“Anne burned it.” Cam tossed her a beer and Kori caught it one-handed, without even looking. She’d always been eerily well-coordinated, though I could find no correlation between that and her Skill as a Traveler.

“That mousy little bitch…” She twisted the top from her bottle as she crossed the room, then tossed the cap onto the coffee table and dropped onto the couch next to me. “Make this quick.”

“Okay, the short version…” I couldn’t quite escape the feeling of déjà vu. We’d sat just like that—with Anne and Noelle—all the time as teenagers, sharing an honesty everyone else in my life seemed to have outgrown.

Everyone except Kori.

“On Thursday night, Anne’s husband was killed. She asked us to track and kill the murderer, so Cam and I did. But it turns out he was after her daughter, not her husband. Somehow, the Tower syndicate is wrapped up in this….” I said, and she glanced briefly, pointedly at Cam. Did she know about his binding? “But we’re not sure how, or how far up it goes, except we have reason to believe that whichever high-level initiate hired the killer also paid for him to have some kind of blood transfusion—of Skilled blood.”

Kori blinked. Then she took a long, long chug from her bottle, and I couldn’t help wondering if she was just stalling until she could come up with some clever, curse-riddled response. “Do you always jump right into the deep end?” she said finally. “What happened to wading in a little at a time?”

“Wading into what?”

“Into trouble, Liv.” Kori set her bottle on the coffee table and gave me a half amused, half exasperated look. “You’re swimming with the fuckin’ sharks, and you’re too stupid to even know it. Those fins circling you? Those are warning signs. Take heed, and get the fuck out of the water before they eat you alive.”

“I didn’t jump in, I got pushed,” I insisted. “And I can’t just crawl out. We’re talking about Anne’s child, Kori.”

“Anne has kids?”

“One. A daughter. She’s five.”

Kori shrugged. “Well, she musta been an accident. Last time I saw Anne, she was in grad school, taking a bunch of sociology and psychology classes, talking about how pointless it was to bring another kid into the world, when there were already thousands of them in this country alone who didn’t have homes, or a fuckin’ thing to eat.”

“Well, things change. People change.” I shrugged. “Now Anne has a daughter, and Jake Tower is trying to kill her.”

Kori leaned back and crossed her arms over her chest. “Okay, first of all, if Tower wants Anne’s kid, it’s not so that he can kill her. It’s so he can keep her.”

“Keep her?” The horrifying conclusions that accompanied that thought were too awful to fully focus on, so I pushed them aside for the more immediate question. “How do you know what Jake Tower does or doesn’t want?” I wasn’t sure I really wanted the answer, but I was suddenly absolutely convinced that I needed it.

She downed the last third of her beer, then waved the empty bottle at Cam, wordlessly demanding another. “Okay, look,” she said finally, turning back to me. “I take this little command appearance to mean that I don’t have any choice but to help you with this.”

“That’s right,” I said, as Cam twisted the top from a fresh bottle and handed it to her.

“Fine.” She took the bottle and drank the neck in one gulp. “The truth is that I won’t hate doing what I can for Anne and her unlikely progeny. If we’re keeping score, I probably owe her anyway.”

In fact, if we were keeping score, Kori would be in debt up to her hair follicles to me and Noelle, too. If Elle were still alive.

She took another gulp, then continued. “But before you start officially asking me for help, you need to understand that there are certain requests I can’t carry out, and making those particular requests would be like pushing my self-destruct button. I’ll implode, like the fuckin’ Death Star.”

“Um, point of fact, I believe the Death Star exploded,” Cam said, leaning back on a bar stool, his elbows propped behind him on the counter. “Twice.”

“Congratulations. Your official super-nerd badge is in the mail,” Kori said, but I couldn’t get past the part about me accidently pushing her self-destruct button. Shit. Shit, shit, shit! “Please tell me that doesn’t mean what I think it means….”

Instead of answering, Kori shrugged out of her jacket and twisted to show me the two black chain links inked on her upper left arm.

“Son of a bitch!” The pressure building inside me had no outlet—I felt as if the top of my head was going to blow off. “Both of you?” I glanced at Cam, and as I’d expected, he showed no sign of surprise. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

No wonder he had her number memorized and she knew where he lived…

“It’s not my place to tell you about Kori’s marks. That’s up to her.” He glanced at her and shrugged. “Or not, if she chooses.”

Kori rolled her eyes. “Like I had any choice but to show her.”

She didn’t. And I didn’t. And Cam didn’t. We were fresh out of choices, and probabl running out of time. Working with them was like playing Marco Polo, with all the Polos gagged.

“Does Tower know you’re bound to me and Anne?”