“Why don’t you just hand that to me? I’ll take good care of it.”

HOPE: CANDY STORE

I glanced over my shoulder just in time to see hands rising in a knockback spell. I dove. The spell caught me in the hip and spun me off balance, but I kept my grip on the bag and darted out of the way before my assailant launched a second one.

Ten feet away stood a young woman with spiky blond hair and so many piercings it’d take her an hour to prepare for a metal detector.

“My competition, I presume,” I said. “Sorry about your luck.”

“Oh, my luck’s fine.”

She cast again. I dodged the spell easily. Her lips tightened and her fury washed over me in delicious waves.

“Not used to casting against someone who knows what you’re doing?” I said. “Lesson one: don’t flail your hands.”

Another cast. I feinted to the side, but from the look on her face, there’d been no need.

“Run out of juice?” I said. “Lesson two: don’t spend it all in one place.”

I reached into the side compartment of my purse, a little hobo-style handbag, designed for the young urbanite of the twenty-first century, with convenient compartments for sunglasses, cell phone, PDA and a concealed weapon.

The witch stared at the gun as if expecting me to light a cigarette with it.

“Sit down,” I said.

After some prodding, she lowered herself to the ground, muttering about fair play. Among supernaturals, using weapons is considered an act of cowardice. But when your power package doesn’t come with fireballs or superhuman strength, you need to even the playing field.

Once she was seated, I used another weapon—my penknife—to cut the bindings from a nearby stack of recyclable papers.

“It’s called using what works,” I said as I tied her. “You should try it. Starting with learning your own kind of magic. If you’d cast a witch’s binding spell, I’d be the one sitting here, and you’d be the one with the conch shell.”

She fumed and squirmed and glared. I closed my eyes and drank in her rage, then picked up my beach bag and walked away.

I WAS PREPARED for Romeo to give me a hard time about passing the test. He grumbled and glowered, and I got my chaos reward, but he didn’t try to withhold the prize, probably for the same reason he hadn’t let me walk out when I’d threatened to—he was well paid for this middleman job and wouldn’t risk losing it.

He gave me an address and told me I was expected to show up there in two hours.

I HAD THE taxi do a drive-by of the gang’s address before I returned to my apartment, and I was glad I did, because it told me a shopping trip was in order.

The taxi driver recommended Bal Harbour Shops and it was a good call. And a good thing I was using someone else’s credit card.

Normally my frugal side would have kicked in, but I was still riding the high from besting the sorcerer, the witch and the goblin, so I was in the mood to treat myself. Considering that the test hadn’t been the cakewalk Benicio promised, I felt justified using his cash.

ANOTHER CAB TOOK me to my temporary apartment. The driver made me for a tourist from the first word and tried to “treat” me to the scenic route. I might not know the layout of Miami, but I spotted that trick after two blocks and ordered him back on track.

As we neared my apartment, I marveled at a wrecking ball tearing through what looked like perfectly good single-family homes—big houses, luxurious even. But houses nonetheless, on valuable property that could hold a hundred times that many in luxury apartment condos. One glance over the Miami skyline, dotted with cranes and skeletal high-rises, told even the newest visitor that this was a city on the move. Out with the old, in with the new.

My apartment was what I would call new, though by Miami standards, it might be a few scant years from the wrecking ball. It wasn’t to my taste—small, antiseptic and cold, painted in grays, whites and blacks, with spare modern furniture—but was in a trendy South Beach neighborhood and, for a girl like Faith Edmonds, location was everything.

I got back to the apartment just in time to change my clothes and place a few calls.

I phoned my editor first. Benicio had provided me with the details of a werewolf cult in Fort Lauderdale that I was supposedly investigating, possibly linked to the murder. His people would give me more later, so I could write the article. He’d booked a room at a Fort Lauderdale hotel in my name, with the phone forwarded to my cell.

He was even having a young female employee drop by the room daily, to establish my alibi.

Normally “I’ve taken off to Florida chasing a story” isn’t something you tell your editor, not without getting permission first, but I had a good relationship with my boss. I liked my job, gave it 100 percent and had no intention of vanishing at the first offer from a more respectable paper. In the world of tabloid journalism, that’s employee-of-the-year material.

Naturally, he chewed me out. Then “get your ass back here” became “fine, but this is on your dime, Adams.” By the end of the call, it had changed to “save your receipts, but if I get a bill for the Hilton, you’re on proofreading duty for a year.”

The next call I made was a dozen times harder. I hate lying to my mother, though it was nothing new. We’d always been close, and still talked for twenty minutes a day and met once or twice a week, but there were days when I felt like an impostor who’d replaced her youngest child. There was just too much I couldn’t share with her.

She didn’t know she had a half-demon for a daughter. She didn’t know such a thing existed. I wasn’t even sure she realized her ex-husband wasn’t my biological father. My parents had separated around the time of my conception and everyone—my dad included—thought I was his. Did my mother have a postbreakup fling and kept it a secret? Or did she temporarily reunite with my dad after that fling and presume he’d fathered me? Or had Lucifer taken my father’s form and returned for one last night together? All I knew was that I’d been raised as the youngest Adams child, treated no differently than my two brothers and sister.

But I had been different. As a child, I’d walk through a museum and stand transfixed before the weapons displays, seeing glorious visions of war and destruction. I’d stare at auto accidents, undoing my seat belt to turn and watch them until they disappeared, then pepper my parents with questions. They chalked it up to a vivid imagination and a taste for the macabre and, since I’d never done anything violent myself, they believed it was just a harmless personality quirk.