“I’m fine.”

He held my face in his hands and tilted it up for his inspection, then pulled me against him. I hugged him briefly then led him into the room. “She’s in here.”

“Hello, Lon.”

Lon nodded a polite greeting. “Bob.”

“Hey,” Lon said to Kar Yee, towering over her. “Hanging in there?”

“This? Pfft. It’s nothing,” Kar Yee said with a silly grin. “How’s my favorite pirate captain? Did you come to give me something nice to look at? A little pirate booty?” She snorted a laugh at her own joke.

Lon stared at her in horror for a moment then said, “What’s she on?”

“Dilaudid,” Bob answered from the computer. “She’s just experiencing a mild euphoria. It should wear off soon.”

“Where’s my future boyfriend?” she asked Lon. “Did you leave him at home?”

“He’s got school tomorrow.”

“Sorry to interrupt, but here it is,” Bob said, looking at the x ray of Kar Yee’s chest on his flickering computer screen. On the wall above, several framed certificates hung in black frames. Universities and state licenses . . . all belonging to his father, Hector Hernandez. Bob had gone to medical school when he was younger—he was in his thirties now—and dropped out. My guess was that he had a good deal more medical knowledge than the average person, but healing surface wounds or simple bone breaks was one thing. Messing around with hearts and brains and complicated diseases was another matter altogether.

Lon and I looked at the screen over his shoulder. “Find anything?”

“Look, right here. Clean fractures”—his fingernail tapped the screen twice—“one and two. You were right, Kar Yee. Both clavicles.”

“Can you heal them?” she asked.

Bob’s mouth twisted to one side as he smoothed a palm over his dark hair. “I healed Tamille Jackson’s broken toe two weeks ago.”

“So, that’s a yes?”

“Doesn’t look like any bones shifted,” he mumbled to himself, squinting at the computer screen. “And I think it usually takes two or three months for this kind of fracture to heal naturally. I might be able to cut that down to a few weeks.”

“Weeks?” She sounded horrified.

Bob’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know. You could feel back to normal in a few days, but you certainly aren’t going to be able to unload a truck at the bar.”

“Cady unloads the trucks,” she said, all matter-of-fact. “How long before I can move my arms?”

Bob looked at me and shrugged, the grinning Tiki masks on his Hawaiian shirt moving up, then dropping.

“Probably a few days, yeah, Bob?” I said, rolling my hand in an encouraging gesture out of Kar Yee’s sight.

“Definitely,” he said, shaking his head with a panicked look on his face.

Didn’t matter if it was true or not. It was just what she wanted to hear.

“Let’s get to it, then,” she said. “I’ve got to work tomorrow.”

The only work she’d be doing was sleeping. I wondered if I could pay Bob to sit with her and make sure she didn’t leave her apartment—I certainly couldn’t babysit her and take care of all the crap at the bar. I still had to call the employees who were scheduled to work and tell them what happened. Find someone to clean up the red latex pool on the floor. Contact the artist who originally painted the binding traps. And as Bob cracked his knuckles and prepared to work his healing mojo on Kar Yee, I added another line to tomorrow’s ever-expanding to-do list: talk to the owners of the convenience store down the street.

I sat on a rickety examination stool, Lon’s hands on my shoulders as we watched Bob leaning over Kar Yee. And even with everything going on, all I could think about was the eerie whispering I’d heard when I used the Moonchild power in the bar . . . and the terrifying feeling that something had jumped through the Æthyr and crawled down my leg.

Bob did his healing mojo on Kar Yee, then we knocked her out with some oxycodone he found in his father’s prescription drug stash. We figured that was more stable than my home-brewed medicinal. And though Lon offered to hire a nurse to sit with Kar Yee for a few days, Bob volunteered before I even had a chance to ask.

The next day, I woke thinking about my mother and the last time I’d seen her, when I was handing her over to Nivella, the albino demon who took her and my father to the Æthyr. If anyone could confirm my mother had died after she’d crossed the veil, it would be the demon who killed them. And, since I was a talented magician, I could simply summon up Nivella by using her glass talon, now sitting in a safe in Lon’s library.

Easy peasy.

But when Lon swung open the heavy door to the wall safe, he spotted a problem I hadn’t anticipated: the glass talon no longer had a soft pink glow of Æthyric Heka surrounding it.

“This doesn’t look good,” I said, hefting the crystal claw in my hand. “Why would the Heka disappear?”

Lon stared at it for several moments. “Only one reason I know of.”

Me too, but I tried anyway, just in case. I spent half an hour constructing a strong binding inside a summoning circle. I had Nivella’s name, class, and her talon—everything that should’ve been needed to call her from the Æthyr. But the albino demon did not come when I called.

Nivella was dead.