“ ’Til next time, then,” he said. A uniformed guard loomed behind him to escort him back to the bowels of the place.

“Yeah. I’ll see you,” I answered.

Ben was waiting for me outside, in the grim parking lot outside the fences and coils of razor wire. “What did he say? If you can tell me. Not that I want to encourage my clients to keep secrets from me.”

I joined him, and together we walked to the car. “He just wants me to look something up for him. He wouldn’t tell me exactly why. He was worried that you’d freak out about it.”

Ben didn’t freak out. I didn’t think he would. But Cormac had spent most of his life believing that he was looking out for Ben, protecting him. Funny how Ben thought the same about Cormac.

We walked on a few steps, silent. I let Ben ponder. Then he said, “This doesn’t have anything to do with those Tiamat guys, does it?”

“No. This seems to be completely unrelated.”

“Is he in trouble?”

I shrugged. How did you answer that question about someone in prison? “I don’t think so. He didn’t seem worried, just curious.”

“Oh.” A few more steps in silence. “Then I’m going to decide not to worry about this.”

“You go right ahead,” I said with a smile. Because of course we were both going to worry.

“This isn’t anything he can’t handle, right?” Ben said.

“Right.”

We reached the car. He was driving today. In a few moments, we were back on the highway.

I said, “It’s weird. I met Cormac before I met you, that time he tried to kill me. Remember?”

“Yeah, and if I recall he never actually fired at you.”

“No. If he’d fired I probably wouldn’t be here now.” Ben grunted an agreement. We drove a few more miles, and I said, “Remember when we met?”

He smiled. “You needed a lawyer who wouldn’t freak out when you told him you’re a werewolf. So Cormac referred you to me. Now I have to ask, did you have any idea we’d end up like this?”

This was one of those heavy relationship questions that had no good answer. Just about anything I said would get me in trouble. “Not a clue. To tell you the truth, I thought you were kind of sleazy.”

“Sleazy?” he said, indignant, but he was still smiling.

“Come on, anyone who’d be Cormac’s lawyer?” I said. He laughed, because I definitely had a point. “Seems like a million years ago.”

So much had happened. So much had changed. So many people just weren’t here anymore.

“Yeah.” He sounded sad. He’d been normal then. Human. Uninfected, with no hint that his life would swerve in this direction.

I squeezed his hand. More for my own comfort than his, if I was honest. But he squeezed back, smiled at me, and I felt better.

When the call from the Paradox crew came the next morning, it was Jules. That was the first surprise. The second was how pleased he sounded when he said, “We’re staying. You’ve got to come over here.”

“Why, what is it?”

“We found something,” he said.

Chapter 15

Ben and I arrived at their hotel suite within the hour.

The suite, in one of those modern, functional hotels that catered to business travelers, had a living-room area between bedrooms. The coffeemaker smelled like it had been going all night, and a half-empty box of donuts sat on the dresser.

The team had pulled chairs to a round table, where they huddled around a couple of humming laptops attached to heavy-duty speakers. Gary lay on a nearby sofa, resting. A gauze square was taped over his left temple. It actually made him look tough.

“Gary, it’s good to see you conscious again,” I said, smiling.

“Good to be conscious. I had no idea Denver would be this exciting,” he said.

“It usually isn’t. Most of our ghost stories are the garden-variety kind.”

“Who wants garden variety when we’ve got this?” Jules said, nodding at one of the screens.

“What is it?”

“Here, watch,” Jules said. We crowded around the laptop.

A video clip filled the screen. It had the grainy, filtered quality of a low-light, night-vision-type camera. Everything in the scene had a green tinge, but I recognized the view: looking along the bar at New Moon, across the back half of the restaurant, including the table where we’d worked and a partial view into the kitchen. A stainless-steel worktable and the industrial gas grill were visible, along with some shelves of pots, pans, utensils, and packages. It was one of a half dozen cameras the crew had set up before the séance.

The time stamp in the corner ticking off seconds was the only indication that time was passing. Nothing in the clip showed movement; we sat still around the table. And these guys watched film like this for hours . Even if you scanned through using the fast-forward button, it must have been tedious. But they’d also had a lot of practice. I certainly wouldn’t have noticed the anomaly that Jules pointed out.

“There, there it is. You see it?”

He put his finger on the screen showing where, on the upper corner of the kitchen doorframe, a tongue of flame emerged. It looked white and glaring in the night-vision footage. It was like a fire had started on the inside of the wall, then burned through, licking outward and expanding like an explosion. One moment it was a hint of fire, emerging in one or two places. The next moment, a wall of fierce fire blew from the kitchen through the dining room, pushing air and heat—and the table, and us—before it. This was the fireball that had roared out to shock us. The rest of the film showed us reacting, panicking, the table knocking Gary’s head, me running for the fire extinguishers, Ben running after me, and so forth. Pandemonium.

The fire itself seemed to come out of nowhere.

“Spontaneous building combustion?” I said. If it could happen to people, why not structures?

“There’s usually a reason a place catches fire like that,” Jules said. “I talked to the investigators about this. They haven’t finished their report, but they haven’t found anything obvious like a gas leak or faulty wiring, or ignition of flammable materials, which is usually what happens. In an older building like this, there’s any number of things that can go wrong, but there’s something else. I didn’t see it until I went through it frame by frame. The investigators wouldn’t have caught it.”