“Look, I don’t have any problem leaving this food on the floor, but you’re going to drink the water before I leave.”

She initially resisted but gave in without too much prodding. It took her two tries to empty it.

“How old are you?” I asked after she’d finished.

Water ran down her chin. “None of your business.” She threw the empty plastic bottle in my direction.

“Eighteen?” I guessed. “Seventeen?”

“Twenty-one. Where are we? Are we still in La Sirena?”

She didn’t know where I lived. That was good.

“We’re in Fresno,” I lied.

“Fresno? What are we doing here?”

I ignored her. “What were your instructions from Luxe?” She shifted her legs to curl up on the couch, facing away from me. She looked uncomfortable. “Bring you back to San Diego … alive, unfortunately.”

“Why me and not my parents?”

She laughed. “My brother’s hunting your parents in Mexico, don’t worry.”

“I doubt he’s having better luck than you are, then. I’m sure they’re already farther away than that.”

“But you don’t know? Interesting.”

“Whatever. The less we know about each other’s whereabouts, the easier it is to stay hidden. So it’s kinda useless, you see, trying to bring me in to get info on them. Because I don’t have it.”

“Hmph.”

“Why did your order kidnap our caliph?”

She wrinkled her nose. “What are you talking about?”

“The head of Ekklesia Eleusia. Why did you kidnap him?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Nobody’s kidnapped anyone except you, and you’re going to regret that when my order finds out.”

Perhaps they hadn’t told her about the caliph, or she wasn’t high up enough in the hierarchy to know—just a bounty hunter instructed to do a job.

I’d removed her leather pants and boots so that she couldn’t use them as projectiles to knock down the sheets, and now she had on only underwear and a sheer black spiderweb print shirt. The dirty soles of her feet faced me as her toes curled; the black polish on her toenails was chipping. “Are you cold?” I asked. “There’s a space heater I can turn on.”

“Are you mad that they left you?” she asked, ignoring my question.

“My parents? No. They were protecting me.”

“By deserting you? If you were so fucking special, why wouldn’t they guard you with their own lives?”

“The three of us being seen together would draw suspicion. It was safer to separate.”

“Or maybe they just told you that. Maybe they realized that you weren’t the savior to Ekklesia Eleusia that they’d thought you’d be. Maybe they thought you weren’t worth the troub—”

“Look, this isn’t going to work. My parents love me. They just did what they had to.”

She shook her head. “Still protecting them after all these years, huh? One of our mages has a theory that you helped them with the killings.”

“They didn’t kill anyone,” I snapped.

“I know for a fact that they did.” When she tried to smile, all I could see was the gaping hole in her teeth. The incisor that once held that spot was now in my pocket.

“Let’s see, you were fourteen or fifteen during the Black Lodge slayings? I seriously doubt you knew much more than your math homework back then.”

She relaxed her shoulders and stared at me for a moment. “Huh,” she said thoughtfully.

“What?”

“You really don’t think they killed all those people, do you?”

I gave her a weak smile. “They were framed by the head of your order.”

“Wow, you’re dense.”

“Alrighty, then. This is going nowhere.” I moved the fruit and crackers toward her with the tip of my shoe. “Have fun eating like a dog off the floor.” I left her a small length of toilet paper on the arm of the couch and parted the hanging sheets to exit.

“I know your parents killed the other heads of the orders,” she said behind me, “because they tried to kill my dad.”

Her dad? I froze in place.

“That’s right, Moonchild. I’m Phil Zorn’s daughter.”

An uneasy chill ran down my back. Magus Zorn? Holy shit. I had just kidnapped the Luxe leader’s daughter. This was either the worst mistake I’d ever made, or a once-in-a-lifetime piece of leverage; I wasn’t sure which.

24

By late afternoon I’d checked on Riley twice and brought her more water. At least she’d eaten. She was refusing to talk anymore, which was fine by me, merely requesting that I change the satellite radio station, which I did. Then I dug through an old toolbox that the previous owners of the house had left behind and found an old sliding lock, which I installed on the door to the basement. Having some extra security made me feel less anxious. More than that, it gave me something to do.

After finishing, I plopped down on my living room sofa, gloomy and miserable, weighing my options. Only four days left until my time ran out.

I laid out in a neat row on my coffee table the contents of Riley Cooper’s pockets. Her gun, a driver’s license, a key card for a motel room in La Sirena, about a thousand dollars in cash, a piece of red ochre chalk, her key ring, a cell phone. I scrolled through her contacts several times. Read all her text messages. Most of them were just brief I-love-you’s to her father and another man—boyfriend, brother? She hadn’t made or received any calls in two days; at least no one would be suspicious about calls suddenly stopping. Hopefully I could just continue texting in her place to keep up appearances.