Pitch grunted. “What’s the demonic equivalent of concrete?”
He’d probably meant the question facetiously, but Sidney straightened, his eyes losing focus as he considered. “Demonic quick-set …”
Since he would stand there until an answer came to him, Alyce moved in front of him. She couldn’t help the jump of her pulse as his gaze locked on her.
“They found the gun in the muck,” he said. “Also in the muck were all the printouts recorded during the fight. So we don’t know if Thorne accessed the verge. We can just add that to the list of things we don’t know, such as what he’s doing next.”
Alyce thought a moment. “We could go to his boat. That is his only home.”
Pitch snorted. “You think he just tells everybody where it is?”
She nodded. “He has signs all along the river.”
Pitch stared at her. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“You didn’t ask.”
There was so much he wanted to ask her. Sid sat beside Alyce in the back of Liam’s car as they cruised streets parallel to the river, looking for the signs Alyce had told them about.
“What kind of signs?” Pitch had demanded. “Signs like ichor smears? Like talya heads on pikes?”
“Like big pictures stuck on tall posts,” she’d said.
“Billboards?” Sid straightened. “He’s a djinn-man with billboards?”
Now Alyce leaned over his lap to point out the car window. “Over there. Across the bridge.”
THE RIVER PRINCESS EVENING CRUISE. The words were left justified to make room for a woman with Caucasian coloring, a Native American costume, and breasts by a plastic surgeon with more silicone than ethics. Her high-heeled moccasins pierced the Web site address at the bottom of the sign.
“Rich men get on. Poor men get off,” Alyce said.
“Riverboat gambling isn’t allowed on the lake.” Jilly, in the front passenger seat, poked at her phone. “Internet search says the River Princess has a few outstanding complaints—all from legitimate offshore casinos—but no associated investigations.”
Liam grunted. “Thorne must know somebody—or he knows where some body is.”
“The sailing schedule shows open boarding tonight,” Jilly said. “Shall I make reservations?”
“We didn’t have time for a company picnic this summer,” Liam mused. “What with battling evil.” His smile was sharper than the princess’s heel. “And talyan do like to gamble.”
Alyce shifted in her seat. “What do we want with him?”
“Whatever he wanted with the verge,” Sid said. “He’s the closest connection we have to the intentions of the djinn, and if they have plans for the verge …”
“He won’t tell.” Fretfully, she tugged at her seat belt. “Well, he might, just because he likes to show how clever he is. But he won’t tell us anything useful if we all confront him.”
Sid bristled. “Do not say you want to get on a boat with him alone. Whatever relationship you had with him was … was before, not after you threw a paver at his head.”
“At his hand,” she corrected. “Because he was trying to shoot me.” She let the belt retract with a snap. “That is the kind of relationship we had.”
Liam drummed his fingers on the seat back. “You have a better idea, Westerbrook?”
“If the River Princess is Thorne’s base of operations, a quick, quiet recon might find something, anything, on this gathering of djinn.” Sid scowled at Alyce. “Without unnecessary shooting.” He smoothed the scowl when he glanced back at Liam. “After our run-in today, chances are Thorne won’t be wasting his time on a pleasure cruise, so I’ll have the place to myself.”
“You?” Alyce’s voice was small.
Sid didn’t look at her. “I’m the obvious choice. Best qualified to judge any information Thorne left lying around. Least valuable if the mission goes awry.”
“I don’t rank my talyan for sacrifice,” Liam said.
Jilly tapped her phone on the dash in counterpoint to Liam. “We could follow in Jonah’s boat. The Shades of Gray is outfitted for running dark. If you get dumped overboard, we can recover you.”
Sid tried for talya humor. “Alive or dead?”
“Yes,” Jilly said.
“No,” Alyce said.
“You’ll go together,” Liam said. When Sid drew a harsh breath, the league leader pinned him with a glare. “Just in case sacrifice seemed like an option.”
Alyce nodded and settled back in her seat.
Sid wanted to scream his rejection.
When Liam had first contacted the London league, seeking older records than any kept in the New World, he’d danced around the information he wanted. Eventually, he asked what they had on long-extinct symballein pairings. Specifically, how long did the bond last?
Once the Bookkeeper masters had overcome their shock that the symballein bond existed, they’d laughed at the commitment phobia that reared in the face of eternity.
Now Sid understood. Liam hadn’t feared the bond lasting forever; he wanted to make sure it did.
That was hard to do when half the bond was stretching toward suicidal curiosity.
For once, Sid didn’t mean himself. But damn it, if he couldn’t talk the Bookkeeper talk anymore, and he didn’t walk the talya walk, what was left?
“Thorne has hinted, more than once, he wanted something from me,” Alyce said quietly. “What if it was my teshuva’s talisman? What if he took it? The thing that could make me a real talya.”
Sid scowled. “You are possessed by a repentant demon. That makes you a real talya.” If he said as much to himself, would that make it true?
“You know what I mean. I want it back from him.” The determination in her voice left no room for discussion. With the removal of the interfering angelic relic, the drifty Alyce was coming into focus—hard, sharp focus. “What time does the River Princess leave?”
“Not until nine,” Jilly said. “Easier to slip out of sight, I suppose, and deal the cards in the dark.”
“Then we have time,” Sid said.
“For me to change clothes?” Alyce asked. “This dress would terrify even a djinni.”
“For me to teach you to swim.”
Back at the warehouse, Alyce was hustled away in the triad of women to find a swimsuit and something suitable for a night of breaking and entering. Sid went down to the labs.
For a long moment, he stood in the doorway of the darkened room, listening to the soft whir of the mainframe as it rolled over some problem in its mechanical guts. Such a comforting noise as it methodically and dispassionately—oh, and bloodlessly—worked its way to a solution.
This was where he’d belonged, just another methodical, dispassionate, and bloodless machine.
But in two days with the Chicago league, he’d thrown his methodology right out the window and gotten excessively bloody, and as for the passion …
Technically, these were not the answers he was seeking.
He finally flicked on the lights. While he’d driven around the river with Alyce, looking for billboards, Archer had returned to the warehouse earlier with Thorne’s gun and the shard taken from Alyce’s leg.
To Sid’s human eye, the gun looked more dangerous: a cheap, ugly, short-barreled thug of a gun. But his gaze kept shifting to the shard, the teshuva’s vision overlying his own like a jeweler’s loupe.
The shard had been placed in an isolation cabinet. A pink sticky note on the front of the glass read WTF? in Sera’s handwriting.
The revolver lay on the counter, cleaned of crypt mud, its hollow point rounds unloaded. The computer monitor behind it displayed nested tabs of what Archer had found through his wireless skullduggery. Sid pulled up a chair and minimized the windows as he read.