“Thanks, Cady!”

Amanda sprang away as Kar Yee handed me a glass of water and leaned against her desk.

“What’s really wrong?” she asked after Amanda was gone. “You look like shit. Your halo is all … bleh.” She made a sour face and wiggled her fingers. “In trouble, maybe? It better not interfere with business. There are two big concerts down the street at the Cypress Club this weekend that are going to keep us slammed.”

Kar Yee’s no-nonsense way of thinking made her a great business partner, but not a warm-and-fuzzy friend. Most of the time this worked out well for me because she didn’t pry into my background too much. Sentimental friends were a liability for someone in my situation.

“It’s probably not a big deal. Just something that I need to sort out. Tomorrow’s my night off, so hopefully I can take care of it before Saturday.”

“Hmph.”

Her usual response. It meant, I know you’re lying to me, but I’m not asking.

I met Kar Yee at college in Seattle, a year after going into hiding, and right after I had assumed my current identity. Before that, I’d been traveling around the country under several other aliases in an attempt to elude our rival magical organization and any stray FBI investigators with nagging suspicions about my parents’ faked deaths.

Kar Yee’s parents lived in Hong Kong. She came to the States to study international law, but ditched the law program for a degree in business. During her second year in school, she decided that she didn’t want to go back home, so she married an American boy to get her U.S. citizenship, then divorced him after INS lost interest in them. Even though they’d never consummated the sham marriage, her fake husband seemed genuinely upset to see her go.

After college, it was her idea to move to California. Most Earthbounds prefer a Mediterranean climate near a large body of water, which is why there are so many living in our area. (If you want to avoid demons, try the Midwest—virtually demon free, at least from what I’ve heard.)

Once we got to California, it was my idea to start up the tiki bar. We traveled up and down the northern coast for almost a month before we settled on the city of Morella. Bordering the Big Sur region, Morella is the fourth largest city in the state, half an hour from the ocean, and a couple hours south of San Francisco, if you drive fast. And there were Earthbounds aplenty here; you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one. The blocks surrounding Tambuku are lined with demon-friendly businesses. So when we found this location for lease—half underground, the entrance at the foot of a short flight of cement steps down from the sidewalk—we knew it was perfect. We’d been in business for almost two years, a success from day one.

Amanda’s voice came through the speakerphone on Kar Yee’s desk. “Uh, Arcadia? Is there more white rum out here somewhere? I kinda tipped over the bottle you were using and I can’t find—oh wait. Never mind. Crap. A big group of people just came in the door.” A loud chorus from the bar rattled the speaker before she hung up. Paranormal Patrol was still going strong.

“Can you help her?” I gave Kar Yee a pleading look. “I need a few minutes alone to make a phone call.”

She shot me a suspicious look, then nodded silently and complied, closing the door behind her. I locked it before pushing up the sleeve of my T-shirt to reveal a raised design on the inside of my arm, between my wrist and elbow.

Inked in white with a thick needle, the tattoo isn’t noticeable unless you’re looking hard—a long, oval Egyptian cartouche that contains seven hidden sigils, which I can identify like Braille from the scarring. Most of them are protective wards: instant, ACME-style spells for protection and stealth. Having them permanently affixed to my skin allows me to avoid hand-drawing the symbols in a pinch and could mean the difference between life or death … or between staying hidden and being caught.

One of the symbols, though, contains a homing sigil for my personal guardian, an Æthyric messenger spirit that can be called for information or help. Known as Hermeneus entities, these beings are coveted by magicians. To petition their aid, you have to woo them in a special ritual. If one of them takes a liking to you, it might offer up its services—either a onetime deal or a more permanent situation, in which they form a link to your Heka signature, something as unique to each person as a fingerprint.

Once linked to you, a guardian will be your loyal eyes and ears on the Æthyric plane, able to glean bits of hidden knowledge, warn about Æthyric disturbances, and monitor spirits who are linked to other magicians. The magician’s equivalent of the witch’s familiar.

These Hermeneus spirits don’t physically cross over from the Æthyr to our plane. Instead, they use Heka to transmit a kind of noncorporeal hologram of themselves. Because of this, they aren’t much use for earthly tasks. All they can really do here is relay information from one magician to another. Before the phone was invented, this was probably helpful, but now? Not so much.

Unlike the binding triangle I’d just powered up in the bar, my guardian’s homing sigil didn’t need to be charged with Heka that had been kindled with electrical energy. It required a more passive, personal energy gained from bodily fluids. Might sound a little odd, but magicians have used fluids to charge spells for centuries: blood, saliva, sexual fluids, tears. Inside all of these is raw, unkindled Heka. The amount of raw Heka varies by fluid type—blood has more Heka than saliva, for example—and it also varies person to person. Not that there’s some lab test available to verify this, but I was pretty sure that my blood had a hell of a lot more Heka than the average person’s. And this definitely gave me an advantage, magically speaking. Just as anybody can learn how to draw, anybody can learn to do magick; however, someone who lacks natural artistic talent might take twice as long to master the basics. And let’s face it: that person might eventually learn to pull off a decent landscape, but they’ll probably never be Michelangelo.