled out the last few words, but I could still hear the hurt in his voice. His shoulders slumped, and his body seemed to deflate, like air slowly leaking out of a balloon. He stared out the windshield instead of looking at me, but a muscle in his jaw ticked, as if he were grinding his teeth to keep from showing any more emotion. Something that I had more than a little experience with, especially these past few weeks.

   Phillip had been abandoned as a toddler and had grown up in some bad foster-care situations before finally running away and living on the streets. That’s where he’d met Owen and Eva, and the three of them had formed their own family, along with Cooper Stills, Owen’s blacksmith mentor. Phillip didn’t know anything about his parents, although he thought that one of them must have been a giant and the other a dwarf, given his own enormous strength.

   I reached over and squeezed his gloved hand with my own, telling him that I understood his pain, anger, and frustration. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye, squeezed my hand back, and slipped his fingers out of mine.