“I thought you said you didn’t handle ritual symbolism.”

“I have an uncle.” (Naga wouldn’t mind being called an uncle under the circumstances, and he was the family go-to guy for anything involving snake cults, largely because he was frequently their target. It was just that explaining why I had an extradimensional professor of demonic studies as an honorary uncle would take too long—especially since the uncle in question was a giant snake from the waist down.) “Plus, my father talks a lot.”

“For someone who dislikes talking about her family, you certainly do it a lot.”

“What can I say? Corpses make me chatty, and not entirely in the good way. It’s not like you’re filling in the gaps, you know. What about your family? Dad says you’re generational Covenant.”

“My parents are dead.” The statement was made without any real emotion. It was simply a fact, something that couldn’t be changed. “They were hunting a hydra when I was young. They didn’t return.”

“I … I’m sorry.”

“It was a very long time ago. I continued my training, so as to do what they had wanted of me. What was expected of me.” He hesitated before adding, “I had never met a sentient cryptid before coming here.”

A lot was starting to make sense. I pulled up my webmail account, attaching the pictures and shooting them off to one of the family’s blind accounts. Even if Dominic saw the address, he’d never be able to use it to backtrack anything important. Maybe I was being paranoid; I liked to think of it as being sensible. “Can I send you copies of these? I really do want you to check them against your records.”

“Here; let me.” He looked relieved at the change of topic, and leaned across me to type his email address into the “To” field. My cheeks flared red as his arms brushed against mine. I delivered a swift but firm internal slap to my hormones. No, Verity. Bad Verity. Giving in to the raw hotness of the Covenant boy once was bad enough. Doing it a second time would show a serious lack of judgment, as well as a definite failure of self-control.

Knowing exactly what he looked like under that shirt and duster wasn’t helping matters. It says something about what passes for “normal” when I’m around that the pictures of the dead girl on my computer screen weren’t doing anything to dampen my desire to jump his bones. They weren’t helping it, either, but they weren’t enough to kill the mood in and of themselves.

Dominic clicked the send button and pulled back. “There.”

“Thanks,” I said lamely. “You’ll let me know if you find anything?”

“I will.” He hesitated, eyes fixing on mine. “Verity—”

Someone started hammering on the front door of the apartment, about half a second before the telepathic static clicked on inside my head, telling me that “someone” was “my cousin,” who I’d forgotten to call. “Crap, it’s Sarah,” I said, knocking Dominic to the side as I scrambled from my chair.

Sarah had her hand raised to start hammering again when I opened the door. At first, she didn’t say anything. She just let her hand drop, and looked at me.

“Sarah, I’m sorry. I lost track of the time.”

Her eyes narrowed, frostbite seeming to spread around the edges of her irises. I took an involuntary step backward. For Sarah’s eyes to be whiting out like that, she had to be pissed. “I thought you were dead,” she said, in a clipped, tightly controlled tone that was belied by the wave of telepathic fury that underscored it. “You disappear right after fucking a boy from the Covenant, you’re not in any of the usual places, no one’s seen you anywhere, and then one of the gargoyles tells me he saw you going back into the sewers alone. You couldn’t even tell me where you were going?” You scared the living shit out of me, and what is he doing here, anyway? I thought you were done with that asshole after he explained his platform on racial cleansing!

The transition from spoken word to telepathic scolding was so smooth I barely noticed it at first, until I saw how much the white had spread across her eyes. “Sarah, you need to calm down. I’m fine. I’m sorry I scared you. I really didn’t mean to.”

You didn’t think! You never think! She stormed into the apartment, which was something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it meant I could close the door, thus sparing the neighbors our little family drama. On the other hand, it meant I was shutting myself in the apartment with a pissed-off cuckoo and a man from the Covenant. Not the sort of combination that inspires many funny anecdotes. A few cautionary tales, maybe, but nothing you can really go repeating in mixed company.

“Miss Zellaby.” Dominic straightened up, offering a shallow but impeccably polite bow in Sarah’s direction. “A pleasure to see you again.”

Sarah turned her narrow-eyed gaze on him, making me glad once more that Antimony’s comic books got it wrong, and telepaths can’t actually kill you with their brains. Give you a whopping headache and earworm you with annoying jingles, yes; kill you, no. (Although sometimes, when she’s managed to stick “The Happy Banana Song” in my head for a week, I sort of wish she could kill people with her brain. It would be kinder.)

What are you doing here? she demanded.

He didn’t respond. He couldn’t. Without spending a lot more time around her, there was no way he’d be attuned enough to actually “hear” her when she thought at him like that.

The white rimming Sarah’s eyes started to fade, replaced by a look of sheer frustration. “What are you doing here?” she repeated, out loud this time.

“You were the one that alerted me to your cousin’s absence, if you’ll take a moment to remember,” he said mildly. “I went looking for her because I shared your concern, and assumed you’d like her returned to you with as many of her original limbs as possible.”

The white fled Sarah’s eyes completely, leaving her chagrined and a little embarrassed. “Oh,” she said. “I did call you, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did.”

“I shouldn’t have had to.” She stalked over and smacked me solidly on the shoulder.

I yelped. “Hey!”

“Don’t you hey me! Why didn’t you call? You know you’re supposed to call before you go running off to your certain death!”