A flutter went through my stomach as she talked, then a familiar voice filled my head.

May I show myself?

My guardian, Priya. It almost never came to me uninvited.

“No!” I whispered. “Hold on!”

Amanda stopped talking and gave me a strange look. “No? You don’t think I should go?”

“Huh? What—I didn’t mean that. Sure, you should go. Why not.”

She relaxed and continued filling up the toothpick bin. “Yeah, I think I will. Like you said, why not. Have you ever dated a customer?”

“Excuse me, I’ll be right back.” I tried not to bolt from behind the bar. I headed toward Kar Yee’s office, heard her on the phone, and switched directions toward the restroom. Once inside, I locked myself inside one of two stalls.

“Okay,” I whispered. “You can appear now.”

Priya emerged from the air, its image so transparent, I could barely see it.

We are being sought, it said plainly in my head.

“You and me? By whom?”

Searchers have been cast into the Æthyr. I am having difficulty hiding from them.

“What kind of searchers? You mean servitors?” Sometimes Priya’s communication skills aren’t the best.

No. Litchen, Priya insisted. Small insect Æthyr beings. They are commanded by demon host in the Æthyr.

Shit. My heart sped up.

“Are these searcher insects on earth too?”

No, only on my plane. They cannot be summoned to earth.

“It’s got to be the Luxe Order. Can you avoid the insects? They can’t injure you, right?”

I am doing my best to avoid them. If they kill me, I will be reborn in a new form and seek out a renewed link with you again, if you will wait for me.

Priya was nothing if not loyal. “Thank you, Priya. Is there any way I can help you? A spell I can do to fortify or hide you better?”

The spirit shook its birdlike head. The air undulated. I merely wanted to warn you.

“I appreciate that. Please keep me updat—”

Litchen are scouts for their host demons. If they find me, our link can be used to locate you, and their host can be summoned to earth in a physical body. The host can harm you.

Great. That’s all I needed. “I’ll put up a continuous ward around me somehow.”

Priya faded. I must go now. Guard yourself. I will do my best to stay hidden and keep our link safe.

“You always do,” I murmured as Priya disappeared, leaving me alone in the brightly lit restroom.

8

Not long after Priya left, Lon called at the bar, catching me right before I left. He didn’t say much, just gruffly asked me to come out to his house. My first reaction was to insist that we meet at a restaurant or some other neutral location, but he refused, claiming that he had books to show me—rare books that couldn’t be carted around. My curiosity got the better of me.

However, now that it was getting dark and I was lost in the woods, that curiosity was quickly dying. I pulled over to the side of the road and put my car in park so that I could study the GPS screen without running off the road.

“Turn left in two hundred feet,” the computerized voice said in a cheery voice.

“There is no turn in two hundred feet, you bitch,” I yelled toward the screen. “Zoom out.” Nothing happened. “ZOOM. OUT,” I said again, louder, before the screen responded to the voice-activated command. I studied the roads on the map; they didn’t exist. I was stuck on the side of a small mountain, in the middle of the woods, at night. Beautiful.

I held down the button to turn off the GPS, then put the car in gear and began following the road up the mountain, hoping I could just find it on my own; I wished that I’d written down the verbal instructions Lon gave me over the phone. The road was narrow and made hairpin twists as it snaked back and forth up the rocky, heavily wooded landscape. After five or six of these sharp, steep turns, I found one road branching off, but it was headed down the mountain, not up, so I kept going.

Just when I thought I couldn’t go any farther, the road suddenly ended and turned into gravel, then a few feet away, the iron gates to his house appeared, just as he’d described; I stopped in front of them. A small speaker box sat atop a bent pole. I rolled down the window and pressed the button.

“Umm, hello? It’s Arcadia.”

I waited for a response. Nothing. When I leaned out the window to press the button again, a buzz sounded and the gates began swinging open.

The gravel driveway was steep, but at least there weren’t any more twists. Who the hell would choose to live way up here and navigate all those dangerous curves every day? A mentally unstable person, I thought, that’s who. After a short time, my headlights fell on a break in the trees and his house came into view.

“Well, well, well,” I muttered to myself. It certainly wasn’t a mountain cabin. The modern house was constructed from dark gray stackstone with clean, horizontal lines and large plate-glass windows. Several of them were brightly lit from the inside, radiating a pleasant orange glow.

The driveway curved into a loop. Gravel crunched under my tires as I drove to the front of the house and parked.

A set of dark red double doors marked the entrance. No doorbell that I could see, so I knocked cautiously and tugged my purse higher up on my shoulder. With a force that suctioned wisps of my hair forward, both doors flung inward and orange light flooded the stone-paved entrance.

An adolescent boy stood inside the open doorway. Taller than me, he was lean and gangly, all arms and legs. Dark brown hair rose up in a mass of long, frizzy spiral curls that defied gravity and sprung out several inches from his head in all directions. His skin was the color of a chocolate milk shake.