“What’s a servitor? Is it a fairy?” Jupe looked from me to the doll in amazement.

“There are no such things as fairies. I created it, with Heka.”

“Does it have a name?”

“No.”

“But it’s good, not bad?”

“It’s not good or bad. It’s just an energy spell. I need to do another spell to retrieve some information from it. You wanna scoot up to the bumper and watch the rest of the movie? I’ll just do the spell inside the car so no one can see me.”

“No way, I’ve seen this movie a thousand times. Will the pink fairy thing come back out when you do your spell? I want to watch. Can I? Please?”

“I thought you said you’d ‘die’ if you couldn’t see this movie.”

He gave me a sheepish grin.

“Are you even allowed to see magick without your dad’s permission? Or am I going to get in trouble for that too?”

“I don’t think there’s a rule about that,” he said, cutting his eyes to the side. What a punk.

I debated for a second, wondering if I should let him watch or not. My deflector charm was still around my neck; the wards on the rental car were intact. It wasn’t a dangerous spell. I reached down to grab the popcorn bucket off the ground and shut the back door.

“There’s not much to see,” I said. “It just dumps images into my mind. You can watch, though, if you stay quiet. Reach over the front seat and grab my purse, will ya? Turn the radio down while you’re at it.”

For on-the-go magick, I always carry a small notebook to jot written spell components. I also used to carry a sigil cheat-sheet until I forgot my purse in a restaurant a few years ago; I got the purse returned to me intact, but it made me realize that if it had fallen into the wrong hands, it might cause all sorts of problems.

Scribbling a squared circle on a sheet of notebook paper, I began to draw the symbols inside it that would trigger the information upload from my servitor. Jupe questioned my every stroke, and I explained as best I could until I lost my patience. “Zip it, kid, or I’m going to put you outside.”

“Zipped! Keep going, I’ll be quiet—I swear!”

I had a sneaking feeling it wasn’t the first time he’d been told to shut up.

When I finished my drawing, I warned him one last time to be quiet—no matter what—and made him watch from the front seat. With intent, I spit on the sigil, charging it as Jupe whispered, “Gross.” The retrieval spell was now ready to be used, so I loosely grasped the head of the clay doll and smashed it against the charged paper sigil. It cracked in several pieces, releasing both the servitor’s energy and the information it had collected.

The images it showed me weren’t happening in real time, but they were most likely gathered within the last few minutes; once the servitor located its objective, it returned pretty fast. They rushed into my head and began flipping slideshow-style. A bedroom—no, hotel room. A girl sat on the bed. Riley Cooper, I presumed. Early twenties? Long black hair, dark eyes. Petite.

She was dressed like she was headed to fetish night at some goth club: skintight black leather pants, purple vinyl top that was cut low to show off cleavage and high to show midriff. That, and the sides of a really bad tramp-stamp tattoo with batwings and paw prints that circled around from her lower back to her sides. Leather boots laced up the front with ridiculous heels, big silver hoop earrings. Lots of dark makeup and matching black nail polish. A pair of handcuffs sat on the bed beside her, along with a handgun and a large grimoire.

The image stuttered, then focused on a matchbook next to her bed. It read palms casino, las vegas.

Perfect. I had a location, and I now knew what she looked like. Better than nothing, and at least she wasn’t in the area.

I expected that to be the end of the servitor’s magick-fueled transmission, but I couldn’t disengage from the spell. The last image blurred, crackled, then … changed. I wasn’t looking at stills anymore. It was the same hotel room, but now it was like a video playing in my head. The girl had moved off the bed. She was looking me square in the face. She walked forward. Toward me. Or toward my servitor? She reached above her head, lips moving, and a green dot appeared in the middle of my vision before darkness ate it all away.

The transmission dropped and my head hit the floor of the SUV as I fell backward. Jupe’s face was wedged between the front seat, a look of thrilled wonder glazing over his pale green eyes. As he stared at me, an unexpectedly strong wave of postmagick nausea hit me.

I barely had time to grab the empty popcorn bucket before I threw up.

16

Apart from making me sick as a dog and giving Jupe his second biggest magical thrill (“The Pareba demon binding was cooler,” he’d remarked), the servitor, I decided later, was a bust. Sure, it was a relief to know that Riley Cooper wasn’t in Morella. But unless I planned to chase her down in Las Vegas—no thanks—all I had was a face to go with a name that didn’t match up with any known magicians. I had nothing to tie her directly to Luxe or to any other order. Disappointing.

With her identity still up in the air and the glass talon being researched, I really needed to talk to the caliph in Florida. I tried to email him again; it bounced a second time. I tried calling multiple times from public phones and just got his voice mail. That left me one option: the local E∴E∴ lodge.

The morning after my date with Jupe, I headed to the lodge after checking on my car in the body shop. When I arrived, Soror Yolanda was speaking to a member on the far side of the main temple. Trying not to pace, I looked around at all the sigils painted on the walls and waited for her to finish. Just when I thought I couldn’t be more miserable, her blond assistant, the over-friendly Frater Kantor, appeared.